A former sportswriter with a deep interest in sports, social justice, and American history, Gretchen Atwood was thumbing through an NFL history one day when she was suddenly stopped in her mental tracks. What caught her attention was that four players had entered professional football in 1946, a year before attention focused on Jackie Robinson’s integration of Major League Baseball. Why, she wondered, do we know so relatively little about Kenny Washington and Woody Strode of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and Bill Willis and Marion Motley of the Cleveland Browns, who then played in the rival All-America Football Conference? Part of the answer lies in the overwhelming popularity of baseball at the time, but Atwood digs even deeper for an explanation. In doing so, she chronicles the careers of these four stars, who met on the field in the 1950 NFL championship game, the first played after the NFL expanded to include the Browns. The opponents boasted the most prolific offenses in pro football up to the point.
Here’s an excerpt from Lost Champions:
“The [Cleveland] Browns would open the inaugural AAFC season at home against the Miami Seahawks, the only franchise in all of pro sports in 1946 located in the Deep South. Miami’s owner and head coach stocked the team exclusively with white Southern players, or white men who had starred at Southern universities. Like George Preston Marshall’s Washington team in the NFL, the Miami Seahawks were built and marketed as the team of the South, in hopes of nurturing a broad regional fan base.
“Black fans and press circled December 7, the day the Browns would play the Seahawks, but this time in Miami. Florida state law banned interracial sports competition, which meant that black and white athletes were not allowed together on the same field. What would happen when the Browns showed up with [Bill] Willis and [Marion] Motley? No one really knew.”
