by Ijeoma Oluo
Although Marshall’s racism appeared to be far-reaching, he was at least willing to let Indigenous people play on the team he had named specifically to insult them. But as Black players and even Black coaches like Fritz Pollard appeared in increasing numbers, Marshall and others saw Black football players as a real threat to what had been a predominantly white game. There was absolutely no way that Marshall was going to allow Blacks anywhere near his precious football.
“George Preston Marshall—he was a businessman,” explained Dave Zirin. “He moved the Redskins here [to Washington, D.C.] from Boston because he wanted to appeal to the Jim Crow South.”
As a committed racist and savvy businessman, Marshall saw a great marketing opportunity in racist football fans—especially across the South. The team fight song was sung to the tune of “Dixie” and in fact included the line “Fight for Old Dixie” until the 1960s. This Southern pageantry helped increase the Redskins’ popularity in the Southern areas where Marshall targeted many of the team’s radio broadcasts.12
Marshall, a powerful coach in the budding NFL, began pressuring other coaches in the league to make the NFL all white. They didn’t need too much convincing. This was a time when fears of Black male physicality were being spread throughout the Jim Crow South. Black men were going to steal your women with their unchecked physical sexuality; they were going to threaten your families with their animal strength and uncontrollable rage. It is easy to see how the rise of powerful Black players in a game that had been founded to showcase white male physical superiority would be a turnoff to fans invested in shows of white male dominance. It is unlikely that Marshall was the only racist coach in the league, but he is recognized by many sports scholars as the driving force behind the unofficial ban of Black players.
The NFL couldn’t stay white forever, though; its rival league, the AFL, had begun to increase the number of Black players on its teams. It turns out that some of those Black players were very good at football, even better than the white ones. The NFL started fearing the loss of fandom when they couldn’t compete with the talent of the AFL’s integrated teams, so the NFL’s owners and coaches started recruiting Black players.
Eventually, all the NFL teams were integrated—except the Washington Redskins. Marshall, who loved racism even more than winning games, was the last owner to integrate his football team. Marshall held on to his “no-Blacks” policy so long that the coach and his team became a joke to sports commentators like Shirley Povich and Sam Lacy, who mocked Marshall’s steadfast commitment to racism at the expense of his own record.
Decades after the integration of most NFL teams, Marshall’s Redskins became a national embarrassment. This was not just any team; this was the team situated in the US capital. During the Cold War, the country’s claim of being the defender of global freedom was severely undermined by the very public civil rights battles waging in the United States. Among many other transgressions happening in the country, Marshall’s stubborn commitment to racial segregation in a uniquely American sport served to highlight the nation’s hypocrisy in its ideological battle with the Soviets. As Dave Zirin said to me, “It was embarrassing on a global propaganda scale.” Finally, after the federal government threatened to take away his stadium if he didn’t integrate, Marshall recruited the first Black player for the Washington Redskins, who took the field in 1962. Perhaps the strain of seeing a Black man wearing his beloved Redskins uniform was too much for Marshall to handle, for he suffered a major, debilitating stroke in 1963.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as devoted to anything as George Preston Marshall was to his racism. While he could not hold off the integration of football, Marshall made sure that his fight for segregation would live on after him. After Marshall’s death in 1969, the bulk of his estate was designated to set up a charitable foundation in his name. One of the stipulations of the money, however, was that none of it was allowed to go to “any purpose which supports or employs the principle of racial integration in any form.”13
I do not know if Marshall would be happy with how quickly his racism was forgotten—it doesn’t appear to be something he wanted to hide, in life or death. But our society likes to make heroes out of some of our biggest bigots. Marshall was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983. On the Hall of Fame website page about Marshall, the only mention of his long commitment to racism and segregation is the note that he “endured his share of criticism for not integrating his team until being forced to do so in 1962.”14
MIZZOU AND THE RISE OF STUDENT-ATHLETE ACTIVISM
This is not, I repeat, not, how change should come about. I take full responsibility for the inaction, and I take full responsibility for the frustration that has occurred.
—University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe, announcing his resignation, 201515
Around two a.m. on October 24, 2015, somebody entered one of the residence halls at the University of Missouri. It was Gateway Hall, named for its mission to be a “gateway to the future of inclusive living.” This person drew a swastika on the wall. With human feces.16
Students who did not see the swastika in situ found out via a flyer outlining the incident posted by the university’s Department of Residential Life. For Jonathan Butler, a twenty-five-year-old Black graduate student at Mizzou, it was the final straw. He began a hunger strike, refusing to eat until university president Tim Wolfe either resigned or was fired.
This was not the first hate incident on campus. There had been racial slurs, homophobic slurs, and antisemitic slurs hurled at students in recent years. Students complained that the university did not take the incidents seriously and that they were made to feel unsafe by the actions. Concerned Student 1950, a student group named after the first year that Black students were allowed on campus, began staging protests shortly after the swastika was drawn. The protests quickly became heated. When students tried to engage Wolfe while he walked to his car and began to drive away, one of the students was allegedly hit by the moving vehicle, although unharmed. When Wolfe finally did meet with students, the situation went from bad to worse: students reported that he acted insulting and dismissive of their concerns.17 A few days after the protests began, Butler, a Concerned Student 1950 member, began his hunger strike.
Meanwhile, members of Concerned Student 1950 wanted more than just a change in leadership; they wanted a change in college culture. Raising grievances that were greater in scope than slurs and swastikas, they demanded structural changes like cultural competency training for staff, an increase in teachers’ diversity, and more recruitment and retention efforts of students of color. Students of multiple races and ethnicities joined the protests, camping out on campus. Soon faculty joined in, showing their support for students and also calling for Wolfe’s resignation.
Although the university’s administrators tried to contain the protests, they showed no sign of meeting the larger demands—especially the removal of Wolfe. They suggested that perhaps the parties could, if they were able to address the health risk to Butler arising from his hunger strike, come to a gentler compromise.
Everything changed the moment the football players joined the protest.
Butler had been friends with many of the Black players. Hearing about his hunger strike, sophomore safety Anthony Sherrils met with Butler to learn more. Then he called a team meeting. On November 7, at least thirty of the team’s Black players announced that they would not play until Wolfe was gone.
The players posted a group photo to Twitter along with the following statement: “The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere.’ We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!”18
If anyone was hoping that the players’ white teammates or coach would step in to pull the Black players back in line, they were quickly disappointed.
The next day, in a show of solidarity with protesting players, coach Gary Pinkel posted a team photo with the following caption: “The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP.”19
Within seventy-two hours, Wolfe had resigned.
Wolfe did not resign because the statements of the football players had convinced him or the school’s board of trustees that it was the right thing to do. He resigned because Mizzou is a football school, and a football school cannot survive without football.
To say that football was a big deal at the University of Missouri would be an understatement. The Southeastern Conference champions for two years running, the Missouri Tigers were the heart and soul of the campus. They were also a major money maker for the college. If the standoff had continued into the next week, the team would have risked missing its game against Brigham Young University. That miss alone would have cost the university at least $1 million from a breach of contract with BYU. Further, missed practices and games—let alone an increase in hostility between team and school—could have cost the university its football season and its recruitment chances for the following year.
Almost immediately, the protesting players had the support of the region’s Black football community. Many of the Black students on campus, including players, came from the Ferguson area and had been devastated by the killing of Michael Brown the year before. At a time when the local Black community was feeling hurt, angry, and powerless, this strong show of power by people as respected as Black college football players in the Missouri area would only become stronger the longer the protest was allowed to continue.
Anxiety around the players’ protest was felt beyond the state. In recent years there had been increasing discussion about the morality of colleges and universities making hundreds of millions of dollars off the destruction of young Black bodies—especially when those students were risking their entire futures to possible injury and not getting paid for their work. Discussion around player safety, player empowerment, and player compensation was a direct threat to the college football system. Who knew how far the list of player demands might reach if the protests grew?
Wolfe later said that he did not resign because of football. He instead appealed to the anxiety of white Missourians who still felt very threatened by the unrest of the Ferguson protests. He explained to Sports Illustrated that he had been told that the protest had been infiltrated by “some bad characters that were in Ferguson. They were professionals; they weren’t students,” and he left to prevent violence instigated by these supposed outside agitators.20 Not only were Wolfe’s comments an insulting dismissal of the activism of Mizzou students; the blatant racism of his wild accusations played directly into white fears of the violence that Black unrest might bring.
Once Wolfe resigned, after eight days of starvation Jonathan Butler began to eat again. Black students and players celebrated a rare and powerful victory.
Team captain and protest leader Ian Simon read the following statement on behalf of the team after Wolfe’s resignation:
It’s not about us. We just wanted to use our platform to take a stance for a fellow concerned student on an issue, especially being as though a fellow Black man’s life was on the line. Due to the end of the hunger strike, we will be ending our solidarity strike to not practice and returning to our normal schedule as football players. It is a privilege to be playing on the University of Missouri’s football team, and we are very thankful for this opportunity. We love the game, but [at the] end of the day, it is just that—a game.
Through this experience, we’ve really began to bridge that gap between student and athlete in the phrase student-athlete by connecting with the community and realizing the bigger picture. We will continue to build with the community and support positive change on Mizzou’s campus. Though we don’t experience everything the general student body does and our struggles may look different at times, we are all #ConcernedStudent1950.21
It was a powerful moment for many Black people outside Missouri as well. At a time of increased racial tension and trauma around the killings of unarmed Black men by police, and the increased violence of knowing that the officers responsible for the killings would never face justice, to see children—our children—bring a powerful institution to its knees in the name of racial justice was the hope that many of us needed right then. When I read the news reports of Wolfe’s resignation, I cried. I knew that the victory was small in the larger battle for Black lives, but I was so grateful for even a little hope that perhaps our children would succeed where we seemed to be failing.
There would, of course, be a price to pay for such audacity. Four days after the protests ended, Coach Pinkel announced that he had leukemia and would retire at the end of the season. The timing was horrible for a team just hitting practice again in the middle of a season filled with so much turmoil. Any coach so beloved by his team would avoid giving his players news this devastating in the middle of a season if it could at all be avoided. But the board of trustees leaked information of Pinkel’s diagnosis and future retirement early.22 Whether the information was leaked due to a lack of discretion by the board or out of spite, it is hard to imagine that the board of a football school—a school that financially depended on the success of its team—did not know how important it was to keep Pinkel’s illness and retirement secret until the football season had ended.
A month after the protests, state representatives Rick Brattin and Kurt Bahr introduced a bill that would punish students and faculty for future protests. It included language stating that any “college athlete who calls, incites, supports, or participates in any strike or concerted refusal to play a scheduled game shall have his or her scholarship revoked,” and “any member of a coaching staff who encourages or enables a college athlete to engage in behavior” prohibited under the bill “shall be fined by his or her institution of employment.”23
The bill faced widespread condemnation and was quickly pulled from consideration by Brattin and Bahr, but their desire to ensure that students and universities understood the penalty for future protest—especially protest that would disturb Mizzou’s or any other school’s football program—was not unique. The University of Missouri would be made an example of. The following year, the state legislature cut millions of dollars from the university’s budget. The message was clear: any protest and disruption on campus would be punished.
“They are there to learn, not to protest all day long. I thought we learned that lesson in the ’60s. Obviously we haven’t,” said Republican state representative Donna Lichtenegger in support of the new budget.24 College protest is not new; there were certainly campus demonstrations before the 1960s, and there have been every year since. I believe that getting practice in civil and political engagement through protest and other forms of political speech is one of the most important aspects of a college education, and it is dismissed and decried to our peril—but I find the imagery that Lichtenegger evoked of a 1960s campus forsaking education to hold four-year-long protests quite hilarious. Even in an era when most parents across the political spectrum want a college education for their children, though, the stereotype of the liberal-arts student forsaking practical study to major instead in macramé and social disruption is still readily believed in many conservative circles.
The following year, enrollment at Mizzou was down sharply, especially of Black students. This isn’t because Black prospective students disagreed with the protests. Black students who decided not to attend the previously well-respected school said that the racism highlighted on campus had turned them off. Some Jewish prospective students said that hearing about swastikas being painted on walls kept them away. And some white prospective students said they didn’t want to be associated with a university so widely known to be racist.25 While many might like to blame the protests for the bad publicity, the truth is that it all began with racism and antisemitism on campus. The experiences that prospective students wished to avoid w
ere real. Instead of looking at how the school’s inaction had forced desperate students to launch protests, and instead of seeing the protests as the students showing their commitment to fighting racial hatred on campus, the story has become about how a group of protesters brought a university to the brink of disaster.
The reduced student enrollment, along with funding cuts from the state legislature and decreased donor funding from skittish alumni, placed the University of Missouri in financial turmoil. The chancellor had to institute a hiring and raise freeze, as well as cut some support services. The library had to ask for donations from the public for books.
While the Mizzou community still suffers painful ramifications surrounding the 2015 protest and as the administration continues to struggle to regain the confidence and support of the state legislature, many of the students of color who participated in the protests feel forever changed by the few days they stood side by side with their fellow students to stand up to powerful systems to defend equality and justice—and won.
“I thought I was just coming to college to play football and get an education,” Mizzou defensive lineman Marcell Frazier said. “And all of that good stuff happened and opened up my network a lot as far as people outside of football, people outside the academic world, people in the social progress world.”26