Synopses & Reviews
In 1961—as America crackled with racial tension—the Washington Redskins stood alone as the only professional football team without a black player on its roster. In fact, during the entire twenty-five-year history of the franchise, no African American had
ever played for George Preston Marshall, the Redskins’ cantankerous principal owner. With slicked-down white hair and angular facial features, the nattily attired, sixty-four-year-old NFL team owner already had a well-deserved reputation for flamboyance, showmanship, and erratic behavior. And like other Southern-born segregationists, Marshall stood firm against race-mixing. “We’ll start signing Negroes,” he once boasted, “when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.” But that was about to change.
Opposing Marshall was Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, whose determination that the Redskins—or “Paleskins,” as he called them—reflect John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier ideals led to one of the most high-profile contests to spill beyond the sports pages. Realizing that racial justice and gridiron success had the potential either to dovetail or take an ugly turn, civil rights advocates and sports fans alike anxiously turned their eyes toward the nation’s capital. There was always the possibility that Marshall—one of the NFL’s most influential and dominating founding fathers—might defy demands from the Kennedy administration to desegregate his lily-white team. When further pressured to desegregate by the press, Marshall remained defiant, declaring that no one, including the White House, could tell him how to run his business.
In Showdown, sports historian Thomas G. Smith captures this striking moment, one that held sweeping implications not only for one team’s racist policy but also for a sharply segregated city and for the nation as a whole. Part sports history, part civil rights story, this compelling and untold narrative serves as a powerful lens onto racism in sport, illustrating how, in microcosm, the fight to desegregate the Redskins was part of a wider struggle against racial injustice in America.
Synopsis
A classic NFL/civil rights story--the showdown between the Washington Redskins and the Kennedy White House.
In the 1960s, America hummed with tension as professional football leagues and civil rights advocates struggled to level their respective playing fields. For the Washington Redskins--the last NFL team to integrate and the only one to have been forced to do so by presidential order--tensions ran even higher. In Showdown, sports historian Thomas Smith captures a striking moment, one that held sweeping implications not only for one team's racist policy but also for a sharply segregated city and--nationally--for the implementation of New Frontier-era integration efforts. It's a story about a country newly shaped by post-World War II ideas about America's image abroad, cold-war consciousness over political power grabs, and, of course, the civil rights movement.
About the Author
Thomas G. Smith is a member of the history program at Nichols College, where he serves as the Robert Stansky Distinguished Professor. A sports and environmental historian, he is the author of two books, Independent: A Biography of Lewis Douglas (with Bob Browder) and Green Republican: John Saylor and the Preservation of America’s Wilderness. He lives in Dudley, Massachusetts, and is a fervent fan of the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Dodgers.
Table of Contents
Prologue “Redskins Told: Integrate or Else”
1 Boston Beginnings
2 Out of Bounds
3 The Redskins March
4 Leveling the Field
5 The Washington Whiteskins
6 The Owner, the Journalist, and the Hustler
7 The Black Blitz
8 The New Frontier
9 Showdown
10 Hail Victory
11 Running Out the Clock
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes on Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index