Details of the history of black players in American professional football depend on the professional league considered:
1) the National Football League (NFL), which evolved from the first professional league, the American Professional Football Association; and
2) the American Football League, (AFL), a successful league from 1960 through 1969, which is considered by many to be the genesis of modern professional football, and with which the NFL eventually merged.
At its inception in 1920, the American Professional Football Association had several African-American players (between 1920 and 1933, a total of thirteen); however by 1932, the subsequent National Football League had only two black players, and by 1934, there were none. One of the leading owners of the league, George Preston Marshall, openly refused to have black players on his Boston Braves/Washington Redskins team. The NFL did not have another black player until after World War II. In 1946, the Cleveland Browns of a rival pro football league, the All-America Football Conference, signed two black players: Marion Motley and Bill Willis, and black players slowly began to be recruited to the NFL, with the L.A. Rams' signing of Woody Strode and Kenny Washington. Still, the owner of one of the NFL's flagship teams, Marshall, was quoted as saying "We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites." In spite of this open bias, Marshall was elected to the NFL's "pro football" hall of fame in 1963. As part of his "qualifications" for enshrinement, the hall says: "Marshall was totally involved in all aspects of his team’s operation and endured his share of criticism for not integrating his team until being forced to do so in 1962." The Redskins had no black players until 1962, when they succumbed to the threat of civil-rights legal action by the Kennedy administration.
Even when the NFL did sign black players, poor treatment was evident. Reportedly, black players routinely received lower contracts than whites in the NFL, while in the American Football League there was no such distinction based on race (Miller Farr, in the foreword to The "Foolish Club" by Jim Acho, Gridiron Press, 1997).
Conversely, the American Football League actively recruited players from small colleges that had been largely ignored by the NFL, giving those schools' black players the opportunity to play professional football. As a result, for the years 1960 through 1962, AFL teams averaged 17% more blacks than NFL teams. (Reference: Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League. By Charles K. Ross. New York: New York University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8147-7495-4). By 1969, a comparison of the two league's championship team photos showed the AFL's Chiefs with 23 black players out of 51 players pictured, while the NFL Vikings had 11 blacks, of 42 players in the photo. The American Football League had the first black placekicker in professional football, Gene Mingo of the Denver Broncos; and the first black quarterback of the modern era, James Harris of the Buffalo Bills.
