Featured Players
Ozzie Newsome
In 2002, Ozzie Newsome was named the first African American General Manager of an NFL franchise, the Baltimore Ravens. Newsome had a Hall of Fame career with the Cleveland Browns where he helped redefine the tight end position. He also worked in the front office for the Browns before assuming hs current position with the Ravens.
Alan Page
Alan Page is a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Page attended Notre Dame and was a key member of the Minnesota Vikings' famous "Purple People Eaters," a defensive line that instilled fear in opposing quarterbacks. Page obtained his law degree from the Univ. of Minnesota Law School while still playing for the Vikings.
Paul Robeson
Although known as an international theater star, Robeson had an All-American collegiate football career at Rutgers University as well as a professional football career with the Akron Pros and the Milwaukee Badgers. Robeson also earned his law degree at Columbia Law School. He was the first black actor to portray Shakespeare's Othello and was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement.
Duke Slater
A member of the College Football hall of Fame, Duke Slater played at the University of Iowa before embarking on a 10-year career in professional football. Slater played for four years with the Rock island Independents. In two of his 10 seasons, 1927 and 1929, Slater was the only black player in the NFL. Slater earned his law degree during the off-season and ultimately became a Municipal Court judge in Cook County, Illinois.
Book - "Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins"
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 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.
Book - Advancing the Ball
Two days before Super Bowl XLI in 2007, the game’s opposing head coaches posed with the trophy one of them would hoist after the contest. It was a fairly unremarkable event, except that both coaches were African American--a fact that was as much of a story as the game itself.
Head coaching in the NFL had long been a whites-only business, and just a few years earlier such a matchup was unthinkable. In 2002, however, two lawyers, Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., together with a few grizzled NFL veterans, began a movement that would expand opportunities for coaching aspirants of color in the NFL and ultimately transform the League’s racial landscape. Featuring an impassioned foreword by Coach Tony Dungy and written by Jeremi Duru, Advancing the Ball offers an eye-opening, first-hand look at how a few committed individuals initiated a sea change in America’s most popular sport and added an extraordinary new chapter to the civil rights story.