Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins

Amazon.com Price: $26.95 (as of 12/04/2019 10:55 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

In 1961—as The us crackled with racial tension—the Washington Redskins stood alone as the only professional football team without a black player on its roster. In reality, all through all the 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 once about to change.
 
Opposing Marshall was once Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, whose determination that the Redskins—or “Paleskins,” as he known as them—reflect John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier ideals led to one of the crucial 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 once all the time the possibility that Marshall—some 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 once a part of a wider struggle against racial injustice in The us.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins

Recent Products