Lost Champions: Four Men, Two Teams, and the Breaking of Pro Football's Color Line

by Gretchen Atwood

Overview

The story of the integration of professional football--the year before Jackie Robinson did the same for baseball--has been overlooked for too long.

Many know the story of Jackie Robinson integrating major league baseball in 1947. But few know that the NFL integrated a year earlier, when Kenny Washington stepped on the field for the Los Angeles Rams.
He wasn't the only one. Four men broke pro football's color line in 1946, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode with the Los Angeles Rams and Bill Willis and Marion Motley with the Cleveland Browns.
Lost Champions traces this history from the early 1930s--when NFL owners first instituted a ban on black players--through pro football's re-integration, to the 1950 NFL Championship Game, which pitted the Rams and Browns against each other in a showdown of the most prolific and advanced offenses pro football had ever seen.
But the battle wasn't just waged on the gridiron. Lost Champions shows how efforts to integrate sports sits within the often-ignored history of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. The four players faced animosity and death threats for their role in integration while they and all black Americans were threatened in 1946 by a spike in lynchings, threat of legal expulsion from their own homes, and segregation all the way down to the simple act of going to an amusement park for a bit of relaxation.
Finally, Lost Champions explains why these men and their stories have for so long languished in the shadow of Jackie Robinson, and why they too deserve widespread acclaim for integrating what is arguably the most popular sport in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620406021
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Gretchen Atwood is a former sports journalist with a passion for football, civil rights and American history. She lives in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Prologue 1

1 First Quarter 3

2 The Last Word 13

3 City of Angels 23

4 Moore's Ford Bridge 35

5 Offside 43

6 Assault 53

7 Second Quarter 63

8 Black Lightning 73

9 Backlash 83

10 Champions 95

11 Shots Fired 103

12 Third Quarter 111

13 92 Yards 119

14 Frozen Out 129

15 Undefeated 139

16 Jackie 149

17 Cleveland's Year 155

18 Good-bye 165

19 Fourth Quarter 175

20 Younger 181

21 Swan Song 189

22 Spring Training 197

23 Goalposts 205

24 Overtime 215

25 On History 227

Acknowledgments 233

Notes 237

Selected Sources 259

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

07/25/2016
Focusing on the 1946 Cleveland Browns and Los Angeles Rams, sports journalist Atwood provides snapshots of the pro football game from the days of the old-T and the single-wing offense up to 1950, by which time most NFL teams ran a version of the modern-T offense. Before the early 1930s, many ranked professional football on the same level as pro-wrestling. But in 1946, a string of events challenged segregation. The NFL team Cleveland Rams relocated to Los Angeles and, through some coaxing, signed former UCLA Bruins players Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. At nearly the same time, the Cleveland Browns of the All-American Football Conference (AAFC) signed Bill Willis and Marion Motley. Off the field, both cities had racial roadblocks for their citizens. Los Angeles County had seen a significant increase in antiblack restrictive housing covenants from 1920 up to 1946; in Cleveland, an interracial group launched a protest at Euclid Beach Park over the exclusionary policies that prevented black residents from using public facilities. That same summer, the nation saw a spike in lynching, including a quadruple lynching at Moore’s Ford Bridge, Ga. Though these events mostly occurred independently and were spread throughout the country, Atwood succeeds in laying them out like a modern-day pro offense, powering the book’s narrative with the march to the 1950 NFL championship between the two teams that integrated professional football. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Overlap between racial issues and the NFL has been part of the sport since its early days, as shown by Gretchen Atwood’s superb book Lost Champions . . . Unabashed in her adoration of the sport, the author has a better grasp of football tactics than many network announcers." - Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

08/01/2016
While 1946 is famous as the year Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball, it is also the year that professional football reintegrated after a 12-year ban on black players. Four players were the gridiron pioneers: Kenny Washington and Woody Strode for the Los Angeles Rams, and Bill Willis and Marion Motley for the fledgling Cleveland Browns of the new All-America Football (AFL) Conference. In 1950, the Browns and the Rams competed for the NFL championship. Although both Washington and Strode were gone by then, former sportswriter Atwood uses the play-by-play of that game as a touchstone. Where the author runs astray is in providing context to the ordeal of the four men. She does not tell the story chronologically, but with wavering success, trying to weave vastly disparate threads into a whole. While background about the four principals and their teams is excellent, equal coverage of Willis and Motley would have been a welcome addition. VERDICT There is enough powerful material here to recommend this title to all football fans, although a stronger focused narrative would have heightened the appeal.

Library Journal