The Integration of Professional Football

By 4Football Staff · October 7, 2026 · 10 min read

Black players were part of professional football from its first years, were pushed out of the NFL for a dozen seasons, and returned in 1946. Here is how that happened and what followed.

The story of racial integration in professional football is often told as if it began in 1946, when two Black players signed with the Los Angeles Rams. That date matters a great deal. But it is the middle of the story, not the beginning. Black athletes played professional football in its earliest years, and the league that would become the NFL had Black players and even a Black coach in its first seasons. What happened in the 1930s was a reversal, and 1946 was a return.

That history is worth knowing for its own sake and because it explains parts of the sport today: why historically Black colleges were such a source of pro talent, why the league later adopted a hiring rule for coaches, and why certain milestones, such as the first Black starting quarterback or the first Black head coach to win a Super Bowl, carry so much weight.

This article gives an outline of that history, based on well-documented events. It covers the early years, the unwritten barrier of the 1930s and 1940s, the breakthrough of 1946, the slow integration of every team, and the later fights over the quarterback position and the coaching ranks. Where historians disagree or details are uncertain, we say so.

The first Black professionals

Professional football grew out of local athletic clubs and town teams in the late 1800s and early 1900s, mostly in the industrial Midwest. Black players were part of that world from the start. One of the best-known early figures is Charles Follis, who played for a Shelby, Ohio, team in the first decade of the twentieth century and is widely recognized as one of the first openly Black professional players. Others played on integrated local teams in the same period.

The environment was far from welcoming. Black players faced hostility from opponents and spectators and discrimination in travel and lodging. But the early pro game was loosely organized, with teams built from whoever could play, and in that setting some Black athletes were able to compete for pay.

1920 and the early NFL

When the American Professional Football Association was formed in 1920, the league that became the NFL, Black players were on its rosters from the start. Fritz Pollard, a standout from Brown University, played for the Akron Pros, and Bobby Marshall, a former University of Minnesota player, played for the Rock Island Independents. Both were among the first Black players in the league.

In 1921, Pollard became a co-head coach of the Akron Pros, which makes him the first Black head coach in the league's history. Another notable figure of those years was Paul Robeson, who played for Akron and later for the Milwaukee Badgers while studying law, and who went on to fame as a singer and actor and an advocate for civil rights.

A handful of Black players appeared in the league through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, but their numbers were small, and the league was still unstable, with franchises coming and going. For the broader story of that period, see The Early NFL: Small Towns, Short Rosters and Unstable Franchises.

The unwritten color line

Beginning in 1934, the NFL had no Black players. The last two to play in 1933 were Joe Lillard, who played for the Chicago Cardinals, and Ray Kemp, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After that season, no Black player appeared in the league for twelve years.

No written rule has ever been found that barred Black players. Historians generally describe the exclusion as an unwritten agreement among team owners, enforced by custom and pressure. The owner of the Boston Redskins, George Preston Marshall, who later moved the team to Washington, is widely identified as the strongest proponent of keeping the league segregated. The team he owned was among the last to integrate, which we return to below.

During those years, Black players with professional talent played elsewhere. Some competed in Black professional and semi-professional leagues, some played for barnstorming teams, and some turned to other sports. Colleges in the North produced Black stars who could not play pro football, which is part of why the later integration came with a rush of ready talent.

Why 1946 was different

The year 1946 saw two separate breakthroughs in two separate leagues.

In the NFL, the Rams had just moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles. They played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a publicly operated stadium. The commission that ran the Coliseum insisted that the team should include Black players, in part because the city had well-known Black athletes from local colleges. The Rams signed Kenny Washington, a former UCLA star, in March 1946, and Woody Strode, another UCLA player, a couple of months later. Their signing ended the NFL's twelve-year absence of Black players.

In a rival league, the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), the Cleveland Browns signed Marion Motley, a fullback, and Bill Willis, a guard, that same year. Browns coach Paul Brown had known Willis from Ohio State, and the Browns became a powerhouse, winning the league's championship every season it existed.

These events happened around the time Jackie Robinson was integrating baseball, and the timing was not coincidental. Washington had been a teammate of Robinson at UCLA, and the national conversation about race in sports was opening up. Whether football's return would have happened on its own timetable, without the Coliseum lease, is a question historians still discuss. What is clear is that the arrangement in Los Angeles gave the Rams a reason to act.

One team at a time

Integration did not spread evenly. After 1946, teams added Black players at different speeds, and some stayed all-white for years. A few examples show the pattern:

• The Giants added Emlen Tunnell in 1948. Tunnell, a defensive back, went on to a distinguished career and became the first Black player elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in 1967.
• The Browns continued to field Black stars, including Motley and Willis, both of whom later entered the Hall of Fame.
• Many other clubs signed Black players slowly, often a few at a time, and sometimes in limited numbers.
• Washington remained the last holdout. The franchise did not have a Black player until 1962, when it acquired halfback Bobby Mitchell.

The Washington case drew national attention. The team's stadium in Washington, D.C., was built on federal land, and the federal government under President John F. Kennedy applied pressure. Stewart Udall, Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior, is widely credited with pushing the team, warning that its lease on the federal stadium was at stake. The franchise integrated in 1962, ending the last all-white roster in the league.

Signing was not the same as equal treatment

A roster spot did not end the obstacles. Historians of the period describe several problems that persisted well after the first signings:

• Segregation on the road. In the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, hotels, restaurants and facilities in some cities were segregated by law or custom, and Black players could be separated from their teammates when the team traveled, particularly to the South.
• Unofficial limits. Some accounts describe informal ceilings on how many Black players a team would keep, which meant that a Black player often had to be clearly better than the white player competing for the same job.
• Position assignments. Coaches and scouts steered players toward certain positions and away from others, a pattern that shaped careers for decades.
• Pay and recognition. Black stars were sometimes overlooked for honors and endorsements that their play deserved.

These points come from the general historical record and from the recollections of players of the era, and individual experiences varied from team to team and city to city. They are a reminder that the dates in this article mark when doors opened, not when everything became fair.

The AFL and the pipeline from Black colleges

The American Football League (AFL), which began play in 1960, took a different approach from the older league. It drafted and signed players from historically Black colleges and universities in large numbers, in part because a new league needed talent wherever it could find it. A number of players from small Black colleges became stars in the AFL and later in the combined league. For the schools behind that talent, read HBCUs and the History of Football.

The AFL also faced its own racial reckoning. In January 1965, Black players selected for the league's all-star game in New Orleans said they had been mistreated by local businesses and cab drivers and refused to play there. The league responded by moving the game to Houston. The incident is a notable early example of players using collective action to challenge discrimination.

The quarterback barrier

Even after the league had integrated, Black players were steered toward certain positions. Pro football had few Black quarterbacks for decades, and the position carried assumptions about leadership and intelligence that were applied unfairly. The result was a series of milestones, each one a barrier broken.

• Willie Thrower played for the Chicago Bears in 1953 and is usually cited as the first Black quarterback to play in the NFL in the modern era.
• Marlin Briscoe became the first Black starting quarterback in the modern pro era with the Denver Broncos of the AFL in 1968. He started a handful of games and was later moved to wide receiver, where he had a long career.
• Doug Williams led Washington to a victory in Super Bowl XXII, in the 1987 season, and was named the game's most valuable player. He was the first Black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl.

Those firsts are well established, but they do not capture every pioneer. Several other players filled the gap between Briscoe and Williams, and many talented quarterbacks never got the chance.

Coaches, executives and the Rooney Rule

Behind the players, the barriers moved slowly in coaching and management. After Fritz Pollard in the 1920s, no Black head coach led an NFL team until Art Shell was hired by the Los Angeles Raiders in 1989, a gap of many decades. Dennis Green was hired by the Minnesota Vikings a few years later. In Super Bowl XLI, after the 2006 season, both head coaches, Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts and Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears, were Black. Dungy's Colts won, making him the first Black head coach to win a Super Bowl.

The league has also tried to address hiring directly. In the early 2000s, it adopted the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching vacancies and some other senior positions. The rule is named after Dan Rooney, the longtime Pittsburgh Steelers owner who chaired the league's diversity committee. How it works, and how it has changed, is covered in The Rooney Rule and How NFL Hiring Works.

Because hiring numbers change from year to year, we do not report the current counts. Interested readers can check league announcements for up-to-date information.

What historians still debate

Several parts of this history involve debate or uncertainty.

1. The cause of the 1933 exclusion. Historians agree that an unwritten barrier existed, but they differ on how formal it was and how much each owner contributed.
2. The role of the Coliseum lease. The stadium commission's insistence is a well-documented part of the story, but scholars weigh it against other factors, such as the pressure of postwar opinion.
3. Individual milestones. Titles such as "first Black player" or "first Black quarterback" depend on definitions: professional or amateur, league or independent team, modern era or earlier. Different sources draw the lines differently.
4. Early records. Records from the first decades of pro football are incomplete, and some details about players like Follis and other early pioneers are uncertain.

If you want to research further, look for detailed histories of the league and of individual figures. The Pro Football Hall of Fame and university archives are good starting points.

Why it still matters

The history of integration is not simply a set of dates. It shaped the sport in ways that can be traced directly to today:

• It reshaped the talent pool. Once the doors opened, pro football drew on a much larger set of athletes, and the quality of play rose.
• It connected the sport to the civil rights movement. Players, owners and coaches were part of a larger national story.
• It explains the structure of hiring rules and the attention paid to who gets the top jobs.
• It gives fans a more complete understanding of the people who built the game, including those who were excluded from it.

For a look at the league's current teams, visit our teams page, and for the standings and results that follow every season, see standings and scores.

The short version

• Black players, including Charles Follis, Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall, were part of professional football's first years, and Pollard became the first Black head coach in 1921.
• From 1934 to 1945, no Black players appeared in the NFL, a result of an unwritten agreement among owners rather than a written rule.
• In 1946, the Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, and the Browns of the AAFC signed Marion Motley and Bill Willis.
• Teams integrated at different speeds; Washington was the last, adding a Black player in 1962 after federal pressure.
• The AFL drew heavily on historically Black colleges, and Black players moved the AFL all-star game out of New Orleans in 1965.
• Quarterback and coaching milestones came decades later, with figures such as Willie Thrower, Marlin Briscoe, Doug Williams, Art Shell and Tony Dungy.
• Some details, especially about the earliest years, are debated, so use detailed histories for specifics.