NFL History | Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — A Lease Condition Broke the Color Line

The NFL's color line was not broken by a league decision. It was broken by a condition attached to a stadium lease.

The Cleveland Rams wanted to move to Los Angeles for the 1946 season and wanted this building to play in. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is publicly owned and run by a commission that meets in public, so the club had to appear before it and ask.

A group of Black sportswriters used the hearing. Halley Harding of the Los Angeles Tribune, with Herman Hill and Edward Robinson among others, argued that a stadium built and maintained with public money could not be leased to a club that would not hire Black players, and named Kenny Washington as the player it should hire. The commission adopted a resolution against discrimination by teams using the ground. Accounts date the meeting to either 15 or 26 January 1946.

Washington signed on 21 March 1946. Woody Strode, his UCLA teammate, signed on 7 May at Washington's insistence. The Rams' announcement denied that any league rule against Black players had ever existed and said no precedent was being set.

The arithmetic of what was being undone deserves stating precisely. Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall played in the league's first season, 1920. Joe Lillard and Ray Kemp were the last before the door shut, in 1933. There were no Black players in the NFL from 1934 through 1945: twelve seasons, though it is routinely called a thirteen-year ban by counting from 1933. The owners never put the agreement in writing and afterwards denied there had been one.

Washington was twenty-seven and had spent six years in minor professional leagues that would have him. He had been a consensus All-American at UCLA in 1939 and led the country in total offense. The Rams' backfield coach Bill Snyder said later that he doubted the club would have been interested in Washington had it stayed in Cleveland.

The league's version of this is that it reintegrated a year ahead of baseball. True, and half the story. The other half is that the league had segregated itself in the first place, and that the pressure came from outside it, from Black journalists and a public body that controlled a building. In the same year Marion Motley and Bill Willis signed with Paul Brown's Cleveland Browns, who played in the All-America Football Conference, not the NFL.

Coordinate: the Coliseum. Two independent sources agree to within about 30 m. Precision ±40 m.

Cover: Kenny Washington, number 13, and Woody Strode, number 34, with three unidentified players, photographed 11 August 1946. The archive catalogues them as UCLA football alumni; this is not a Rams team photograph. Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons and the UCLA Library Digital Collections.

Second image: a night game at the Coliseum on 6 September 1946, the Rams' first season in this stadium; the newspaper caption puts the crowd at 68,188. The scan is of the original negative and is laterally reversed. Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons and the UCLA Library Digital Collections.