MITCHELL & MARSHALL: BOBBY MITCHELL, RACE AND THE NFL

Bobby Mitchell was the first black player to join the Washington Redskins, and complete the breaking of the colour barrier in the NFL, a process which had begun a full 16 years earlier with the Los Angeles Rams, the year before Jackie Robinson appeared for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He and Redskins’ owner George Preston Marshall stand as antagonistic bookends in this sad parable of race in America, and in the NFL, a tale whose telling is not yet finished, in case you’ve missed Colin Kaepernick. In some ways framing the story with this historical importance distracts from Mitchell’s on-field brilliance, and it’s important to note his presence in the Pro Football Hall of Fame is not dependent on his fellow Hall of Famer Marshall’s racism: he was a tremendous football player who starred as both a running back and receiver, one of those players from the early years of the NFL’s boom to whom you can point and say that guy could step out of those game films and play today, a perfect fit in the modern game.

Mitchell grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but went to college at Illinois, rather than a segregated university down south. He was a track star too, and actually held briefly the world record in the seldom-contested 70 yard hurdles at 7.7 seconds. Running indoor track in the winter would make sense because he reportedly was offered a minor-league baseball…