In 1902, a multisport star at Ohio Wesleyan University, who was already playing football and baseball at the school, signed on to play with a semi-pro football team about an hour away — the Shelby Blues.
His name was Branch Rickey, and Rickey is known to history as the baseball executive who broke that sport’s color line by signing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers more than four decades later.
Here’s what is not nearly as well-known: One of Rickey’s teammates on the Shelby Blues was a college student from a rival school in Ohio. Rickey called him “a wonder,” which leaves us today to wonder in a different way: Did Rickey’s friendship with that running back help inspire Rickey to integrate baseball? That running back’s name was Charles Follis, and he owns his own place in history, although it’s far less celebrated than Rickey’s. Follis went on to become the first Black professional football player.
Here’s something that’s even less well-known: Follis was from Virginia.
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Follis was born in Cloverdale, in Botetourt County, in 1879, the son of two formerly enslaved laborers. He came into the world at a time when a brief window of civil rights progress after the Civil War was being closed in Virginia, often violently. Politically, the short-lived biracial Readjuster Party held power in the state but was about to be voted out in the coming years. According to “Follis: Greatness Transcends,” a biography by Ralph Paulk, the Ku Klux Klan touched his family’s house twice — first in 1881, then again in 1884. That last attack, when Charles was 5, left his 3-year-old brother dead. The family immediately moved out of state, settling in Wooster, Ohio.
Virginia’s claim on Follis’ legacy ends there, but Virginia has honored native sons and daughters who spent less time here. Woodrow Wilson moved out of state before his first birthday, but Staunton embraces him anyway. Roger Arliner Young was a little more than 1 before her family moved out of Clifton Forge, but there’s still a historical marker in the town that notes she went on to become the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in zoology. Virginia has no such marker to Follis, although he is mentioned in the new mobile museum launched by the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. (See our photo tour of the museum and check it out whenever it comes to your community.)
The Follis story in Ohio, though, does shed some distant light on our own here in Virginia — and that of America, at large.
“The elder Follis, who worked in a bank, became a community leader and founded a Baptist church whose congregation still exists,” the Akron Beacon Journal reported in a 2023 story about the Follis biography. Charles grew into a strapping teenager — 6 foot, 200 pounds — and gravitated toward sports. Baseball was his first love, as was customary in those days, and he starred on Wooster’s amateur team as a power-hitting catcher who led the team to the state championship. Black Sports says it was evident “from the very beginning of his baseball career that he was destined for stardom.”
On the side, Follis also took up the relatively new sport of football. When he was 16, he organized a football team at his high school, according to Black Sports. Then something else happened that seems extraordinary for the times through our Virginia eyes: His white teammates elected him the team captain.
Follis must have excelled in the classroom as well because he went on to attend what was then the University of Wooster (and today is the College of Wooster). He played baseball for both the school team and the local amateur team. Black Sports wrote: “More than once sports writers referred to a Follis four bagger as ‘his usual home run.’” In the summer of 1901, in a game between Wooster and Sebring, the local newspaper wrote: “Follis came in for his usual whirl at the bat and knocked out two home runs, one of which went farther perhaps than any ball hit at the present diamond. Follis … sent the ball so far and so swift that it looked like a pea as it whirled over across the race track.”
To occupy himself in the fall, Follis played football for Wooster’s amateur team. After two games against the Shelby Blues, the team’s manager recruited Follis to jump teams. That’s where he met Rickey, then a student at Ohio Wesleyan. They were teammates in football and rivals in baseball, because Follis’ Wooster team and Rickey’s Ohio Wesleyan team played each other. Then they were rivals again when the Shelby team played an Ohio Wesleyan squad that Rickey was playing on. Follis broke loose for four long runs, including a 70-yard dash for a touchdown. All this was in 1902-1903, dates that may not mean much in Ohio but are significant in Virginia: 1902 is when state leaders, led by Carter Glass of Lynchburg, wrote a new constitution with the specific goal of purging as many Black Virginians as possible from the voter rolls, even if that meant purging a lot of white voters at the same time. In 1902 in Virginia, doors were closing, but in Ohio, they seemed to be opening, although not very wide.
After one game, the Shelby Blues went to a local tavern for post-game refreshment. “When the tavern owner saw him, he announced that white football players could stay but Black ones would have to go,” Black Sports wrote. “Follis didn’t force the issue; he withdrew from the group and took his refreshment alone.”
Rickey always said his formative experience came in 1903, when as player-coach for Ohio Wesleyan a hotel in Indiana refused to accommodate the team’s Black catcher. The encounter left the player in tears, and Rickey wondering about things he’d never wondered about before. “I vowed that I would always do whatever I could to see that other Americans did not have to face the bitter humiliation that was heaped upon Charles Thomas,” Rickey later said.
However, the publication Black Sports has speculated that Rickey’s experiences with Follis might have also played a role in his commitment to integrate baseball: “It is highly probable that Branch Rickey’s first hand observation of Follis’ unruffled handling of prejudice, on the field and off, influenced his decision to introduce Jackie Robinson to major league baseball, just as he had watched Frank Schiffer introduce Charles Follis to professional football some 40 years earlier.”
It’s unclear whether Follis got paid for playing for the Shelby Blues in 1902 and 1903, but in 1904, the team manager, Shiffer, announced he’d signed Follis to a professional contract.
This was still decades before the National Football League, but that contract appears to have made Follis the first Black athlete to get paid for playing football. Follis played three seasons for the Shelby Blues, who were members of the Ohio League. Follis dominated the league. In his first pro game in 1904, he burst loose for an 83-yard touchdown run. Follis was dubbed “the Black Cyclone,” a nickname he detested.
White opponents sometimes targeted Follis for hard hits on the field that once left him with torn ligaments in his shoulder. Opposing fans heckled with racist taunts. In one game in Toledo in 1905, the verbal abuse was so bad that the Toledo captain interrupted the game to admonish the crowd to stop calling Follis by the customary racial epithet: “He is a gentleman and a clean player, and please don’t call him that!” According to a contemporary newspaper account, the crowd applauded, and Follis “was not molested during the rest of the game.”
Football is a rough sport, though, and was rougher in the days when helmets were considered optional. Injuries took their toll. After a Thanksgiving Day game in 1906, Follis “limped off the field” and never played football again.
Four years later, he was dead, from pneumonia, then one of the leading causes of death.
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The Follis story does not end there. The Ohio League evolved into the American Professional Football Association, and that evolved into the National Football League in 1922, which has since evolved into the spectacle that it is today. Follis is part of the pre-history of the NFL. Society sometimes moves backward: Virginia rolled back civil rights in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There were Black players in the early days of Major League Baseball until they were banned. Fritz Pollard was a running back for the Akron Pros in 1920, but then the NFL segregated itself until the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington in 1946.
Follis is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, although there is a plaque noting his achievements. He is in the College of Wooster Hall of Fame. The town of Shelby has a street named after Follis. The football field at Wooster High School is named Follis Field. He has inspired a book as well as a play.
And in Virginia, the state where he was born but chased him away?
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