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In October 1961, two teams from the National Basketball Association, then a league that was still an afterthought to many sports fans, traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, to play a pre-season game as part of the NBA’s promotional efforts.
The Boston Celtics checked into The Phoenix Hotel. Two of the players, Sam Jones and Tom “Satch” Sanders, went down to the dining room. The hostess turned them away.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t serve Negroes,” she told them.
The two players were so furious, they wanted to fly back to Boston. Before they left, though, they did something else: They organized a boycott. None of the Black players for either the Celtics or the St. Louis Hawks played.
When the Boston players returned home, a crowd of predominantly white fans gathered at the airport to cheer their team’s willingness to stand up to racism. The team owner declared that he’d never again allow the Celtics to play in a Southern city.
Years later, in marking the anniversary of the boycott, National Public Radio called this the first instance of Black athletes using their power to protest racism.
That’s not so, though.
The first example had happened two months before — in Roanoke — and it involved the National Football League.
* * *
The NFL in 1961 bears only a pale resemblance to the NFL of today. There was no Super Bowl then. There wasn’t even a national television contract. And, like the NBA, the NFL often played pre-season games in smaller cities as a way to market itself. In 1949, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Detroit Lions played in Roanoke. In 1961, another game was scheduled in Roanoke, this time between the Steelers and the Baltimore Colts.
A lot had happened in the 12 years between those two games. The Civil Rights Movement had happened, and it was still happening. In 1961, Roanoke schools had begun to integrate, however tentatively. Nine Black students from just four families were allowed to attend white schools. In Prince Edward County, the schools were still shut down rather than integrate. Harry Byrd Sr., the architect of Massive Resistance to the Supreme Court’s orders, was still a U.S. senator. Lindsay Almond, who had initially thundered against integration but eventually caved, was still governor. Virginia’s law that banned integration in “any place of public entertainment or public assemblage” was still on the books.
When the NFL game in Roanoke was announced in February 1961, Reuben Lawson decided that was the time to mount a legal challenge.
Lawson was a Black lawyer in Roanoke who had already made a name for himself filing legal challenges to segregated schools in the western part of the state. Lawson had gone to court in Floyd County, in Grayson County, in Lynchburg, in Pulaski County, in Roanoke, and in Roanoke County to force the school systems to integrate — and eventually won them all. He was the western equivalent to the more famous Richmond-based duo of Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, who had pursued a Prince Edward County case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that ultimately became part of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In fact, Lawson had briefly practiced in Richmond with Hill and Robinson before moving to Roanoke.
Lawson first went to the city council and asked that the game at the city-owned Victory Stadium allow integrated seating — the practice at the time had been to confine Black fans to the inferior seats in the end zone and far ends of the field. Part of Lawson’s argument was that the city had already allowed Victory Stadium to be integrated. The previous October, a Republican rally featuring Vice President Richard Nixon at the stadium had an integrated audience, and several Black leaders had sat on the platform with Nixon. (Nixon had made a concerted effort to woo Black voters that year. His running mate that year, Henry Cabot Lodge, had promised that Republicans would name a Black Cabinet secretary if they won — something that didn’t happen until Lyndon Johnson did six years later. The barrier-breaking baseball star Jackie Robinson endorsed Nixon, calling Democratic commitment to civil rights “insincere.”)
The city council was not swayed and pointed to the state law against integration.
So Lawson sued. Judge Fred Hoback dismissed the case, ruling that the three plaintiffs didn’t have legal standing to sue because nothing had happened yet.
Lawson sued again. This time his Black clients purchased tickets in the white seating area, and hoped that the threat of prosecution would give them legal standing. (The game’s sponsor, the chamber of commerce, was selling tickets by mail so didn’t know the race of the ticket-buyers.)
By now, though, it was July. The game was set for Aug. 12, and the legal deadline for the city to respond to Lawson’s latest suit was after the game. The city could simply run out the clock.
Now we turn to Lawon’s collaborator: R.R. Wilkinson.
Wilkinson was pastor of Hill Street Baptist Church and president of the Roanoke NAACP. He had a flair for the dramatic, both in the pulpit and in his public actions. Two years later, Wilkinson would pressure the city to close its dump in a Black neighborhood by threatening a “baby carriage brigade” of young mothers to block the entrance. Now, with four days left before the game and no realistic hope of legal intervention, Wilkinson resorted to a Hail Mary pass: He fired off telegrams to the 20 Black players on the two teams and beseeched them to boycott the game.
Players in those days weren’t making the millions they are now. Some might not have even had secure roster spots for what they were making. Asking them to breach their contracts and boycott a game was a steep request.
They all agreed anyway.
Lenny Moore, the Colts’ star running back, declared that his Black teammates were “100%” behind the boycott. The Steelers’ Black players told their coach they would not “cross an NAACP picket line.”
This was now a situation that went far beyond a routine pre-season game. It reverberated all the way up to NFL headquarters.
The league’s new commissioner, Pete Rozelle, was only a year and a half into his job. He was just 35 but was considered a marketing genius. His goal was to ink a national TV contract that would bring the league’s games into every home, something which eventually he did and made NFL owners even richer than they were. First, though, he had to resolve a problem with one of his 12 bosses.
George Preston Marshall, owner of the Washington Redskins, ran an all-white team. Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich called Marshall “one of pro football’s greatest innovators, and its leading bigot.” His ex-wife called him “the Marshall without a plan.” Actually, he did have a plan. He owned the southernmost team in the NFL at the time and wanted to promote Washington as “the team of the South.” He booked Southern bands for halftime, he signed Southern players — white Southern players — and he built an extensive radio network throughout the South. The changing times were catching up with Marshall. He had grudgingly changed the team’s fight song to say “fight for old D.C.” instead of “fight for Old Dixie.” Now, the Kennedy administration was threatening to revoke the team’s lease on the D.C.-owned stadium unless Marshall signed Black players. He insisted he would do no such thing. This was going to be an obstacle to Rozelle’s goal to turn the NFL into household entertainment. Rozelle went to Washington to meet with the recalcitrant Marshall.
He was there on the same day that a separate meeting was taking place in Roanoke — an emergency gathering at the Patrick Henry Hotel that brought together representatives of the teams (including Buddy Young, a Black player for the Steelers), the city, the chamber of commerce and the NAACP.
We don’t know what happened in that meeting, but we know that at some point the participants dialed up Commissioner Rozelle on a long-distance line. We also know that when the meeting was over, it was announced that the NAACP had dropped its boycott request and the game would go on with a full complement of players. That looked as if the NAACP had caved, but the result was quite the opposite. It appears that the city had agreed to not enforce the segregation ordinance. It also appears that Wilkinson had revealed that quite a few of the city’s Black residents had purchased tickets in the whites-only section, including Wilkinson himself. As he left the meeting, he told waiting reporters: “I’ll be there rootin’ on the 40-yard line.” The 40-yard line was in the section reserved for whites.
More significantly, Rozelle issued a statement in which he condemned segregation as “repugnant to the American way of life” and that he hoped NFL teams “will not play to segregated audiences.”
The game went on without incident. The Steelers won 24-20 in what The Roanoke Times called “a thriller.” Lawson did not sit in the stands. He and his sons were invited to sit on the Colts’ bench. The game was a Saturday; on that Monday, Marshall announced that his team would pick a Black player in the next NFL draft (this turned out to be Ernie Davis, whom the team then traded for Bobby Mitchell, who became Washington’s first Black player).
Was that decision connected to the threatened Roanoke boycott? Alex Long thinks it might be.
Long grew up in Roanoke County, graduated from Cave Spring High School, James Madison University, William & Mary’s law school, and now is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He’s been researching the threatened boycott at Victory Stadium, has written an article about it for the University of Virginia Law Review and hopes to expand that into a book. Last week, he spoke at Roanoke College about what he’s found and also sat down with me for a conversation.
Long sees what happened in Roanoke as a pivotal event. “For the first time, you had players engaging in collective action to force change, and it worked and it resulted in the NFL condemning segregation,” he said. Plus, “it may have contributed to the integration of the Washington Redskins,” which meant that the NFL was then fully integrated.
More history followed. The next year, Roanoke’s Patrick Henry High School hosted Arlington’s Washington & Lee High School at Victory Stadium for a football game. The Roanoke Times called it “the first integrated scholastic football game ever played in Victory Stadium.”
Victory Stadium is gone, and its role in history has largely gone unrecognized. Not until the past few years have the participants in the 1961 integration of the stadium been honored. Two years ago, Roanoke renamed a street after Wilkinson. Last year, Congress voted to rename the federal courthouse in Roanoke after Lawson.
Marshall, who owned Washington’s pro football team, died in 1969. In his will, he directed that part of his fortune go to a family foundation, which he instructed would never give money for “any purpose which supports the principle of racial integration in any form.”
The courts ruled that clause invalid.
Join us for a conversation with top legislators
Join us Thursday, Feb. 27, at Fitzpatrick Hall in Roanoke for the second annual Cardinal Way: Civility Rules luncheon with the top leaders of the Virginia General Assembly.
Hear from top Republican and Democratic House and Senate leaders as they discuss the issues on which they found consensus and those in which they remain far apart. They’ll also leave time to answer your questions.
Cardinal Way: Civility Rules is a project partially funded by a civil discourse grant from the American Press Institute. This event is also sponsored by Gentry Locke Consulting. Tickets are available here.