David Rosenthal

In fact, the first NFL champions in that first season, the Akron Pros, the star player and the head coach was a man named Fritz Pollard, who was Black.

Unfortunately, in the mid-30s, supposedly after George Preston Marshall comes into the league as owner of the Boston Braves that became the Boston Redskins and then moved to Washington, D.C., at his behest, they adopt the same policy as Major League Baseball and completely kick blacks out of the league.

And it wouldn't be until after World War II.

And for the Redskins, not until 1961.

So, all this would continue, kind of, status quo...

The league barely is creeping along until after World War II, when both America and the NFL would change forever and pretty radically.

So after the war, when all the troops come home and there's the GI Bill, there's this new...

middle class in America that didn't go to these elite private school Ivy League institutions or even the Ohio States of the world or the Carlisle Indian colleges and they're coming home from the war they don't have college educations they may be now getting them through the GI Bill but

They have jobs.

They have disposable income.

They increasingly have radios and soon-to-be television sets.

They want entertainment.

Yeah.

And all these American GIs coming home from the war and their families, they don't have the same hangups and preoccupations about the college football game that the elite did before the war because they didn't go to college during their younger formative years.

So there is this big opportunity now after the war for professional football in the NFL to become a much bigger thing.

And they probably would not have realized it, except their hand was forced.

In 1944, right before the end of the war, a lot of people could see this opportunity.

Football was a very compelling game.

The NFL was only in, what, I think, eight cities at that point in time.

To really realize it, you had to expand.