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Super Bowl a super score for civil rights movement
By Jeremy Johnson
jjohn308@mscd.edu

When the rain of civil rights falls, it falls fast and with the fury, finality and finesse that have been displayed over the past six months by a pair of National Football League coaches named Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy.

In March 1947, the modern, post-World-War-II NFL signed the first black football player – halfback Kenny Washington – to a professional football contract. Sadly, Washington’s short career would forever lie in the shadows of a young Major League Baseball second baseman named Jackie Robinson. Signed into baseball very briefly after Washington’s football contract, Robinson, arguably, set the standard for sports integration.

While many sports enthusiasts may argue about whether Robinson’s lightning infield glove was better than his booming bat, few give, or should give, a damn about whether one of baseball’s best infielders was black or white.

There are arguments to be made about what makes up a historic sports-integration moment: heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson winning the World Championship in 1908, Jesse Owens single-handedly defeating Adolf Hitler and the entire Nazi regime on the track with four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Satchel Paige entering and dominating professional baseball at the age of 42, or even Willie O’Ree’s 1958 debut in the National Hockey League.

There’s an awful racist joke I remember being tossed around the locker room when I was in high school: “What do you call a white guy surrounded by ten black guys? A quarterback.”

Well, in Super Bowl XXII, Washington Redskins’ black quarterback Doug Williams threw for four touchdowns as the ’Skins routed John Elway and the Denver Broncos 42-10. The first winning black quarterback in history, Williams posted a 94.0 quarterback rating and was named the game’s MVP.

And, frankly, Williams was little more than a placebo compared to black quarterbacks who followed, including Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham, Steve McNair, Michael Vick, Donovan McNabb and Vince Young, to name a few.

In a game in which two-thirds of the athletes are black, black quarterbacks are still a minority but are quickly on the rise.

One thing that cannot be debated is the influence of black athletes on our nation’s playing fields. It is certainly one field that has been leveled over time.

Now, just days away from Super Bowl XLI, it’s not just playing fields that are being leveled, but office politics and leadership roles as well.

On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the New York Giants named Jerry Reese the general manager of operations. Reese, along with Ozzie Newsome (Baltimore Ravens) and Rick Smith (Houston Texans), became the third black person to be appointed to the NFL’s highest role.
Of the seven black head coaches in the NFL this season, two of them – Smith and Dungy – will face off in Super Bowl XLI.

One game certainly cannot make up for years of prejudice, hate and discrimination, but it’s definitely a first down for the ongoing civil rights movement.

Jackie Robinson once said: “I’m not concerned with you liking me or disliking me … all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.”

And, like it or not, blacks are now bound for glory on all levels of sport.