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Showdown, September 2011
Hardcover / e-Book
JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins
Beacon Press
September 2011
On Sale: September 6, 2011
256 pages ISBN: 0807000744 EAN: 9780807000748 Kindle: B004J4X7CQ Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Sports
In 1961s as America crackled with racial tensions the
Washington Redskins stood alone as the only professional
football team without a black player on its roster. In fact,
during the entire twenty-five-year history of the franchise,
no African American had ever played for George Preston
Marshall, the Redskins' cantankerous principal owner. With
slicked-down white hair and angular facial features, the
nattily attired, sixty-four-year-old NFL team owner already
had a well-deserved reputation for flamboyance, showmanship,
and erratic behavior. And like other Southern-born
segregationists, Marshall stood firm against race-mixing.
"We'll start signing Negroes," he once boasted, "when the
Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites." But that was
about to change.
Opposing Marshall was Interior Secretary Stewart Udall,
whose determination that the Redskins' or "Paleskins," as he
called them, reflect John F. Kennedy's New Frontier ideals
led to one of the most high-profile contests to spill beyond
the sports pages. Realizing that racial justice and gridiron
success had the potential either to dovetail or take an ugly
turn, civil rights advocates and sports fans alike anxiously
turned their eyes toward the nation's capital. There was
always the possibility that Marshall, one of the NFL's most
influential and dominating founding fathers, might defy
demands from the Kennedy administration to desegregate his
lily-white team. When further pressured to desegregate by
the press, Marshall remained defiant, declaring that no one,
including the White House, could tell him how to run his
business.
In Showdown, sports historian Thomas G. Smith captures this
striking moment, one that held sweeping implications not
only for one team's racist policy but also for a sharply
segregated city and for the nation as a whole. Part sports
history, part civil rights story, this compelling and untold
narrative serves as a powerful lens onto racism in sport,
illustrating how, in microcosm, the fight to desegregate the
Redskins was part of a wider struggle against racial
injustice in America.
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