The masterful satirist Richard Pryor, during a skit on his television variety show, in 1977, played a black president holding a press conference. Subdued in tone, clad in a gray suit, Pryor as chief executive tries to field all the questions without losing his composure. He answers the journalists’ queries about tensions in the Middle East, the neutron bomb, and the unemployment rate. Then, about four minutes along, a reporter wearing the beret and fatigue jacket of the Black Panthers and identifying himself as Brother Bell, of Ebony magazine, stands up to say, “I want to know what you gonna do about having more black brothers as quarterbacks in the National Football Honky League. Right on!”
Pryor responds, his voice gradually rising: “I plan not only to have lots of black quarterbacks, but we gonna have black coaches and black owners of teams. As long as there gonna be football, gonna be some black in it somewhere!” By now, he is jabbing the air with his hand and widening his eyes. “I’m tired of this mess that’s been goin’ down,” he shouts. “Ever since the Rams got rid of James Harris, that’s what my job been about.”
The raucous applause that ensues from the studio audience attests to Pryor’s laser aim. As an astute commentator on the American dilemma of race, he understood thirty-six years ago something that the nation as a whole is still grasping: the plight of black quarterbacks, so often denied the starting positions they deserved, has always been about much more than football.
James Harris was the first African-American to regularly start as quarterback in professional football, breaking through, in 1969, with the Buffalo Bills as a rookie out of Grambling State University. He had his finest years with the then-Los Angeles Rams in the mid-seventies. Yet after compiling a 21-6 record as a starter, taking the Rams twice to the N.F.C. championship, leading the conference twice in passing efficiency, being voted Pro Bowl M.V.P., and being selected team captain—after all of that, Harris watched as the Rams’ management brought in four white quarterbacks to try to unseat him, before finally trading him away to be a backup in San Diego.
As bitterly as Harris’s N.F.L experience ended, it nonetheless blasted open the door for every African-American quarterback that would follow. He began the lineage that leads to Russell Wilson, of the Seattle Seahawks, who will be starting in the Super Bowl, on Sunday. Wilson is not the first black quarterback to start in the biggest game. That honor belongs to Doug Williams, who also won the game’s M.V.P. award while playing for Washington, in 1988. Steve McNair, of the Titans, Donovan McNabb, of the Eagles, and Colin Kaepernick, of the 49ers, each made Super Bowl starts in 2000, 2005, and 2013, respectively.
The difference this year is that Wilson will represent the largest cohort of African-American quarterbacks to have played in one season. Williams, McNair, and McNabb stuck out as rarities in their time. During some weeks of the 2013 regular season, as many as nine black quarterbacks started for the N.F.L.’s thirty-two teams, setting a league record. Three of the four quarterbacks who started in the N.F.C. divisional playoffs are black—Wilson, Kaepernick, and Carolina’s Cam Newton.
Often, mistakenly, this generational ascent of black quarterbacks is linked to a redefinition of how the position is played. Black quarterbacks, the line of reasoning goes, have found their niche by bringing the double-threat, read-option offense into prominence. In this narrow explanation, Peyton Manning, Wilson’s opponent in the Super Bowl, embodies the traditional—meaning “white”—drop-back quarterback.
If only the long resistance of pro football to black quarterbacks had such a benign, technical explanation. For decades, the most talented black quarterbacks to emerge from college were invariably forced to change their positions to wide receiver (Marlin Briscoe, Gene Washington, and Eldridge Dickey) or to defensive back (Mike Howell, Emmitt Thomas, Ken Riley). Or they were unceremoniously benched despite a winning record, like Joe Gilliam of the Steelers. Or they went entirely undrafted, as in the case of Warren Moon, who had to play in the Canadian Football League despite leading the University of Washington to the Rose Bowl during his senior year.
The ability of these athletes to run the ball was, in effect, held against them by pro coaches. Yet for white quarterbacks like Fran Tarkenton, of the Vikings, Roger Staubach, of the Cowboys, and Greg Landry, of the Lions, that same talent was seen as adding value. Landry was named an All-Pro in 1971 while running for an average of more yards per game than Russell Wilson or Colin Kaepernick ever have. Bobby Douglass, by every statistical measure a lousy passer, ran for nearly a thousand yards during a fourteen-game season while starting for the Bears, in 1972.
So it wasn’t a preferred offensive strategy that kept blacks from being N.F.L. quarterbacks; the double standard concerning running merely formed one part of a larger pattern of bigotry. Indeed, more than any position in any sport, the position of quarterback was inextricably tied to the vilest presumptions of American racism. There are reasons why James Harris didn’t break pro football’s barrier until twenty-two years after Jackie Robinson broke pro baseball’s. There are reasons why the last four positions to be desegregated in pro football were the four with the most decision-making responsibility: free safety, middle linebacker, center, and quarterback.
First, quarterback is surely the most cerebral position in sports. So, for a mid-century America still largely convinced of black intellectual inferiority, no black athlete could possibly play the position. Second, the quarterback is, to use the cliché, the “field general,” leading troops and giving orders. In an America that saw the role of blacks as following commands, and certainly never delivering them to whites, no black player could possibly lead a team. Finally, to be a quarterback is to possess those ineffable traits of character—work ethic, poise under pressure, resilience after even a devastating mistake. But black quarterbacks were invariably described as “natural athletes.” While that term may sound like a compliment, it evokes the venerable racist iconography of blacks as animals: monkeys, apes, jungle predators, all of them operating on mindless reflex alone.
Over the thirty-seven seasons since James Harris excelled with the Rams, these stereotypes have largely abated, though they have not vanished altogether. During Donovan McNabb’s stellar career with the Eagles, Rush Limbaugh declared that the quarterback was overrated because he was black. In football chatter, it is almost always white quarterbacks like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, of the Patriots, who are extolled for their study habits and on-the-field analysis. Meanwhile, discussions of Kaepernick focus on the direction of his baseball cap and the number of his tattoos.
Russell Wilson, standing well shy of six-feet and playing in only his second season, could not compile his excellent win-loss record just by being a “natural” athlete. He obviously spends a lot of time breaking down game film during the week. He established himself as a team leader during training camp of his rookie season, surpassing the high-priced free agent Matt Flynn.
As Richard Pryor prophesied, in 1977, though, the integration of pro football has included not only black quarterbacks but black head coaches (including Super Bowl winners Tony Dungy, of the Colts, and Mike Tomlin, of the Steelers) and black general managers (including two-time Super Bowl winners Ozzie Newsome, of the Ravens, and Jerry Reese, of the Giants). A black owner cannot be far behind.
Such progress came to the N.F.L. through the strange ideological bedfellows of capitalism and social engineering. Teams must win to fill seats, sell luxury boxes, move merchandise—and so the imperative to hire the best coaches and executives has trumped old prejudices. At the same time, the N.F.L. has operated with a successful diversity program, known as the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview minority candidates for major coaching and management vacancies.
The impact of that forward movement extends beyond the realm of sports. We can argue over whether football exerts too large a cultural influence in America, but if it does, then that influence can be used for good as well as ill. The canards that quarterbacks from James Harris to Russell Wilson have faced—that blacks aren’t smart enough, can’t lead, don’t work hard, and fold under pressure—had to be confronted and surmounted before this nation could elect a black man as its signal-caller-in-chief.
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