Throughout the history of the NFL, no position on the field commands respect and brings stupendous amount of excitement than quarterback.
However, in 1933, the NFL reportedly took a decision to ban black players from being deployed as quarterbacks.
The decision was said to be at the request of former Washington owner George Preston Marshall, a committed segregationist who in a 1942 interview argued that if African Americans were allowed to play, “white players, especially those from the South, would go to extremes to physically disable them”.
According to Patrick-Hruby, the ban mirrored the status of black Americans at the time: separate, unequal and living in a de facto apartheid state via Jim Crow in the South and a patchwork of exclusionary laws and customs everywhere else.
As a result, the position has practically always been held by whites.
According to Jay Coakley, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and sports sociologist and reported by the Guardian, in the early part of the 20th century, whites assumed that African Americans lacked the physical stamina and emotional courage to excel at contact sports like boxing and football.
Despite the ban being lifted in 1946, the opportunities for African American quarterbacks weren’t there. They were nonexistent.
“You had the Negro Leagues in baseball, and similar kinds of teams in football and basketball,” Coakley said. “So what happened over time is that the racial ideology changed.”
“Whites accepted that blacks were physically evolved, but decided that they were intellectually un-evolved – that they were actually lower on the ladder of evolution than white people, and somehow closer to our animal ancestors. And that’s the ideology, the cultural context, that prevailed when the major sports in the US were desegregated.”
The belief that a black person could lead a team at quarterback did not come to fruition until a few breakthrough stars in the late 80s and early 90s paved the way for blacks to excel at the quarterback position, according to BR.
This article, therefore, presents to you the three African-American quarterbacks who won the super bowl.
