Forgotten fields stars pro#
Forgotten fields stars professional#

“My grandfather dealt with racism, but his feeling until the day he died was to stress education first,” said Bill Marshall, 67, who lives in the Twin Cities.

3, 1920, while Pollard’s Pros opened a week later by beating the Columbus Panhandles 37-0. Marshall’s Independents debuted with a 45-0 victory over the Muncie Flyers on Oct. Technically, Marshall was the first African-American to play in league history. His second and final NFL season, according to “The Football Encyclopedia,” came five years later in Duluth (0-3). Marshall was 40 by the time he joined Rock Island for one season (4-2-1).

He joined the Minneapolis Marines in 1916, but was one of many standout players who moved on to Rock Island after World War I and a flu epidemic shut down independent football for the 1918 season. He graduated in 1907 and practiced law downtown while becoming a local semipro football star. They moved north to Minneapolis, where Bobby became the University of Minnesota’s first African-American in football, baseball, hockey and the school of law. Marshall, the grandson of Virginia slaves, was born in Milwaukee on March 12, 1880, to Richard Marshall, an African-American, and Symantha Gillespie, a woman of German Jewish heritage. His legacy lives on through the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which promotes equal opportunity hiring in the NFL.

Forgotten fields stars pro#

Pollard also became the NFL’s first black coach and was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005. “He kind of bounced around from city to city, as a lot of pros did in the day, and he knew where black players could or should play.” “Pollard became the key because he was the one that brought other black players in,” Horrigan said. In 1920 - 27 years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier - the APFA opened with Fritz Pollard playing tailback for the Akron (Ohio) Pros and Bobby Marshall, a 20th-century Minnesota sporting icon, playing end for the Rock Island (Ill.) Independents. That’s the year manager Ole Haugsrud and coach Dewey Scanlon bought the Kelleys from the players for $1, signed wildly popular Stanford All-America fullback Ernie Nevers, changed the team’s name to the “Ernie Nevers’ Eskimos” and sent it on the road for a national barnstorming tour of 14 league games (6-5-3) and 15 exhibitions from Sept. Duluth fared better, going 16-20-3 while creating one of the league’s legendary tales in 1926. The Marines and Red Jackets posted a 6-33-4 NFL record while going 0-27-3 on the road, including the aforementioned loss in the Packers’ first league game. Bank Stadium, the site of Super Bowl LII on Feb. Until 1921, the Marines were a successful semipro team formed in 1905, when they played in the 115-pound weight class and were stocked mostly with teenagers from neighborhoods surrounding the current site of U.S.

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The American Professional Football Association began in 1920 and changed its name to the National Football League in 1922. Marshall, who attended Minneapolis Central and became the first African-American in football, hockey and law school at the University of Minnesota, was 40 in 1920 when he played in a nonleague game for the American Professional Football Association’s Rock Island (Ill.) Independents. Being first already was old hat to Bobby Marshall when he became the first black man to play in the NFL.