First: Three African-American Athletes That Changed the Game

By Frank Foster

For change to happen, there has to be someone daring enough to suffer through the negativity of being first. The three players profiled here, beat the odds and changed the game.

Profiled in this book:

Jackie Robinson — The first African-American baseball player

Fritz Pollard — The first African-American coaches in the NFL and one of the first African-American players in the NFL

Nathaniel Clifton — One of the first African-American NBA players

These biographies may also be purchased separately.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookCaps
• Release date: Jul 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310622496

Book preview

LifeCaps Presents:

First

Three African-American Athletes That Changed the Game

By Frank Foster

© 2011 by Golgotha Press, Inc./LifeCaps

Published at SmashWords

www.bookcaps.com

About LifeCaps

LifeCaps is an imprint of BookCaps™ Study Guides. With each book, a lesser known or sometimes forgotten life is is recapped. We publish a wide array of topics (from baseball and music to literature and philosophy), so check our growing catalogue regularly (www.bookcaps.com) to see our newest books.

Breaking the Color Barrier

The Story of the First African-American NFL Head Coach, Frederick Fritz Pollard

Introduction

The history of sports and race is messy. In baseball, Jackie Robinson is universally touted as the first black major league player, which conveniently forgets Moses Fleetwood Walker and other players of color who appeared on 19th century diamonds.

Football deals with the messiness a different way. The sport employs the term modern era instead. So Kenny Washington is the first black player of the modern era. James Harris was the first black quarterback to start an NFL game in the modern era. Art Shell was the first black head coach of the modern era. The reason football has to append the qualifier to its historical racial milestones is because there was a man who was doing all those things back when the National Football League began. His name was Fritz Pollard.

Chapter 1: Early Life and High School

John William Pollard was born into a family of free black Virginia yeoman farmers in 1846, the family's ancestors having been freed in the last year of the Revolutionary War. They were turbulent times, and with laws against the importation of slaves becoming more widespread, the stories of free black children being kidnapped and sold into bondage were rampant. Eventually when young John was eight years old, his mother sent him and a sister to live with relatives in Kansas for their safety.

The Pollards' timing could not have been worse. That same year, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 passed that left the decision of slavery in new states to the settlers. In Kansas Territory the anti-slavery Free-Staters squared off so violently with pro-slavery elements that Kansas became an open battleground. Eventually, Bleeding Kansas entered the Union in 1861 as a slave-free state. The next year, an underage 16-year old John Pollard, using the alias Jackson Ridgeway, signed on with the 2nd Colored Kansas Regiment, becoming among the first group of black soldiers to join the Union Army.

Records are spotty concerning Pollard's service in the Union Army, but it is known that, due to his age he supported troops as a drummer, and was able to build a name for himself as a pugilist. Family lore maintains that the young Kansan won the unofficial lightweight championship of the 83rd United States Colored Infantry.

Pollard survived the Civil War to return to Kansas where he fell under the influence of a preacher and religious teacher named Hiram Rhodes Revels, who had helped organize regiments of the United States Colored Troops during the war. Revels would leave his Leavenworth, Kansas ministry for Mississippi in 1866, and go on to become the first African-American to serve in the United States Senate. In his wake, Pollard was inspired to attend Oberlin College in Ohio and become a lawyer.

A bad case of smallpox intervened, and cost him any chance at a law degree and nearly his life. After he recovered, Pollard learned barbering and he honed his skills in a swanky St. Louis hotel. He took his big city talents back to Leavenworth but was soon on the move again and landed in the town of Mexico in the bluegrass region of Missouri. So many horses and mules were shipped down the Santa Fe Trail from Mexico that it was known as the Saddle Horse Capital of the World. Even today, wealthy horse people from around the world beat a trail to Mexico to buy saddle horses.

Pollard landed a job with the busiest shop in town, but he was soon able to leave and put up his own barber pole, running a shop with five chairs and a bath. Meanwhile, a young woman of African-American, Sioux and French descent caught the eye of the master barber. Like himself, Catherine Amanda Hughes was devoted to the idea of education and came to Mexico to complete her schooling. When she did, in 1874, the 18-year old Catherine Hughes married John Pollard, ten years her senior.

Their first child, a girl named Artissmisia but always called Artie around the house, was born a year later. Luther, the first son, followed in 1878 and Naomi came along in 1883. By this time the Pollard children were of school age and the parents refused to send them to a segregated school in the former slave state of Missouri. Tutors were hired but as racial tensions escalated in the 1880s the Pollards made plans to move to the Chicago area for the sake of their children's future education.

John Pollard sold his business and property he had bought in Mexico and headed for the northern Chicago suburb of Evanston, home to Northwestern University and an enclave of working class blacks. Instead, the family settled in all-white Rogers Park about four miles to the south, and the Pollards enjoyed the distinction of being the only Race group in the entire Rogers Park community as the leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, remembered in 1937.

John Pollard moved the family into a home at 1928 West Lunt Avenue and set up a three-chair barbershop a few blocks away at 7017 East Ravenswood Avenue. Amanda Pollard was not an idle spectator in the family finances, building a successful seamstress business and affixing her name to most of the tax documents that remain in the public record. Her clients included high-end downtown Chicago stores like Marshall Fields.

She also had time to give birth to five more children. The seventh of the eight Pollard children arrived on January 27, 1894, and was named Frederick Douglass Pollard after the then 76-year old African-American orator and social reformer whom the Pollards had seen speak at the Chicago Columbian Exposition when Amanda was pregnant with young Fred. The great champion of equal rights would die of a massive heart attack just after Frederick Pollard's first birthday.

Rogers Park was an up-and-coming community of about 3,500 residents in the 1890s. Many of its settlers had arrived from Germany, and the little boy's honorific name did not last long once he began mingling on the neighborhood playgrounds. He was being called Fritz by the time he entered grade school. Also by the time Fritz was answering his first school bells, his older siblings were already making their marks on the world in ways that would influence him in years to come.

Artie, 19 years older than Fritz, earned a degree in nursing, and when she returned to Chicago she became the first black registered nurse in the state of Illinois. The oldest boy, Luther, was enjoying a career as a star athlete at Lake View High School when Fritz was born, one of the first African-Americans to compete on Chicago interscholastic fields. Luther Pollard play halfback on the football team and was one of the best high school pitchers in the city for Lake View, which today is the oldest operating public secondary school in Illinois.

Having inherited his mother's light skin, Luther hoped to convince professional baseball scouts that he was Native American, bypassing the prohibition against black players, but he was denied his shot at a career in baseball. Luther channeled his competitive energies into business, becoming a rare black face in the high-rise office towers going up on Chicago's Michigan Avenue. He sold insurance and worked in advertising. In 1915, Luther Pollard became the colored front man for a white-owned movie studio that produced comedies shot with all black casts. The Ebony Film Corporation offerings were picked up by General Film in 1918, but after the Ebony Comedies were savaged by the Chicago Defender for racial stereotypes the company folded.

Leslie was another star athlete in the family, close enough to Fritz's age that he was able to teach his little brother how to play football. One of the tricks he taught him was that after he was tackled, to roll up in a ball on his back with his cleats in the air to survive on the bottom of a pile. After a stellar schoolboy athletic career at North Division High School, a breakaway from the main Chicago Central High School, Leslie matriculated at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1908. He enjoyed a brief but flashy time as the halfback for the Indians, but quit school and started writing sports for a black New York City newspaper. He later moved to suburban Philadelphia to coach football at Lincoln University - all of which made indelible impacts on his younger brother.

But it was Hughes Pollard who had a more immediate impact on Fritz's athletic career. In 1909, as a barely noticeable 89-pound sophomore standing not even five feet tall, Fritz Pollard joined the football squad. Hughes was a senior and the star of the team, a burly six-footer weighing more than 200 pounds. Before the season began, Hughes made it clear that if the coaches were not going to give Fritz a chance to play, well then, he wasn't going to play either. Hughes proved a better player agent than football player. After Fritz got his chance Hughes quit and pursued his real interest in music as a drum major and leader of the orchestra.

Hughes Pollard went on to front a popular Chicago jazz combo called the Melody Four and traveled abroad to entertain. He was celebrated as one of the music industry's best traps drummers before signing on with the French Army in World War I. Hughes took a round of poisonous gas in the trenches on the Western Front, and never truly recovered from its effects before dying in Chicago in 1926.

Since Pollard's brothers had starred as baseball players on Rogers Park town teams, Fritz played baseball as well. When he reached his teens he won races in track events, much as his sisters had done before him. But it was mostly in football that the Pollard family encouraged young Fritz to pursue because they believed that sport held the greatest promise, albeit slim, for black athletes.

Fritz Pollard was a member of the first graduating class at Albert G. Lane Technical High School, named for one of the leading figures of 19th century Chicago education. When the doors to the brand new Dwight Heald Perkins-designed building opened in 1908, Fritz and Hughes were the only African-American students. Fritz played baseball and football and ran indoor and outdoor track. He played trombone in the school orchestra and maintained a C-plus academic average through four years.

He received his first citywide notice in his third high school game, a 29-17 thumping of Northwestern Military Academy. It was reported in the Tech Prep that, F. Pollard's work on the offensive was brilliant; after catching a punt on our twenty-yard line he ran ninety yards for a touchdown through his knowledge of dodging and twisting.

Pollard finished high school with a brimming trophy case. He was selected All-Cook County shortstop after his senior baseball season. That year he won both the 220-yard low hurdles and half-mile run in the Cook County championships. He was named All-Cook County in football after both his junior and senior seasons, averaging nearly a touchdown a game each year.

Leaving high school, Frederick Douglass Pollard was a rare specimen indeed: an African-American in the early 20th century with a diploma in his hand and college options in his future. His siblings had helped pioneer black enrollment in prestigious Eastern colleges when the entire African-American population in the Ivy League maybe numbered 50. In his hometown, his sister Naomi was one of the first black women to graduate from Northwestern University.

Not that it was always easy being the only black family in an all-white town or the only black face in a college classroom. His family taught Pollard how to handle himself as a black man in a white world. The Pollards may have been accepted in the circles in which they traveled, but there was always an undercurrent of racial discrimination present. Even John Pollard, who sacrificed a prosperous living in Missouri to advance the education of his family in Chicago, always made the Pollard boys work in the barber shop to learn the trade so when you go out in the world you can have any job you want but you'll never be broke. Each time one of his sons left home his father gave him a barber kit.

Chapter 2: College Career

Not that Fritz Pollard was thinking about academics when he graduated from Lane Technical High School; he was looking for a place to play football. It so happened that the local