He should have been great. He should have rumbled through NFL defenses like he did as a star sprinter playing running back at Western Illinois. But he couldn’t break into the Redskins’ lineup and in October of 1963, barely more than a year after he helped integrate the team, he was cut. Football would never be the same for him. A few months later he retired, leaving almost no legacy and carrying with him for half a century the secret of his release.
“I wondered what happened to him,” Mitchell says. “The day he walked off the field he disappeared. He’d crop up once in awhile but really that was it.”
For many years the Redskins were the shame of the NFL. There had been black players in the league dating back to the 1920s, and by the 1950s most rosters were dotted with a handful of African-Americans. The lone holdout was Washington, whose owner, George Preston Marshall, refused to integrate the team. The city was the southern-most in the NFL for years and Marshall appeared to embrace a fan base that didn’t want to see black Redskins players.
Perhaps the most famous line attached to him was: “We will start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.”