Perhaps there was some kind of unconscious pull that, during a stay in Washington last weekend, led us down Florida Avenue, N.W., past the site of now-vanished Griffith Stadium. Just to be in that part of the city conjured up the thrill of long-ago trips from my family's place in Virginia to see the Washington Senators do battle with the likes of Ted Williams' Red Sox or Mickey Mantle's Yankees.
The stadium had hosted Senators baseball since 1911 before it finally was abandoned after the 1961 season. Its old block is now occupied by Howard University's hospital.
The Senators' tale becomes a bit tangled. The original franchise that had been owned by Clark Griffith was relocated by his son, Calvin, to Minnesota. An expansion franchise also called the Senators played its first year at Griffith Stadium, then carried on in new digs until 1971, when it left for Texas.
But the stadium's demise wasn't really the result of these baseball wheelings and dealings. It was done in by football - specifically, by the Washington Redskins, whose owner, George Preston Marshall, wanted a new, larger park.
This being a weekend when football looms large, at least in many a man-cave, let's blend NFL lore, cultural history and politics into a nice post-Thanksgiving casserole.
George Preston Marshall - what a guy. He had his strengths as a sports entrepreneur, buying the Boston Braves football franchise in 1932 and bringing it to the nation's capital, where he used showmanship and the strong arm of quarterback Sammy Baugh to build a successful team. The "Redskins" name was a gimmick keyed to a coach who had some native American heritage.
Marshall certainly wasn't the type to be bothered by the use of a team name that many would regard as an ethnic slur. In fact, as a recent book makes clear, Marshall held the line against using black players until he could hold it no longer against pressure from the U.S. government.
I haven't read the book - "Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins," by Thomas G. Smith - but the Nov. 10 New York Review of Books carried a thorough piece about it. Boy, did it send me back.
Because as a kid I was a Redskins fan, too - still am, to the degree I follow pro football at all (no Panthers for me, thanks). And while I was aware that the 'Skins were slow to integrate, I hadn't realized how dead-set against it their owner was as he positioned his team to "fight for old Dixie," or how his resistance finally was broken. It hurts to see how your favorite football team was operated in a way that put it in sync with the segregationists who fought every advance as the civil rights movement gathered steam.
Many NFL teams began acquiring black players in the 1950s after the color line was breached following World War II. (Some African-Americans had played years before, until a ban engineered, evidently, by Marshall.) The Cleveland Browns' incomparable fullback, the African-American Jim Brown, set the standard for dominance on the field.
Redskins teams of that era were dismal. Still, Marshall successfully lobbied the feds (who controlled the D.C. government) to construct a new showcase, due east of the Capitol along the Anacostia River.
That's when the showdown occurred. In early 1961, the new secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, got approval from the Kennedy White House to set a condition on the Redskins' use of the new stadium. It was intolerable to Udall and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that the NFL franchise in Washington would remain whites-only. The team would have to be integrated for the 1962 season.
Marshall, after dragging his feet as far as he could drag them, had little choice but to accept the deal, and the team drafted Heisman Trophy-winning running back Ernie Davis of Syracuse.
Davis didn't play for the Redskins. He was traded immediately to the Browns for Bobby Mitchell, an established star as a flanker, halfback and kick returner, who became the 'Skins' first black player. Davis didn't play for the Browns, either. Just a few months after the trade, he was diagnosed with leukemia, and by the next year he was dead at 23.
Mitchell became a fixture in the Redskins' lineup and rounded out a Hall of Fame career. Meanwhile the team added other black stars such as Charley Taylor and Brig Owens. The Redskins would go to the Super Bowl for the first time in 1973.
On the same circuit that had awakened the ghosts of Griffith Stadium, last weekend we drove past the stadium that eventually was named for RFK, now reduced to hosting soccer. But in the fall of 1962, it was where I saw my one and only live pro football game - the Redskins against the Browns. Jim Brown the bulldozer. Bobby Mitchell the pioneer. The 'Skins won. And the Nation's Capital had a football team that was beginning to look more like the nation.
