[1] From its inception in 1920 as a loose coalition of various regional teams, the American Professional Football Association had comparatively few African-American players; a total of nine black players suited up for NFL teams between 1920 and 1926, including future attorney, black activist and internationally acclaimed artist Paul Robeson, as well as famed race record producer J. Mayo Williams.
With the stock market collapsed, white owners of the teams didn't want to pay African-American players.
[5][6] Many observers will attribute the subsequent lockout of black players to the entry of George Preston Marshall into the league in 1932.
Marshall openly refused to have black athletes on his Boston Braves/Washington Redskins team, and reportedly pressured the rest of the league to follow suit.
Marshall, however, was likely not the only reason: the Great Depression had stoked an increase in racism and self-inflicted segregation across the country, and internal politics likely had as much of an effect as external pressure.
[22]) In 1946, after the Rams had received approval to move to Los Angeles and Washington returned from the war, members of the African American print media made the Los Angeles Coliseum commission aware the NFL did not have any African American players[23] and reminded the commission the Coliseum was supported with public funds.
No team followed the Rams in re-integrating the NFL until the Detroit Lions signed Mel Groomes and Bob Mann in 1948.
[33] In comparison, only three of the ten NFL teams (the Rams, Lions and New York Giants) signed a black player before 1950.
[36] Reportedly, Black players routinely received lower contracts than whites in the NFL, while in the American Football League there was no such distinction based on race.
[39] The American Football League had the first Black placekicker in U.S. professional football, Gene Mingo of the Denver Broncos (Mingo's primary claim to fame, however, was as a running back, and was only secondarily a placekicker); and the first Black regular starting quarterback of the modern era, Marlin Briscoe of the Denver Broncos.
[41] At the start of the 2014 season, NFL surveys revealed that the league was 68.7% African-American and 28.6% non-Hispanic white, with the remaining 2.7% comprising Asian/Pacific Islander, non-white Hispanics, and those preferring an other category.
[49] There are also allegations that racial profiling exists at the lower levels of the game that discourages white players from playing halfback.
In 2013, there were two African American punters, Reggie Hodges for the Cleveland Browns and Marquette King for the Denver Broncos.
[1] In October 2018, George Taliaferro, the first African American selected by the process of the NFL draft, died at the age of 91.
[52] In Week 1 of the 2020 NFL season, 10 quarterbacks with known Black African ancestry (Cam Newton, Teddy Bridgewater, Dwayne Haskins, Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, Kyler Murray, Dak Prescott, Tyrod Taylor, Deshaun Watson, Russell Wilson) started games for their teams, the most ever on opening week.
[53] Outside of playing, the first black head coach in the NFL since the end of the player-coach era did not come until 1989, when Art Shell took over the then-Los Angeles Raiders; he was followed three years later by Dennis Green of the Minnesota Vikings.
Only two of the league's owners (Korean-born Kim Pegula of the Buffalo Bills, and Pakistani-American Shahid Khan of the Jacksonville Jaguars) are of non-European descent.