The Rise of Black Quarterbacks

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            At Sunday’s Super Bowl, the United States will congratulate itself on another racial milestone, the first time two Black quarterbacks have played in the culminating game of the country’s most popular sport. “Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes will make history on Sunday,” crowed CBS News.

But the history is a lesson in bigotry, illustrating how devious stereotypes can be.

The latest “first” is a cause for celebration, to be sure. It is no exoneration of American society, however, for the racial assumptions that have made this so long in coming still whirl around Blacks, whether professional athletes or ordinary mortals. Tangible barriers that are broken often leave a strong residue of bias—in this case, about the interactions of the mind, the body, and the power of Blacks on the field or off.   

Americans love to chart progress. We have had the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black defense secretary, the first Black secretary of state, the first Black Supreme Court justice, the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on. And now “the first Black House Minority Leader in history” as President Biden said in his State of the Union Address, congratulating Representative Hakeem Jeffries.

 Whether Jeffries was pleased or displeased by the label was hard to tell by the neutral expression on his face. Not every Black or Muslim or woman or gay person who gets past the obstacle loves being defined primarily that way. Jeffries and the rest of us might reasonably wonder if the day will ever come when the phrase “the first Black [fill in the blank]” can be relegated to a distant past.

            The first Black quarterback to start in the Superbowl was Doug Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory in 1988. He won the Lombardi Trophy and was named the game’s most valuable player. But he hadn’t been the team’s starter at the beginning of the season, when Black quarterbacks overall started fewer than 10 percent of NFL games. 

            Several years later, for my book A Country of Strangers, I looked into the patterns of prejudice that was keeping Black players out of the quarterback position. A system of tracking was putting high school athletes on career-changing detours, especially if they came from mostly Black schools, according to Richard L. Schaefer, former attorney for the National Football League Players Association. On college teams, he said then, talented Black quarterbacks were being bumped to other positions considered more physical than mental. “I think it’s a subtle, perhaps even subconscious, kind of bigotry.”

            The bigotry pairs two of the society’s longest-standing stereotypes of Blacks as both physically strong and mentally weak. Since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson, who codified those images in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, there has been a tendency in white America to see the body and the mind as opposite poles, perceptions that persisted and shaped college and NFL coaches’ decisions centuries later.

Sportscasters used to call a good play by a Black an “athletic move” and by a white a “smart move.” You don’t hear that distinction much anymore, but the assumptions once took their toll. “There is a tradition in sports of saying that when the Black guy succeeds, he’s a great natural ” Schaefer observed in the 1990s. “When the white guy succeeds, it’s due to hard work and perseverance and his own dedication to his sport.” This implied “that it’s just a physical versus a mental thing.”

The practice of sorting Blacks players out of so-called thinking positions was documented by the Players Association in a 1980 report: “The ‘Black Positions’—running back, defensive back, and wide receiver—were rated by the coaches as demanding physical speed, physical quickness, and high achievement motivation.” Blacks were shunted away from quarterback, center, and linebacker, who “tend to have the greatest opportunity to have a controlling influence on the outcome.”

The positions long denied to Blacks were leadership and decision-making roles requiring “frequent social interactions calling for interpersonal acceptability,” the Players Association observed. Those were also the spots from which players could graduate after retirement to managerial jobs in professional football.

But Blacks in power have long stirred discomfort, ambivalence, or outright resentment among a swath of white America, as if the natural order of society were being disrupted. Witness the backlash to Barak Obama achieving the presidency, a much more visceral revulsion among rightwing whites than policy differences alone could explain.

“In pro football’s portion of the civil rights struggle, the last positions to be desegregated were center, middle linebacker and quarterback,” Samuel G. Freedman once wrote. “Those three spots, not coincidentally, required the greatest intellectual acumen, because they involved calling the blocking assignments (center), defensive alignment (middle linebacker) and the entire offense (quarterback). In the late 1960s, white supremacist perceptions still kept Blacks from quarterbacking an NFL team. No Black player could possibly be smart enough, have the required strength of character or possibly give orders to white teammates.”

            Bias was self-defeating, of course, in sports as in every area of life, by excluding whole reservoirs of talent. In fact, Southern resistance to school desegregation eventually eroded partly because of Black students playing on integrated teams. The white chairman of B, E & K Construction Company in Birmingham, Alabama, put it this way to me back in the late 1990s. “The first thing that caught the attention of the whites in the South, in my view, was that they started realizing that they could win football games with black athletes. I really believe, when I think back, that that’s what turned them around.”

            College and pro football took the same lesson eventually, and the roster of Black quarterbacks has grown to include impressive, quick-minded readers of complex field positions and precise executors of intricate plays.

Mahomes, of the Kansas City Chiefs, is biracial and identifies as Black. He will meet Hurts, of the Philadelphia Eagles Sunday in the dazzling spectacle that is bound to blind most of the country to the continuing prejudices that have shaped American society, football included. Both men played quarterback in college, a big change from decades past.

 That doesn’t mean that the biases have disappeared, especially outside the stadium. If only the game were the template for the country as a whole.

            “It is the only place in life where it doesn’t matter anymore who your daddy was or how much money you have or whether you’re white or black,” said Schaeffer years ago. “It is literally the even playing field we’re always metaphorically searching for in this world.”