Washingtons signing was not just a civil rights breakthrough. In helping to establish the Rams franchise on the West Coast, it made the National Football League truly national. It then switches, not so seamlessly, to a shot of whats supposed to be the same player getting up from the ground. Strode and Washington managed to find a hotel on the Black side of town where Count Basie happened to be performing. Similarly, the NFL may now have an incentive to tell Washingtons story more prominently, to mollify the blowback that the league has earned for its craven treatment of Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matteraligned protesters, and former Black players suffering from brain injuries. The browser you are using is no longer supported on this site.
But as the NFL has overtaken Major League Baseball in popularity, Washingtons stature hasnt grown along with the leagues.
*Kenny.
Somehow, having a gun pulled on him after a white motorist called him and his friends the N-word marked him as dangerous at UCLA. "A lot of black people did a lot of really good things and they don't get recognition for it," Cohen said. Robinson, who succeeded Washington as the Bruins shortstop, hit just .097 in his only college season.
I knew when my father was still alive," Cohen said. The Black sports writers who stumped for Washington werent nave. Even though Washington and Strode broke the NFL's color barrier, they did not receive the same treatment on the road as they did in Los Angeles. A chldren's book about a great college football team reminds us that playing sports Bypassed by the NFL, Washington took his talents to Hollywood. In 1967, Washington told the Sacramento Bee that young minorities needed to be more patient about the rate of change in America. I know that wasn't the case when my dad was playing.".
Washington's father, Edgar "Blue" Washington, played professional baseball for the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs. The Rams chose Kenny Washington and his former UCLA teammate Woody Strode to be their first African-American players -- and the first to play in the modern NFL. Yesterday, they were talking about someone else, but on the logo that they are using for Black History Month, on all the pictures, my dad's is one of the pictures.
He became a sales rep for Youngs Market, a local liquor distributor, and then joined the public relations department for Cutty Sark Scotch whisky. Washington didnt take home any hardware in the NFL. After graduating from UCLA, Kenny Washington could not play in the National Football League because African-Ameicans were not allowed. Kennys storycomplicated, messy, and sadresists easy narrativizing. Washington initially refused to participate, fearing threats to his personal safety. As Claude Newman wrote in the Sun Valley Times years later, With such men [as Washington] there are no racial problems. Pro football has a harder time using Kenny Washingtons story to make such a case. No schools, interstates, or asteroids are named after him. In the fourth and final installment of a series for Black History Month, theRams.com spotlights Rams Vice President of Communications Artis Twyman. After leading Lincoln High School to a city title as a junior and state championship as a senior, he went on to star at UCLA, where he shared a backfield with Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson. Historian Michael Oriard notes that While Thousands Cheer was the only one out of 120 full-length football films produced between 1920 and 1960 to feature a Black star. Washington continued his baseball career at UCLA, batting .454 and .350 for the Bruins in 1937 and 1938. Though they were both 27 years old when they made history, Robinson was still in his prime while Washington, given the state of his knees, was a shadow of his former self.
He missed an intrasquad scrimmage, but made his NFL debut in a Chicago exhibition game between the Rams and a college all-star team. He died early. Dick Hyland, an L.A. Times columnist whod asked his readers in 1941 whether Kenny Washington might be the greatest football player who ever lived, asserted in 1946 that the NFL has never had a rule against the use of Negro players.. His career passing yards at UCLA totaled 1,300; his career total offense at UCLA was 3,206 yards.
Kenny Washington Biographyfrom Wikipedia It Wasnt Always That Way. But dad and Uncle Woody, they weren't with the team so they could pretty much do whatever they wanted as long as they were ready for the games.". Bears owner George Halas tried to overturn it but was unsuccessful, so Washington joined the Los Angeles Police Department and played four seasons of semi-pro football two with the Hollywood Bears and two with the San Francisco Clippers according to a biography published by A&E Television Networks. Unsung heroes of Rams football integrationhow Kenny Washington and Woody Strode broke the NFL's color barrier. Despite their similar backgrounds, their shared educations, and their mirrored experiences dealing with the abuses of a racist systemnot to mention their athletic prowesstheir lives and experiences are so different. The same year he played a bit role in Robinsons biopic, Kenny Washington made an ill-fated attempt to play Major League Baseball, finagling an invitation to the New York Giants spring training. Meanwhile Washington continued to believe in gradualism. Department of Special Collections/UCLA Library
At the time, Don Hutson, the NFLs biggest star, earned only $175 per game. All rights reserved. O Africa! He was the teams field general, and the Los Angeles Times took to calling him General Washington.. That December, Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron issued an official proclamation: In recognition of your 16 years as a great football player, your fine conduct and inspirational sportsmanship and your record as Policeman in curbing juvenile delinquency, the city of Los Angeles will recognize officially Dec. 12 as Kenny Washington Day. At halftime of the last game of the 1948 season, a throng of civic leaders and Washingtons former coaches gathered with him at the 50-yard line.
He grew up in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Lincoln Heights, the citys first suburb. Like Robinsons well-chronicled experience in Major League Baseball, Washington suffered his share of slurs and cheap shots in the NFLperhaps more than he had while playing for UCLA or in the PCPFL, when he was less likely to compete against players from the South.
But the optimism that followed his signing was offset by Washingtons ongoing knee woes. In the decades that followed, Washingtons struggles, and his pioneering role in NFL history, would barely be discussed at all. In his senior year (1939), he rushed for 1,915 yards and led the nation in total offense; he also played safety on defense and played all but 20 minutes that entire season. He gambled on horse racing and wasnt home a lot, and June eventually filed for divorce. Instead, Washington coached football at UCLA and joined the LAPD. In the decades since Washington broke the NFLs color barrier in 1946the year before Robinson got to the Brooklyn Dodgersthe league has hardly acknowledged his importance, especially compared with the way Major League Baseball has burnished Robinsons legend.
In Goal Dust, Woody Strode writes of the Rams two Black players being turned away at the team hotel room prior to an exhibition game in Chicago. Racial prejudice also was the reason he was not selected to play in the East-West Shrine Game that year. The film cuts to actual UCLA game footage of Kenny Washington carrying the ball and getting tackled.
Karin said her father didn't talk much about his professional football career when she was growing up, so she had to gather details through other sources. Just to sign em to win the affection of (not to mention the business) of Halley Hardings customers, Macker wrote, and then only use em on the billboards and splinters is strictly four ball [a] skam of advertising.. Kenny Washington was born in 1918 in Los Angeles, California. This Week Is Probably Tiger Woods Last, Best Shot to Win Another Major. Of course, Kenny hasnt got a whole lot of years on the gridiron ahead of him, but well string along with him for our moneys worth, never having been robbed yet, wrote Washingtons most vocal advocate, Halley Harding, a Los Angeles Tribune sports writer. "And she talks about having to take the train.
Washingtons health deteriorated, and he reportedly struggled to pay his medical bills.
Kenny Washington at UCLA 1 on all your lists. The integration of pro football garnered national attention, and Washington was celebrated by both the mainstream and Black press, though the leaguewide ban that precipitated his signing was rarely mentionedif not outright deniedby white writers. The reverends influence upon Robinson was clear during his college years: Robinson had little patience for inequality.
When the 1940 football season ended, Robinson again followed Washingtons lead, leaving UCLA prior to graduating and, after a brief stint playing football in Hawaii, joining the PCPFLs Los Angeles Bulldogs. By this point, Washington had a wife (the former June Bradley) and infant son (Kenny Jr., born in 1941) to support. He was born too soon. His career passing yards at UCLA totaled 1,300; his career total offense at UCLA was 3,206 yards. Kristi Yamaguchi Is Remembered as the Perfect Olympics Hero. Toward the end of the 1948 season, it became clear that Washingtons NFL career was coming to a close. Kenny Washington played for the Rams for three years. In the 1950s and 60s, he would sit at the end of the bench of his beloved Lincoln High School Tigers, cheering on the football team he willed to a city championship in 1935. Some white writers harped on the racial makeup of the cheering crowd. "Uncle Woody, I remember him telling me how they kind of loved it because they could be out partying, be at the club drinking, doing everything white players couldn't because they had a curfew. He was the son ofEdgar "Blue" Washington, who playedNegro Leaguebaseball. Nixon even spent election night drinking beer with Washington at his home, likely a stunt aimed at getting out the Black vote.
According to Rams halfback Tom Harmon, a Green Bay Packers player elbowed Washington in the jaw in a 1947 game, then called Washington a Black bastard. Washington replied: I want to tell you something, you white trash. Behind her own contributions and the efforts of others, Karin continues to learn more about and keep alive her father's legacy. I think it's really good.". The two faced off against each other on Dec. 21, 1941, with Washington tossing a 55-yard pass to Strode to defeat Robinsons Bulldogs. Decades after Washingtons death, the NFL seems to have decided that football fans are now primed to consume his story, and so theyre feeding it to them.
In 1939, along with Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson (later to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers), Washington played in a powerful UCLA backfield that vied with national champion and cross-town rival USC for the Pacific Conference Championship and the chance to play in the 1940 Rose Bowl. Continuing to be plagued by his knee, Washington would play in only six of 11 regular-season games in 1946. After football be became an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. Soon, Washington dipped his own toe into politics, failing in a bid to become supervisor of L.A.s 2nd District. The Rams signing Kenny in 1946 ended a 12-year ban on black players in the NFL and made him the first of the league's modern era. Newspaper articles over the following years and an on-camera interview appearance for an NFL special in her 30s continued Cohen's education on her father's legacy. Few would imagine you were describing Jackie Robinson, who followed Washington at UCLA as a football and baseball player. Woody Strode - The Football Yearsvideo produced by Woody Strode, Kenny Washington's good friend and teammate at UCLA and in the NFL When he retired in 1948, 80,000 people attended his final game and the entire stadium gave him a standing ovation. But Kirk cant remember ever hearing about Kenny Washington breaking the NFL color barrier. Most of what we know comes via his teammates. None of you chose him.. "Oh, I knew that when I was around 10. Washingtons signing was celebrated in Los Angeles Black community, where the football star was honored by churches and civic groups, and Kenny and June (who had since reconciled) were fted by high society. And so it made sense that in 1946, when the Cleveland Rams wanted to relocate to Los Angeles to play in the 103,000-seat, publicly owned L.A. Memorial Coliseum, a group of Black journalists prodded the team to give Washington a tryout. He played for the Rams for three years, but although his injuries had taken their toll, he was still able to lead the league in yards per carry in his second season,and even scored a 92-yard touchdown, which remains the Rams team record for the longest run from scrimmage. TheLos Angeles Black presswas especially outspoken, thanks to its Black sports editor,William Claire "Halley" Harding. It wasn't until the Rams' relocation from Cleveland to Los Angeles seven years later that Washington would get a second chance. Born on August 31, 1918, Kenny Washington grew up in Los Angeles' Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Growing up in Los Angeles County in the 1970s and 1980s, Kirk Washington knew that his grandfather had been a beloved athlete. His argument helped create enough pressure to reintegrate the league, which in turn opened the door for the Rams to sign Washington and Strode. But theres a bittersweetness to it, too. Fans called for the Rams to sub in Washington throughout the game, and head coach Adam Walsh finally gave in with five minutes to play. Kenneth S. Washington was born inLos Angelesand grew up in the city'sLincoln Heightsneighborhood. He was a Black professionalAmericanfootballplayer. Washington also played baseball at UCLA, batting .454 in 1937 and .350 in 1938. Hed give to his community, helping to raise money for the local YMCA or a local hospital. It extended further many years later, and became known to larger audiences, with another on-camera appearance in the 2011 documentary "Third and Long: The History of African Americans in Pro Football," Johnson McKelvy's 2014 documentary "The Forgotten Four: The History of African Americans in Pro Football 1946-1989," and an interview with Gretchen Atwood for her 2016 book "Lost Champions: Four Men, Two Teams, and the Breaking of Pro Football's Color Line.". She recalled a recent conversation with a younger friend who originally thought Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown was the first to break the NFL's color barrier. They led the Bruins to a 604 record and within 4 yards of defeating intracity (and all-white) rival USC and earning a trip to the Rose Bowl. Not long after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, Washington became a part-time scout for the team.
In 1939, along with Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson (later to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers), Washington played in a powerful UCLA backfield that vied with national champion and cross-town rival USC for the Pacific Conference Championship and the chance to play in the 1940 Rose Bowl. Jackie Robinson, a junior college transfer from Pasadena, came to UCLA in 1939, the year Washington won the Douglas Fairbanks Trophy as the nations best college football player. In his senior year (1939), he rushed for 1,915 yards and led the nation in total offense; he also played safety on defense and played all but 20 minutes that entire season. Someone told me that [future Oscar-winning actress] Jane Wyman was crying in the stands.
Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. By mid-August, he had to have fluid drained from it and was forced to wear a clunky steel brace. But he eventually gave in, and rushed for 60 yards in a contest that went off without any major incidentsthough the 500 Black fans in attendance were forced to sit in segregated seating in the end zone. From 1940 to 1945, Washington played for the Hollywood Bears of thePacific Coast Professional Football League. He played more sparingly in 1948, and the weight of public scrutiny began to take a toll on him. The magnitude of it kind of grew on me a little bit later.". When theCleveland Ramsmoved to Los Angeles, the team sought to play in the publicly ownedLos Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Washington with the Lincoln High School football team in 1962, in Los Angeles.
But I always knew what he done. He is sometimes referred to as the "Jackie Robinson of pro football." The cheers you have given me went to my heart and not my head, Washington told the crowd. Its a public acknowledgment that should help bring more attention to Washingtons legacy at last. MLB trotted out Jackie Robinson Day in 2004, at least partially to divert attention from the controversy around the use of performance enhancing drugs that blew up that year. There were whispers that the Rams might end up cutting Washington before the season began.
By all accounts, he received an unusually large ovation when he walked onto the field. "And I just looked at him. [] He was No. Know thy rivers not my love? But it would be on the football field that hed achieve his greatest success, becoming a national figure on the most racially integrated squad of its era. As a result, the team signed Washington onMarch 21,1946, as the firstBlackto sign a contract with aNational Football League(NFL) team in the modern era (post-World War II followed by Strode onMay 7. Kenny Washington passed away when daughter Karin Washington Cohen was only 15 years old. While Cohen learned more about her father through her mother as well as Woody and his son, she still had an idea of the significance at a young age. Woody and Kenny, she later learned, broke the NFL's color barrier. Civil rights movements in the sixties and high school history classes furthered her understanding, but the stories told by immediate and extended family offered a stunning testament to what Washington endured. Cohen said she remembered one particular conversation she had with Strode at his home in Glendora, California, when she was around 24, 25 years old and got a lot more information from him about him and her father. Her efforts, and those of others, won't be slowing down anytime soon. "(My friend) goes, are you sure he was the first? And he distanced himself from Nixon in the early 1960s, before Robinson didbut he didnt, as Robinson did, march on Washington in 1963 or travel to Birmingham in support of desegregation.
You see Jim Brown in a football uniform, you see a whole lot of other brown faces on the team with him. But in less than a week, he was given his walking papers. When World War II started, Robinson enlisted in the Army, but knee surgery kept Washington out of the service and sidelined him from football. "Most of the information that I got was from my mother, and from Woody Strode and his son," Karin said in a phone interview with theRams.com last Thursday. 6. Washington received $2,500 to star in While Thousands Cheer, a 1940 crime drama that follows college football hero Kenny Harringtons efforts to bust up a game-fixing ring. Instead, he played for the Hollywood Bears of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League from 1941 to 1945.
Robinson wrote in his memoir, I was tired of having special Jim Crow living arrangements, and that he made the hotel back down.). Washingtonwas born on this date in 1918. In UCLA's trademark single-wing offense, Kenny Washington played left half back, a position that called upon him to pass and run. The story of one mans historic talent, thwarted potential, and confounding contradictionsor another Jackie Robinson? He is buried inEvergreen Cemetery. But it wasnt just their personalities that set the two men apart. 1 on all your lists. "But as recently as yesterday (last Wednesday), I saw a thing on the black history moments on CBS and they talked about my dad two days ago. Kenny was one of the greatest backs in the history of the game, and kids today have no idea who he is.. 2022 Los Angeles Rams.
All rights reserved. In the Black press, the spotlight shifted to Robinson, who debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947. I said, 'No, I'm sure that he was first.' Frustrated with police work, Washington returned to football in 1944, playing for the San Francisco Clippers of the American Football League, a West Coast league in direct competition with the PCPFL. I come with my heart afire; And as Kenny left the field and headed to the tunnel, the ovation followed him in huge waves. They knew that Washington, who was 27 years old and preparing for his fifth knee operation, was nearing the end of his career. He soon reestablished himself as the most dominant player outside the NFL, leading the Hollywood Bears (whom he rejoined in October 1945) to a league championship. Washington also never really embraced being a trailblazer. He lived through the same indignities that Robinson facedviolence, taunts, the humiliations of segregationwithout ever getting any sense that the league appreciated his struggle, even after his football career had long ended. Claim thy mountains not my heart?
In UCLA's trademark single-wing offense, Kenny Washington played left half back, a position that called upon him to pass and run.
As UCLA teammate Woody Strode put it in his autobiography, Goal Dust, It was the most soul-stirring event I have ever seen in sports. The Rams had their sights on Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as their new home and L.A. Tribune columnist Halley Harding asked if they would consider employing black players, according to a January 2017 story written by Los Angeles Times sports enterprise reporter Nathan Fenno. Outside of the media, other successful ventures include the Kenny Washington Stadium Foundation restoring Kenny Washington Square in northeast Los Angeles and honoring Washington during the Rams final game at the Coliseum in late December last year, with Cohen and her family in attendance. Washington was gregarious, a big man on campus. "When (my mother) went to get married, my dad and Uncle Woody were at UCLA and they were in Chicago for a game," Cohen said. Although he led the nation in scoring in 1939 and became the first Bruin football player to earn All-America recognition, Washington's professional football options were limited after graduation. He was a star running back at Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles and from there attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Baseball feels vindicated by Robinson.
Fields of Glory - Kenny Washington and Woody Strodean NFL video
The Black journalists who led a grassroots movement to pressure the Coliseum Commission and the Rams into signing our Kenny Washington are the heroic champions in this tale. Washington, meanwhile, was the first of the four to integrate pro football.
He has an uneventful bit part in the film as Robinsons Negro League manager.
Kenny Washington was the first African-American to play modern professional football. Washingtons return to form was short-lived. A 2006 exhibition at the Pro Football Hall of Fame called Breaking Through: The Reintegration of Pro Football focused on the Cleveland Browns Marion Motley and Bill Willishalf of the sports forgotten four of pioneering Black players, along with Washington and Woody Strode (who signed with the Los Angeles Rams two months after Washington). "I may not have realized quite the magnitude of it, but I knew what it was. When Washington died on June 24, 1971, at age 52 from polyarteritis (an inflammation of the arteries), A.S. Doc Young wrote in the Chicago Defender: He wasnt one to complain. (Strode was cut before the 1947 season.) He was raised by his grandmother Susie and his uncle Rocky, the first Black uniformed lieutenant in theLos Angeles Police Department(LAPD). He became a Los Angeles sports hero in 1935 when he led Lincoln High School to city baseball and football titles. Kenny Washington Biographyfrom Wikipedia. Death kicked him when he was down. Robinson, who himself would die the following year at the age of 53, remembered Washington in the magazine Gridiron: He had a deep hurt over the fact that he never had become a national figure in professional sports.. She took the train to Chicago. means a lot more than getting whatever you can for yourself. I come with SONG OF INNOCENCE by Julius E. Thompson. Wolff theorizes that weve forgotten Kenny Washington because his story is one of rupture rather than redemption. He wasnt cut out for law enforcement, said his daughter Karin Washington Cohen. Robinson went on to become one of the countrys leading civil rights figures; journalist Sridhar Pappu has written that he provided a blueprint for the militancy of Malcolm X. Washington also gravitated back toward the neighborhood where he was raised. Nor are there any books that treat him as anything more than one piece of a larger narrative about the forgotten four.. Forget about a two-part, four-hour PBS documentarythere is not a single feature film that tells Washingtons story. Gordon Macker of the Los Angeles Daily News, for instance, mused that the signings of Washington and Woody Strode seemed like a publicity stunt to fill the cavernous Coliseum with Black patrons, given Washingtons underwhelming performance in the game (and the fact that Strode never saw the field). Washington was accommodationist and reluctant to stir the pot. Washington died ofpolyarteritis nodosaon June 24, 1971, at the age of 52 in Los Angeles, California. There were even rumors about a fisticuffs in a Westwood alley. Perhaps the greatest symbol of Washingtons historical erasure was his appearance in 1950s The Jackie Robinson Story. UCLA and USC played a 0-0 tie; USC was awarded the conference championship based on its better won/lost record. Kenny Washington Resources
He was No. When Fletcher Bowron, the L.A. mayor who had issued the Kenny Washington Day proclamation in 1948, was running for reelection in 1949, he appointed Washington to monitor claims of police brutality in the minority community. Yet the young men were fundamentally different people. He served under Rocky at the Newton Street Division, located amid nightclubs, barbecue joints, and bustling foot traffic. Washington signed with the Hollywood Bears and soon became the leagues headliner. Both were multisport stars who grew up in predominantly white, middle-class, Los Angeles neighborhoods (approximately 6 miles apart). Kenny was one of the greatest backs in the history of the game, and kids today have no idea who he. At a crossroads, he followed the lead of his uncle Rocky, the first Black lieutenant watch commander in the LAPD. Washington was born in 1918 in Los Angeles, the only child of a Black American father and a Jamaican mother. Football has been good to me. As the Los Angeles Tribunes Harding wrote of one Washington highlight, Even with his gimpy leg he went through the line for 12 yards, dragging half the opposition along., His first Rams appearance in Los Angeles came in their next exhibition game against the Washington football team. He was a star running back at Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles and from there attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In order to play in the city's publicly-owned 92,000 seat stadium, the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Rams had to agree to hire African-American players.
His 92-yard touchdown run against the Chicago Cardinals is still the longest run from scrimmage in Rams franchise history. They must educate and improve themselves so they can make a decent living. According to Hank Shatford of the Pasadena Junior College Chronicle, When [Robinson] felt he was right and the other guy was wrong, he didnt hesitate. No museums are being built as permanent tributes to his legacy. Life beat him up. He was down on his luck, Tunney remembers. When UCLAs head coach took Washington out of that USC game with 15 seconds to play, fans in the packed Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum stood and applauded for what seemed like an eternity. There, the Helms Athletic Foundation presented him with a trophy, a television set, a Ford sedan, and a $500 contribution to his sons college fund. Racial prejudice also was the reason he was not selected to play in the East-West Shrine Game that year. There Will Never Be Another Tiger Woods. In the first of a series for Black History Month, theRams.com spotlights Rams Community Affairs and Engagement Intern Noel Grigsby Jr. As part of the Rams Black History Month efforts, the Rams hosted a virtual career panel with Inglewood Unified students from City Honors High School on Friday, February 19. That same year, he and June divorced, and Kenny moved out of their Baldwin Hills home and into an apartment not far away. A handful of Black players had competed in the NFL during the leagues first 13 years of existence, but the leagues owners enacted a gentlemans agreement in 1933, unofficially banning Black players. according to a biography published by A&E Television Networks. It was pretty hard to shake off, he told Rampersad. Following that season, many in the white press suggested that Washington ought to retire or that the Rams should cut him. It was like the Pope of Rome had come out., At the very moment that Washington soaked in the love from the Coliseum crowd, the 1940 NFL draft was taking place at the Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But the NFL usurped Major League Baseball as the nations sports obsession in part because Kenny Washington broke that same barrier.