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Abstract
It is the argument of this paper that the literature on mid-century racial discrimination in sport is incomplete in that it ignores the experiences of a small, but relatively significant, group of African-American football players who actually chose to leave their own country – and correspondingly leave the racially-charged environment of mid-twentieth-century USA – to head north to play professional football in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Beginning in 1946, a steady flow of African-Americans began to migrate to the CFL which, at the time, was a legitimate competitor league to the NFL. This paper attempts to test a perception seemingly held by some that, by moving to Canada, African-American football players were able to escape the racial injustices they often suffered in the US. This view appears to have its roots in the notion that Canada is a ‘gentler’, more tolerant society, without the divisive socio-political history that characterizes much of the race relations in the US. This paper tests these notions using a variety of empirical approaches. The results indicate that, while African-Americans were better represented in the CFL relative to the NFL, African-Americans still faced some level of entry discrimination in the CFL. In particular, African-American players in the CFL outperformed their white counterparts on numerous performance dimensions, indicating the overall talent level in the CFL could have been further improved by employing an even greater number of African-Americans. Additionally, the paper finds that those CFL teams that employed the highest percentage of African-Americans were those teams that had the most on-field success. Finally, the paper analyses prices of player trading cards from that era, and finds that cards of African-Americans were undervalued, relative to white CFL players of equal talent.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Steve Hardy for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We would also like to thank Jim Taylor of Vancouver, John Cooper of the CFL Hall of Fame and Dale West of the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame for their invaluable assistance in accessing CFL-related archival material. Thanks also to Jessica Willis and Vivian Chan for providing research assistance.
Notes
[1] ‘Quitting America’ is actually the title of a recent book by Robinson (2004), whose work draws considerable inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois.
[2] For example, a perusal of the 2007 rosters of professional basketball teams in Italy (found at www.eurobasket.com) shows the typical team having two to three African-Americans on the squad, most of whom with little or no previous NBA experience. To our knowledge, there have not been any academic studies that have chronicled the experiences of African-Americans playing in overseas basketball or baseball leagues.
[3] Technically, the name ‘Canadian Football League’ was not officially adopted until 1958, but for convenience the term is used here to describe professional football in Canada even before 1958.
[4] See Boyd and Scrivener, Legends of Autumn, for a history of the CFL's ‘glory’ years of the 1950s and 1960s.
[5] Kelly, Green Grit, 166
[6] Trawick and Wagner were the first ‘official’ African-Americans in the CFL, although a team picture of the 1930 Regina Roughriders (forerunner to the Saskatchewan Roughriders) includes an African-American player by the name of Stonewall Jackson. It was rumoured that Jackson was a US porter working on the Canadian railway system and would occasionally play football as he travelled across the country.
[7] Josh Bell-Webster, ‘Herb Trawick’, available online at www.cfl.ca, accessed 29 Jan. 2007
[8] The NFL colour barrier lasted from 1933 to 1946. Numerous African-Americans did play in the league prior to 1933, with Fritz Pollard being one of the more prominent players. For a biography of Pollard, see Carroll, Fritz Pollard.
[9] That one team in the league, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, was slow to integrate, is similar to the situations found in baseball and the NFL, where the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Redskins lagged well behind their respective league brethren when it came to integration. In both of these latter cases, the attitudes of the team owner – Tom Yawkey in the case of the Red Sox and George Marshall in the case of the Redskins – have often been cited as the reason for this unwillingness to integrate (for a comprehensive discussion of the Red Sox situation, see Bryant, Shut Out). In the case of the Roughriders, it is not readily apparent why the team was particularly slow to integrate. The team was community-owned and thus was governed by a group of individuals from the community, rather than one sole individual. One hypothesis is that the collective attitudes of this management group were such that African-American players were not welcome in the organization.
[10] Harrison, ‘African American Quarterbacks’.
[11] Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport.
[12] Howell, Blood, Sweat, and Cheers.
[13] Humber, A Sporting Chance.
[14] Winks, The Blacks in Canada.
[15] See ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] See, particularly, Fosty and Fosty, Black Ice, and also Harris, Breaking the Ice and O'Ree and McKinley, The Autobiography of Willie O'Ree. Fosty and Fosty examine the plight of African-Canadians in the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes – a league that existed from 1900 to the mid-1920s. Fosty and Fosty discuss how players in the league met hardship and prejudice, and argue that the significant contribution that the league and its players made to the development of the modern game is almost completely ignored in the annals of hockey history. They state: ‘It is as if the league had never existed. For hockey is today a sport Whiter in history than a Canadian winter’ (195–6).
[18] See, for example, Longley, ‘Measuring Employer-Based Discrimination’.
[19] See Becker, The Economics of Discrimination. Becker won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics, in part for his path-breaking work on the economics of discrimination. For an overview of the current state of the economics literature on discrimination in sport see Kahn, ‘The Sports Business as a Labor Market Laboratory’ and Longley, ‘Racial Discrimination’.
[20] Early in Royal's tenure at Texas, there were accusations of racism in the football program. See Royal and Wheat, Coach Royal.
[21] While locating and conducting detailed first-person interviews of those former players still living would be an enormous undertaking, and is beyond the scope of this paper, the authors did contact representatives of both the CFL Hall of Fame and the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame, and were given access to a wide variety of archival material from the era. As well, one of the authors interviewed Jim Taylor – a sports journalist icon in Canada – and a person very close to the CFL scene in the 1950s. Information from these sources was integrated throughout the paper.
[22] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL', 5.
[24] Chaput, Saskatchewan Sports Legends, 213–14.
[25] Ibid., 214–15.
[26] Ibid., 213–14.
[27] Ibid., 215.
[28] Kelly, Green Grit, 122.
[29] One measure of discrimination, or lack thereof, might be the extent to which black American CFL players resettled in Canada. While it is beyond the limits of this project to do a systematic analysis of the lives of individual black CFL players from this era, we did come across some anecdotal evidence. While some clearly made a life for themselves beyond football in Canada, we were nonetheless struck by how many CFL stars returned to the US – including Tom Casey, Woody Strode, Kenny Washington and Cookie Gilchrist. The tension between the opportunity that the CFL represented and the dream of a racially just United States is captured in the personal history of the Bright family. Johnny Bright, a symbol for Canadian racial harmony and US racial hostility, made a life for himself and his family in Canada, but his wife and children never became Canadian citizens. In this way, the journey of African-Americans to the CFL resembles other African-American migrations to Canada following the revolutionary war and prior to the civil war – Canada proved to be a temporary refuge. The desire to immigrate was driven by conditions in America, with blacks in Canada often playing the role of longing exiles in a foreign land.
[30] Kelly, Green Grit, 123.
[31] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL', 5.
[32] Ibid., 5.
[33] Barnes, The Plastic Orgasm.
[34] Ibid., 142.
[35] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL', 5.
[36] Kelly, The Grey Cup, 22.
[37] Kelly, Green Grit, 123.
[38] The fact that some CFL cities were more accepting of integration than others is somewhat analogous to the situation found in the integration of minor-league baseball during the 1950s. For a discussion of the latter, see, for example, Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow.
[39] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL', 5.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Kelly, Green Grit, 123.
[43] Bell-Webster, ‘Herb Trawick’.
[44] Barnes, The Plastic Orgasm, 143.
[45] Kelly, The Grey Cup, 22.
[46] Ibid., 22.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid., 324.
[49] Ibid., 22.
[50] Bell-Webster, ‘Herb Trawick’.
[51] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL', 5.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Ibid.
[54] MacCambridge, America's Game.
[55] Ross, Outside the Lines.
[56] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL'.
[57] Players included in this analysis are only those that had a player card issued for them in the year in question. Constantly changing rosters and imprecise and inconsistent historical record-keeping for rosters make it extremely difficult to identify all players in a given year. However, by using player cards, one can be reasonably assured that most of the prominent players are being identified.
[58] This argument presumes that there was a sufficient supply of quality African-American players that could have moved into these positions.
[59] This issue highlights the trade-off involved for teams such as Saskatchewan. To the extent fans may have had preferences against seeing African-American players on the team, the cost of indulging such preferences was that the team performed more poorly on the field. In other words, fewer African-American players led to fewer wins. One interesting extension to this discussion would be to examine attendance data across the league during this era to determine which two competing factors– the desire to have fewer African-American on a team, versus the desire to win – were the strongest. Unfortunately, consistent and reliable attendance data from this era is not generally available.
[60] See, for example Scahill, ‘A Reinvestigation of Racial Discrimination and Baseball Cards’.
[61] One of the more prominent quarterbacks in the CFL over the past decade has been Anthony Cavillo, a Mexican-American. See Longoria, Athletes Remembered, for an overview of Latino/Mexican football players.