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Long before there was a Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as was observed Monday, the late iconic civil rights leader and the Browns were, in a lot of ways, joined at the hip.

The early Browns were to pro football what Dr. King was to the rest of the country, as they became the team to permanently break the color barrier, not just in football but also pro sports overall, when Bill Willis and Marion Motley played for the team in its first regular-season game on Sept. 6, 1946 at Cleveland Stadium against the Miami Seahawks in the brand-new All-America Football Conference. That was a full eight months before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

Baseball has always been light years ahead of pro football when it comes to celebrating its heritage, including when it honors Robinson one day each season when every player on every team wears his jersey number, 42, in a game. Despite being in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, neither Willis nor Mötley have ever been treated like that — or even remotely close to it — by their sport. The discussion of that sad truth is another story for another time. Only the Browns have truly given those two heroes their just due.

Just as MLK lived by the motto of non-violence and peaceful protest, so did Willis and Motley. When the Browns signed them, they made the pair aware that they could not retaliate against any of the angry racism to which they would be subjected. They just had to tolerate it, take it, ignore it, for any negativity would set the movement back decades, something it couldn’t afford to have happen.

Willis told me that opposing players would slide razor blades inside their hand pads, and they would poke that into his ribs in pileups. When I asked him how he was able to withstand that, he smiled that friendly, gentlemanly smile of his and explained, “Along about the third quarter when they realized that I was so much better than them and what they were doing wasn’t having any effect on me, they just stopped doing it.”

That was 80 years ago, but the racism, though not nearly as pronounced, still clearly exists. So, then, if there is any chance to ever get equality and acceptance established much more substantially, then we all need to have a little — or a lot — of Bill Willis in us in regard to how we conduct ourselves and treat others both on the field and off it.

And this is a good day — a good time — to get back to work on that important effort.