With all the highly controversial, highly important and highly emotional “stuff” going on in the NFL and the country as a whole right now, it seems fitting that the Browns and Cincinnati Bengals are playing on Sunday in Cleveland.
Yes, the Browns and Bengals, both of whom has as their founding head coach Paul Brown, the man whose color blindness enabled his 1946 Cleveland team to be the first in pro sports – not just football, but all of pro sports – to permanently break the color barrier coming out of World War II. It happened on Sept. 6, 1946 at Cleveland Stadium, which was located where FirstEnergy, the site of Sunday’s game, is now.
Yes, the Browns and Bengals, whose owner and president, Mike Brown, Paul Brown’s son, spent his teenage years in Shaker Heights hanging around the locker room and practice fields idolizing those first African Americans on the Browns 71 years ago, Pro Football of Famers Bill Willis and Marion Motley.
Yes, the Browns and Bengals playing in Cleveland, one of the most racially progressive cities – in sports and otherwise — in the history of this country with Wills and Motley; Larry Doby, who was the first African American player in the American League when he joined the Indians in 1947; John McLendon, the first African American head coach in any pro sport when he was hired in 1962 by the American Basketball League’s Cleveland Pipers, owned by another color-blind Cleveland guy in George Steinbrenner, and the first head basketball coach at a predominantly white university when he was hired by Cleveland State in 1966; and Carl Stokes, who became the first African American mayor of a major American city when he was elected in Cleveland in 1967.
Yes, the Browns, who had one of the first African American assistant coaches in the NFL in Ernie Green (running backs) in 1969, and one of the first strength and conditioning coaches in the league’s history in Al Tabor, an African American, in 1972, and the Bengals.
Yes, the Browns and Bengals, who both have African American head coaches in, respectively, Hue Jackson and Marvin Lewis, the second-longest-tenured head coach in the NFL behind some guy named Bill Belichick in New England. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. An did we mention that Belichick is a big, big fan of Paul Brown?
Yes, the Browns and Bengals, who play in the AFC North, where, for the second time in the division’s history, three of the four teams have African American head coaches (now, also with the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin; and from 2007-08 with Tomlin, Lewis and Cleveland’s Romeo Crennel).
Yes, the Browns, who have an African American starting quarterback in rookie DeShone Kizer, and the Bengals.
Yes, it all fits nicely in these thought-provoking times.
