Stewart Udall And The Redskins

For no particular reason I found this an interesting story and did a little more digging.  Apparently Udall used his power as Interior secretary to force the Skins, till then the last holdout in signing black players, into integrating.  The new stadium was built on federal land and Udall says George Preston Marshall could be sued for anti-discrimination.  Interesting.

Mr. Udall also had a direct hand in integrating the Washington Redskins football team.

The Redskins -- the last team in any major professional sport to integrate -- were set to begin playing in a new stadium (which Mr. Udall later named for Robert F. Kennedy) that sat on land owned by the National Park Service. In March 1961, Mr. Udall sent a sharply worded letter to Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, warning him that he was in danger of criminal prosecution if the team violated anti-discrimination laws. In 1962, Bobby Mitchell became the first black player to take the field for the Redskins.

Dan Steinberg of the DC Sports Bog has more about how Udall prevented the then new stadium from being called LBJ Stadium.  Though Udall served for the entire Kennedy and Johnson terms, he was apparently always a Kennedy loyalist and couldn't stomach the idea of Johnson plastering his name on this.  So with the power of his pen and the fact that the stadium was on federal land, it was legally within Udall's power to overrule and put RFK's name on it.

And so, absent that Udall-executed plot, all the great Redskins and D.C. United and Senators and Nationals memories, the NFC Championship games and MLS Cups, the World Cup games and Olympic soccer festivals, the departure of baseball and the arrival of baseball, the Eagle Bank Bowls and the scenes of me dropping pumpkins off the upper concourse with Alecko Eskandarian, the naked ESPN The Magazine photo shoots and the HFStivals, would have happened not at RFK but at LBJ. Almost impossible to imagine, right?

I don't know.  I find this kind of stuff interesting.

RIP Stewart Udall.  You may have been a huge liberal, but we can all thank him for integrating the Skins and keeping LBJ's name off of the stadium. 

Comments

[Mom]

Chris, when Stewart Udall died Dad told me this story. Since the stadium was controlled by the National Parks Service, Udall would not allow the Redskins to play there unless they integrated.

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