The most powerful segregationist in American sports was about to face his professional end, not at the hands of a rival owner or player, but through a single sheet of paper he never saw coming. On December 4, 1961, George Preston Marshall sent his coach, Bill McPeak, to deliver the Washington Redskins’ first-round draft pick. The name on the card was Ernie Davis, the first Black man to win the Heisman Trophy. In seconds, the last segregated team in professional football would make history.
Marshall did not know it yet, but that card would become the most humiliating moment of his career, and he brought every second of it on himself. Marshall is remembered as the flamboyant showman who gave the NFL halftime shows, marching bands, and television deals. What is often left out is how the United States government, the attorney general, the interior secretary, and ultimately the president spent an entire year dismantling one man’s 25-year refusal to let a Black player wear his team’s jersey. This is the story of how a stubborn old segregationist lost a fight he never realized he had already lost.
Marshall bought his first NFL franchise in 1932. He built an empire of pageantry, fight songs, cheerleaders, and a network of Southern stations that made the Redskins the “team of the South. ” But for those Southern fans, Marshall made a decision in the 1930s that would define the rest of his life. While every other owner in the league gradually began signing Black players after 1946, Marshall refused—not once, not for one season, but for 25 consecutive years.
He was, by his own admission and nearly every sportswriter who covered him, the last segregationist holdout in professional football. When pressed by journalists, he had a ready answer: he would start signing Black players when the Harlem Globetrotters started signing white players. He said it like a joke. No one in the room who did not already agree with him laughed.
For a quarter of a century, in the capital of the United States, a city with a Black majority, families could walk past a stadium built partly with their tax money without ever seeing a man who looked like their sons wearing that uniform. Fathers took their boys to games and watched them cheer for a team that made clear, year after year, who was welcome and who was not. That was the cost of Marshall’s stubbornness—not an abstraction, not a statistic. A whole generation of Black Washington was shut out of their city’s team in their city’s stadium because of one man’s refusal to change.
The situation went deeper than private roster decisions. Black players had appeared on NFL rosters since the league’s early days, but historians who studied the period point to Marshall as the primary force behind an unwritten agreement among owners in 1933 to simply stop signing them. That silent ban lasted thirteen years until other franchises broke it in 1946. Marshall’s own team did not budge for another sixteen years after that.
He had his band play “Dixie” before every home game. As late as the 1960s, he created a television network specifically to reach Southern markets, promoting the Redskins as the old Confederacy’s team. None of this was subtle. None of it was hidden.
It simply was that way for 25 years because no one with enough power had pushed the matter hard enough. By 1961, that refusal collided with something Marshall had never faced before: a government that was done asking politely. Stewart Udall had just been sworn in as Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy. In February 1961, Udall sent a special memo to the president, writing that Marshall was the last segregationist in professional football.
Udall had noticed something useful: the Redskins’ new $24 million stadium, under construction at Anacostia Flats, sat on land owned by the federal government, financed by public money, and operated as part of the National Capital Parks system. That meant the Interior Department was legally the landlord of the property leased to Marshall. On March 24, 1961, Udall sent a letter to Marshall. It was polite, but also unmistakable: sign a Black player, or the Redskins would not be allowed to use the stadium they had already signed a 30-year lease for.
Marshall’s response was exactly what you would expect from a man who had not been forced to bend in 25 years. He called his lawyers. He told the press that the government had no business telling a showman how to cast his show. He said the whole thing was ridiculous: while the world stood on the brink of another war, Washington bureaucrats concerned themselves with whether a Black man would play for the Redskins.
Udall backed off for one season. The Redskins played their first year in the new stadium in 1961, still all-white. But Udall was not finished—he was just postponing. That fall, as construction crews put the finishing touches on the stadium, members of the NAACP and CORE organized picket lines outside the site.
They stood for hours in the D. C. heat holding signs. Although the story did not appear on the evening news, they were also at exhibition games, all season long, reminding fans and reporters what kind of team owned that stadium.
Black fans in Washington began boycotting home games entirely, refusing to spend a dollar supporting a team that would not let a man who looked like them wear its uniform. Shirley Povich, the Washington Post columnist who had criticized Marshall for years, kept up the pressure in every column he wrote. Even players around the league felt the weight of what Washington represented. Ali Matson, a player for the Chicago Cardinals, admitted to Povich that Black players in the NFL deliberately played harder whenever they faced the Redskins.
On the field, the team was collapsing under its internal decay. By the end of the season, the record was one win, 12 losses, and one tie: the worst season in franchise history. Their only win came in the last game of the year, two weeks after the draft that changed everything. Even NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who usually stayed out of individual team affairs, began making his own calls, quietly asking Marshall the same question over and over: if every other team we play has Black players on the field, what exactly is the argument for keeping ours off it?
What Marshall did not know, as he dismissed reporters, columnists, and commissioners, was that Stewart Udall had already found the one weapon that no amount of money, lawyers, or 25 years of stubbornness could withstand. In July 1961, Udall drew his final line. He told Marshall to integrate the team by the 1962 season, or lose the stadium forever and face legal consequences on top of that. Marshall told a reporter, with a mix of defiance and resignation, that no one could predict what might happen under the guise of liberalism.
But even Marshall, for all his bluster, realized the equation had changed. He said he would probably comply, even if that meant, in his words, hiring an Eskimo, Chinese, or Mongolian. It was the closest thing to surrender the man had ever spoken publicly. Then came the moment that no one puts in highlight reels.
Stewart Udall did not hold a press conference to announce his victory. He did not flex under the lights. According to the historian who spent years researching this story, Udall moved alone, without consulting President Kennedy or Attorney General Robert Kennedy at every step. He simply wrote the letter and attached an anti-discrimination clause to the federal rules governing the stadium lease.
Quietly, with a definitive administrative action, without speeches, medals, or cameras: just a government official deciding that a 25-year injustice would end on his watch, using only a signature and a piece of paper. On December 4, 1961, the Redskins held the first overall pick in the draft—the only consolation prize for years of losses. Marshall, who did not want to be the man who personally picked a Black player, sent Bill McPeak to do it for him. With the first pick, the Redskins selected Ernie Davis, the historic Heisman winner from Syracuse.
Newspapers across the country praised the choice. One columnist wrote that Udall was watching Marshall from behind his shoulder like a stern older brother. For one morning only, it seemed George Preston Marshall had finally done the right thing. Then came what no one expected.
That same morning, with Marshall’s blessing, Bill McPeak secretly agreed to trade Davis to the Cleveland Browns for veteran Bobby Mitchell and quarterback LeRoy Jackson. Marshall wanted the credit for choosing a Black star without actually having to put him on the team. It was the last sarcastic, stubborn move of a stubborn, sarcastic man. But it backfired completely.
Bobby Mitchell arrived in Washington in 1962 and became not only the first Black player in Redskins history, but one of the greatest offensive weapons the team ever had—a Hall of Famer. Marshall got his trade but lost the argument in the end. And Ernie Davis, the man Marshall never wanted, never met, never sat at a table with, became something greater than any deal could measure. His name, his story, and the tragedy that followed meant more to this country than Marshall’s 25 years of resistance ever did.
Mitchell was not alone for long. That same year, defensive player John Nisby joined him on the field, and running back Ron Hatcher became the first Black player to sign an actual contract with the team. Twenty-five years of exclusion vanished in a single season, not because Marshall changed his mind, but because he ran out of ways to avoid it. Mitchell later said he had no personal problem with George Preston Marshall.
It was the fans in the stands who made his first seasons in Washington miserable, hurling abuse unrelated to football. He endured it anyway, playing and scoring until the abuse faded and turned into something else entirely: respect. Marshall spent his final years watching his body fail him the way his principles had failed others. In 1963, a stroke left him legally unable to manage the team he had controlled with an iron grip for three decades.
He died in 1969. Even after death, he tried one last time to hold his position, writing in his will that not one dollar of his $6 million fortune would go to any purpose that, in his words, supported or enforced the principle of racial integration in any form. The courts read the will and voided it. Even his last wish could not withstand the world he spent his life refusing to accept.
But history did not end with George Preston Marshall. In June 2020, more than half a century after his death, the statue of Marshall standing outside RFK Stadium was removed. The team erased his name from its Ring of Fame, its wall of history, and its website. The lower stands, the section that carried Marshall’s name for years, were renamed for Bobby Mitchell—the same man Washington fans had once screamed at from those very seats.
That summer, the team retired Mitchell’s number 49, only the second number retired in franchise history. The man Marshall was forced to accept now stands permanently where Marshall’s name once was. There is a lesson buried in this story that has nothing to do with football. Power built on exclusion always seems unshakeable, right up until the moment someone more patient, more careful, and more determined decides it is not.
Marshall had money, headlines, a Hall of Fame plaque, and 25 years of experience imposing his will. None of it bought him anything against a quiet government official who simply refused to renew the lease. Real change, the kind that outlasts a man’s obituary, rarely comes through a speech or a press conference.
It comes when someone quietly and finally decides that enough is enough.