Bobby Mitchell packed his bags in December 1961, headed for a city that did not want him. He had spent four seasons with the Cleveland Browns, playing in one of the most talented offenses in professional football alongside Jim Brown, catching passes, returning kicks, and earning All-Star honors. He had never been cut, never benched, never told he was unwanted. Now Paul Brown told him he had been traded to Washington.
Not to a better team, not for more money, but to the only NFL franchise that had spent 25 years making its stance on players like Bobby Mitchell unmistakably clear. He already knew why he was going. Everyone did. This is not a story about integration itself.
History books can cover that in a paragraph. This is the story of what it actually took—a man sent into hostile territory not because he chose it, but because the President of the United States needed someone to go, and Bobby Mitchell was the best available. It is also the story of an owner who spent his career building something he was ready to destroy rather than share it, and what happened when those two men ended up in the same football stadium. George Preston Marshall founded the Boston Braves franchise in 1932.
He renamed them the Redskins in 1933 and moved them to Washington in 1937, where they won the NFL championship in their first season. He was one of the most important figures in professional football history. He pushed for the forward pass rule that made the game more open, organized the league’s first marching band, and created its first radio network, broadcasting Redskins games across the South, which he described as his primary audience. When he arrived in Washington, the franchise was an afterthought.
By the time he finished building it, the Redskins were the dominant team of the South, the team every city without its own franchise rooted for—a cultural institution before that phrase meant anything in sports. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in its inaugural class of 1963 alongside Red Grange, George Halas, and Sammy Baugh. He was also, by any measure, proudly racist. In 1933, he informally organized what became an unwritten agreement that kept Black players out of the NFL entirely, an arrangement that lasted 13 years.
When the league integrated in 1946 under pressure from stadium lease contracts in Los Angeles, Marshall did not. When other teams signed Black stars and won championships, Marshall only watched. When sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote in The Washington Post that the Redskins colors were burgundy, gold, and Caucasian, Marshall did not respond. When the NAACP protested at league owners’ meetings in 1957 and organized demonstrations outside his home, Marshall did not change.
When asked directly about integration, his answer was simple: “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites. ” He was not embarrassed. He was not defensive. He believed he had the right to run his team as he saw fit.
He had built it himself. It was his. That was the man Bobby Mitchell was about to work for. Bobby Mitchell was 23 when he arrived in Cleveland in 1958.
He grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and played college football at the University of Illinois. The Browns took him in the seventh round of the draft. He was supposed to be a backup. In his first season, he averaged 6.
1 yards per carry. In his second, he scored 14 touchdowns. Paul Brown moved him around—halfback, flanker, kick returner—because wherever he placed him, Mitchell made defenders miss. He had speed that forced defensive coordinators to invent new plans by Monday morning.
By 1961, he was among the best players on one of the best teams in professional football, playing alongside Jim Brown. He had never been told he was unwanted anywhere. He had no reason to imagine that feeling. He was about to learn it.
In March 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order creating the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. His administration publicly and explicitly committed to ending racial discrimination in federal hiring and in federally contracted businesses. Stewart Udall, Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, saw an opportunity.
The new Washington stadium was being built on federal land—land owned by the Department of the Interior and under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Marshall had negotiated a 30-year lease. Udall flagged the situation in his weekly report to Kennedy on February 28, 1961: George Marshall of the Washington Redskins is the only opponent of integration policy in professional football. The Interior Department owns the land on which the new Washington stadium is being built, and we are investigating whether a non-discrimination clause can be inserted into Marshall’s lease.
Udall then sent a letter to Marshall. The message was direct: integrate Black players onto your team, or the stadium will not be available to the Redskins. Marshall had built his team over 30 years. He had survived the Depression, survived the war, survived the NFL merger itself in 1946 by simply refusing to participate.
He had weathered every challenge. Now the United States government was telling him the terms had changed. And unlike every previous challenge, this one had a deadline. The new stadium was scheduled to open in the fall of 1961, and his team was expected to play there.
He told reporters there was no problem. He told reporters he could handle it. On December 4, 1961, the NFL held its annual draft. Marshall sent his coach, Bill McPeak, to represent him.
With the first overall pick, McPeak selected Ernie Davis, the Heisman Trophy winner from Syracuse, the most famous college player in the country and a Black man. The Washington press celebrated Marshall’s integration. The pressure lifted. But Marshall had already made a different arrangement before the draft began.
He had called Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown and proposed a trade: the rights to Ernie Davis for running back Bobby Mitchell and halfback Leroy Jackson. The deal was done in total secrecy. Davis would go to Cleveland, Mitchell would come to Washington. Marshall would satisfy the federal government with a proven veteran instead of a rookie, and Davis, who could not be forced to play for a man he did not want, would get what he wanted.
Art Modell, the owner of the Cleveland franchise, received a late-night phone call from Marshall shortly after the draft. “We just made a great trade,” Marshall said. What trade? Modell asked.
Modell had not been informed. His coach had made the deal without his knowledge. Bobby Mitchell found out the same way Art Modell did—after it had already been completed. He had spent four seasons in Cleveland learning the game from Paul Brown, playing alongside Jim Brown, becoming one of the most versatile offensive weapons in professional football.
He was 26 years old, in his prime. In his four seasons with the Browns, he averaged 5. 3 yards per carry. He had every reason to believe he would spend the rest of his career in Cleveland.
Instead, Paul Brown called him into his office and told him he had been traded to Washington—the same Washington that had openly maintained an all-white roster for 25 years, the same city where pro-segregation protesters from the American Nazi movement had gathered outside the stadium in 1961 while civil rights activists rallied. The same owner who had publicly and without apology said he did not want players who looked like Bobby Mitchell. Mitchell had not asked to be traded. He had done nothing to deserve being sent somewhere against his will.
The federal government, Paul Brown, and the circumstances of American history in 1961 were using him to solve a problem that George Preston Marshall had created. He packed his bags. He later described the feeling in simple, precise words: “You’re performing in front of a group of people and you’re not sure whether they want you. ” He added, “So, I had a lot of conflicting emotions.
” He was not wrong to feel that way. On September 30, 1962, Bobby Mitchell played his first home game as a member of the Washington Redskins. There is another side to the deal that brought him to Washington. Ernie Davis, the player Marshall drafted first overall and then traded away for Mitchell, never played a single professional game.
Days after winning the Heisman, Davis was diagnosed with leukemia. He died on May 18, 1963, at age 23, before ever playing professionally. The Cleveland Browns, who acquired a Heisman winner in exchange for Bobby Mitchell, received a player who would never play for them. The Washington Redskins, owned by a man who fought integration with everything he had, received a future Hall of Famer.
Coach Bill McPeak moved Mitchell from halfback to flanker, a position that used his speed and pass-catching skill. The opponent on September 30 was the St. Louis Cardinals. Mitchell caught seven passes for 147 yards and scored two touchdowns.
Washington won 24–14. After the game, many people claimed credit for putting him there. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, a civil rights leader, told him, “I’m the reason you’re here playing in Washington. ” Kennedy and his brother Robert told him the same thing at the White House.
Mitchell said years later that he had been at the White House and both John and Robert Kennedy told him they were the reason he was there. Mitchell’s reaction was exactly what you would expect from a man who walked into hostile territory and thrived there: “Anyway, it’s funny, everybody. Everybody said they were the reason I was here. ” He himself was the reason he stayed.
George Preston Marshall died in his sleep on August 9, 1969, at age 72. He had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1963, shortly after his Hall of Fame induction, and spent his final years legally unable to manage his own affairs. He never fully accepted what happened to his team. He never publicly acknowledged that integration had made the Redskins better.
He lived long enough to watch Bobby Mitchell make four Pro Bowls with Washington, break franchise receiving records, and become exactly the kind of player his policies were designed to exclude. His funeral was held at the Washington National Cathedral. Bobby Mitchell attended. In his will, Marshall included a clause stating that the foundation bearing his name, which managed the charitable funds from his estate, must not contribute to any cause supporting racial integration in professional sports.
That clause was later challenged and overturned. He spent his entire adult life trying to keep certain people out of his world. He lost. Bobby Mitchell played seven seasons for Washington.
He finished his career with 521 receptions for 7,954 receiving yards, added 2,735 rushing yards, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983. He was introduced in Canton by Edward Bennett Williams, the president of the Washington franchise—not anyone from the Kennedy administration, not Stewart Udall, not the federal government that had made his arrival possible. He then spent 41 years working for Washington as a scout, personnel director, and assistant general manager. The man sent to a team that did not want him stayed for half a century.
He made the team his own. In June 2020, 58 years after Mitchell’s first home game as a Washington Redskin, Events DC removed George Preston Marshall’s statue from outside RFK Stadium on Juneteenth. That same week, the team retired Mitchell’s number 49—the first number retired in franchise history—and renamed the lower stands of FedEx Field in his honor. The name previously there was Marshall’s.
Bobby Mitchell died on April 5, 2020, eight weeks before the statue came down. He did not live to see his name replace Marshall’s on the stadium wall. But he had already replaced it in every way that mattered—on the field, in the record books, and in the memory of the city that once told him he was not welcome. Years before his death, he said he wanted to be remembered not just as a player of historical significance, but as a great player.
He was both.