The Daily History Chronicle

In August 1920, seven men meeting inside a Canton, Ohio car dealership built the framework for what became the National Football League, and within that same inaugural season, Fritz Pollard became one of its first Black players and, a year later, its first Black head coach. Owners then quietly excluded Black players from the league for twelve years, without ever writing the ban into any rule, a decision that left Pollard's job unmatched for sixty-eight years before another Black coach got the chance. This episode traces the improvised birth of America's most profitable sports league and the unwritten door that closed almost as fast as it opened.