Something About Race And Sports -Again-The Frederick Douglass Pollard Story

Something About Race And Sports -Again-The Frederick Douglass Pollard Story

By Si Lannon

A link to a NPR Only A Game show hosted by Bill Littlefield report on an unjustly mostly unknown early black football player, Frederick Douglass Powell   

http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/01/12/fritz-pollard-football 

Readers who are familiar with what this site normally posts stuff about politics, social commentary, cultural niches know that over the past several years under the aegis of the previous site manager sports have been well under the radar. That as a result of that said past site manager’s ill-winded attempt to reach a younger and different audience by making his own personal commentary on the college football scene which he loved before the playoff system came into play and before Alabama had become the dominant college team in the land. Well you reap what you sow which was not much. Not much since as he used for his reasons for not allowing sports commentary on this site there are a billion sports sites gabbing all the time 24/7/365 about the stuff. It took me practically a civil war to do a little fluff slice of life piece on an amateur golf tournament at my golf club involving me friends and fellow players.       

Under the new site manager Greg Green sports is still not a big time subject for much the same reasoning as before but apparently something got Greg’s wind up and based on my previous couple of amateur golf articles I have become the “residence” sports commentator on those infrequent occasions when something comes up that deserves some play here.

Greg told me he was listening to a NPR show this weekend morning the erudite sport commentator Bill Littlefield’s Only A Game which featured a report about a little known but should be well-known black football player from the very early days of the game, Frederick Douglass Powell. The given name alone telling you this is no ordinary guy. This was the time of the early professional football leagues when like in baseball and virtually every other major sport blacks were persona non grata and that ain’t no lie. No lie as the story once again unfolds that a black man could not be accepted in social white society. This story is from a time when another great black football player was making a name for himself in another field, music, Paul Robeson, who faced plenty of the same racial animosities. Robeson a name well known to us. Now way too late we know another unsung, mostly, hero of the black liberation struggle who proudly bears the given name of a great black abolitionist when that was a hell of a thing to be back in ante bellum times. Maybe today too.