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.
