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The Migration of African-Americans tothe Canadian Football League Duringthe 1950s: An Escape from Racism?Neil Longley , Todd Crosset & Steve JeffersonPublished online: 30 Jul 2008.

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The Migration of African-Americansto the Canadian Football LeagueDuring the 1950s: An Escape fromRacism?Neil Longley, Todd Crosset and Steve Jefferson

It is the argument of this paper that the literature on mid-century racial discriminationin sport is incomplete in that it ignores the experiences of a small, but relatively

significant, group of African-American football players who actually chose to leave theirown country – and correspondingly leave the racially-charged environment of mid-

twentieth-century USA – to head north to play professional football in the CanadianFootball League (CFL). Beginning in 1946, a steady flow of African-Americans began to

migrate to the CFL which, at the time, was a legitimate competitor league to the NFL.This paper attempts to test a perception seemingly held by some that, by moving toCanada, African-American football players were able to escape the racial injustices they

often suffered in the US. This view appears to have its roots in the notion that Canada isa ‘gentler’, more tolerant society, without the divisive socio-political history that

characterizes much of the race relations in the US. This paper tests these notions using avariety of empirical approaches. The results indicate that, while African-Americans were

better represented in the CFL relative to the NFL, African-Americans still faced somelevel of entry discrimination in the CFL. In particular, African-American players in the

CFL outperformed their white counterparts on numerous performance dimensions,indicating the overall talent level in the CFL could have been further improved by

employing an even greater number of African-Americans. Additionally, the paper findsthat those CFL teams that employed the highest percentage of African-Americans werethose teams that had the most on-field success. Finally, the paper analyses prices of player

trading cards from that era, and finds that cards of African-Americans wereundervalued, relative to white CFL players of equal talent.

Neil Longley, Todd Crosset and Steve Jefferson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Correspondence to: nlongley@sportmgt.umass.edu

The International Journal of the History of SportVol. 25, No. 10, September 2008, 1374–1397

ISSN 0952-3367 (print)/ISSN 1743-9035 (online) � 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09523360802212339

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Introduction

Racial discrimination in American sports has been extensively documented andanalysed by academics in a variety of disciplines, and a vast, multi-dimensional, body

of literature now exists on the subject.This paper focuses on a somewhat narrow aspect of this discourse on discri-

mination, and examines the notion of ‘quitting America’ as a possible response todiscrimination. [1] Quitting America is often a sub-theme of historical biographies on

African-American athletes. Turn-of-the-century athletes such as Jack Johnson, JimmyWinkfield, Marshall Taylor and Moses Fleetwood Walker either quit or advocatedquitting America. These biographies speak to the racial injustice of America, and by

contrast, suggest the liberty that African-Americans could find elsewhere.However, in the major team sports such as football, basketball and baseball,

African-American athletes have generally never had the opportunity to take theircareers outside of America, largely because of the absence of professional leagues in

other countries. These sports all originated in America, and their play at the majorprofessional level has historically been restricted to America. Even now, with the

existence of professional basketball leagues in Europe and professional baseballleagues in Asia, the representation of American players in these leagues is relatively

small, and tends to be players not capable of playing in the major US leagues. [2]There is, however, an important historical exception to these generalizations. During

the mid-twentieth century, African-American football players had the opportunity to

‘quit’ America and ply their trade in a relatively comparable professional league inCanada. Beginning in 1946, a steady, albeit relatively small, flow of African-Americans

began to migrate to the Canadian Football League (CFL). [3] For some of these players,the decision to move north was simply a business or career decision – at the time, and

unlike today, the CFL was a legitimate competitor to the NFL in the labour market, andit was not uncommon for the CFL to sign NFL-calibre players. For other African-

Americans who went north, the move represented a hope that life would be better inCanada, and that opportunities would exist that were not possible in the US.

In this sense, Canada and the CFL have often been viewed in idyllic terms when it

comes to their treatment of African-American football players. There is a perceptionheld by some that, by migrating north to Canada, African-American football players

were able to escape the racial injustices they often suffered in the US. This viewappears to have its roots in the notion that Canada is a ‘gentler’, more tolerant

society, without the divisive socio-political history that characterizes much of the racerelations in the US.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, scholars have paid almost no attention to theexperiences of this group of African-American athletes who actually chose to leave

their homeland – and correspondingly leave the racially-charged environment of themid-twentieth-century USA – to ply their trades in a foreign country. It is ourintention to begin to fill this void in the literature and to more systematically address

the crucial questions that arise – was Canada and the CFL truly a more hospitable

African-Americans in the CFL in the 1950s 1375

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environment for African-American football players, or are such notions more myththan fact?

While there were certainly some exceptions, the 1950s generally predate anywidespread concern for racial justice by whites in US society. Serious efforts to

integrate US institutions were nascent at best. For these reasons, the 1950s givescholars a relatively clean period to explore the CFL as an alternative to the NFL for

African-American football players.

Background: The CFL and African-American Football Players

The CFL

Professional football in Canada has roots that go back to the late nineteenth century.

The game evolved out of the sport of rugby, but became a distinct game with theadoption of the forward pass in the 1920s. The game of Canadian football is very

similar to American football. There are some rule differences – for example,Canadian football has 12 players per team on the field instead of 11, has three ‘downs’

instead of four and plays on a field that is ten yards longer and 12 yards wider – butfundamentally the two games are the same, meaning that US players do not generally

face prohibitive adjustments when they move north.In its early days, the game was played at the amateur level, but it started to become

‘professionalized’ during the 1930s. At about the same time, the first US players

started arriving in the CFL. Prior to that point, teams in western Canada, where thepopulation base was smaller, were at a distinct competitive disadvantage compared to

their counterparts in eastern Canada, who had the benefit of a much larger talentpool to draw from. In 1935, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, a team from western

Canada, attempted to remedy this competitive imbalance by employing nine USplayers on their roster. With these players, Winnipeg won the Grey Cup that year –

the first ever Grey Cup victory by a team from western Canada. With the success ofWinnipeg, other teams also began to recruit from the US, and concern developed thatUS players would completely take over the Canadian game. These concerns prompted

‘import’ restrictions on US players – by 1946, for example, teams were prohibitedfrom carrying more than five imports – i.e. Americans – on their roster.

As the Second World War ended, the CFL had stabilized at eight teams – four inthe west and four in the east. These eight franchises, plus an additional team that was

added in 1954, have provided the foundation for the league right up to the present.While today’s CFL occupies very much of a second-tier status to the NFL, such was

not the case during the CFL’s ‘glory’ days of the 1950s. [4] It was during that era thatsalaries in the CFL were generally comparable to NFL salaries – college football still

dominated professional football in the US, and the NFL had not yet become thedominating commercial force that it is today.

This relative salary parity meant that CFL teams could often compete for NFL-

calibre players. For example, Frank Tripuca, a star with New York in the NFL in the

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early 1950s, jumped to Saskatchewan of the CFL for a salary that was more than doublethe $12,000 per year he was making in New York. [5] The CFL also signed players

directly out of college – for example, Billy Vessels, the 1952 Heisman Trophy winnerand first-round NFL draft pick, spurned an offer from the Baltimore Colts to sign with

Edmonton of the CFL. During the 1950s, the CFL was the NFL’s only competitorleague – the All American Football Conference (AAFC) had folded after the 1949

season and the American Football League (AFL) would not begin play until 1960.

African-Americans in the CFL

The CFL colour barrier was officially broken in 1946, when the Montreal Alouettes

signed Herb Trawick and Virgil Wagner. [6] The Alouettes were a CFL expansionteam in 1946, and their American general manager, Lew Hayman, no doubt used the

signings as a means to gain an immediate competitive advantage over the existingteams in the league. These expectations were fulfilled as the Alouettes, led by Trawick

and Wagner, won the 1949 Grey Cup in only their fourth year of existence.Hayman’s decision to sign Trawick and Wagner was apparently influenced by the

positive reception that Jackie Robinson received while playing in Montreal. Robinsonplayed the 1946 season for the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top farm

club, before making his historic major league debut with the Dodgers in 1947.Hayman felt that Montreal, which at the time was Canada’s most cosmopolitan anddiverse city, was ready for an African-American football player. [7]

As basic microeconomic theory would predict, other CFL teams quickly followedMontreal’s lead – if teams did not begin to integrate, they risked putting themselves

at a competitive disadvantage on the field. Each team had their ‘pioneer’ African-American players. In 1948, Calgary signed Woody Strode who, along with Kenny

Washington, had broken the NFL colour barrier in 1946 when they played for the LosAngeles Rams. [8] One year later, Calgary also signed Ezzert ‘Sugarfoot’ Anderson.

Anderson went on to have a nine-year career with Calgary.Calgary also brought Johnny Bright to the CFL. Bright – a first-round NFL draft

pick of the Philadelphia Eagles – played one season in Calgary, and then went on to

an illustrious career with the Edmonton Eskimos. In Edmonton, Bright joined RollieMiles to lead the Eskimos to three successive Grey Cup triumphs in the mid-1950s.

Bright was already famous in the US for being the victim of one of the worstincidents of racist behaviour ever seen in US sports. In 1950, Bright, who was a star

running back at Drake University in Iowa, travelled with his team to Stillwater,Oklahoma to play Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State). What was significant

was that Bright would be the first African-American college football player ever toplay a game in the state of Oklahoma. In the days leading up to the game, some

Oklahoma A&M players threatened Bright with physical harm. On the first play ofthe game, an Oklahoma A& M defender hit Bright with a forearm to the head,breaking Bright’s jaw. The incident was captured by a Life magazine photographer,

who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph.

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Bright was ultimately drafted in the first round of the 1951 NFL draft by thePhiladelphia Eagles, but elected to sign with Calgary of the CFL. He played one year

for Calgary, and then was traded to Edmonton for the 1954 season, where he went onto become the CFL’s all-time leading rusher at the time of his retirement. Had Bright

signed with Philadelphia, he would have become the first African-American playerever to play for the Eagles.

Winnipeg had Tom Casey from 1950–55, and he was joined in 1955 by Leo Lewis,who starred for nine years as a running back. Hamilton signed Bernie Custis in the

early 1950s – in 1953, Custis became the first African-American to ever playquarterback in the CFL. In Toronto, both Ulysses Curtis and Bill Bass were signed in1950. One team – the Saskatchewan Roughriders – was slow to integrate. One

African-American player, Gabe Paterson, appeared for the team during the 1948season, but it was almost ten years before another African-American player would

play regularly in Saskatchewan. [9]

A Framework for Analysis

Perspectives on Canadians and Race

A typical American view of race and Canadian football is expressed by Harrison:

Canada has historically been a place where African-Americans have felt morecomfortable and welcomed. Whether in regards to freedom from slavery or inregards to better and increased playing opportunities on the field; Canada hasalways been perceived as a place where African-Americans can turn to for freedom,opportunities, and success (i.e., Tuskegee Airmen instructor, Charles Drew atMcGill University’s Medical School and Jackie Robinson in the Minor Leagues inMontreal). . . . . [I]s there something different about the organizations of sport andsociety that would enable African-Americans to express their talents on Canadianterritory? [10]

Much of the Canadian social-historical sport literature does not challenge these

assumptions. Discussion of white supremacy and racism is often either completelyabsent (e.g. Kidd), [11] or is presented only in contrast to the United States to

highlight the positive aspects of Canadian culture (Howell). [12] For example,Humber’s book on African-Canadian athletes is entitled ‘A Sporting Chance’, and of

mid-century Canadian football he writes: ‘The Canadian Football League survivedthe post-war popularity of the National Football League by providing opportunities

for minorities to assume leadership positions. American Black George Reed, a greatrunning back with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the 1960’s played an important

role as a player representative and union organizer.’ [13]This type of framing of Canadian sport, and Canadian football in particular, fits

with a popular notion of Canada as a place of refuge for African-Americans.

Beginning with the American Revolution, Canada has provided Africans with an

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alternative to the American slave system. The British provided safe and free passage toover 3,000 escaped slaves and freedmen from New York to Nova Scotia at the end of

the American Revolution in 1780.After the War of 1812, the British again offered freedom to escaped slaves fighting

on behalf of the English. About 2,000 African-Americans crossed the border. In 1829,after three days of riots in Cincinnati, Canada offered resettlement into a community

they called Wilberforce. US slaves and free blacks began to call Canada the ‘PromisedLand’, especially after slavery was banned in 1834 throughout the British colonies. By

the mid-nineteenth century, Canada had about 40 black settlements. [14] EveryAmerican schoolchild is probably aware that the underground railroad led to theCanadian border, particularly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Historians

estimate that 30,000 African-Americans emigrated to Canada in the years leading upto the Civil War.

However, what is often not emphasized in this framing of Canadian history is that,by and large, these migrations were temporary. Many of the Africans seeking refugee

in Canada after the American Revolution opted to return to Africa with the British-sponsored Sierra Leone Company. It is estimated that the 30 years of black migration

to Canada prior to the Civil War was reversed in less than a decade, as 30,000 black‘Canadians’ left during and after the Civil War to fight with the Union Army and be

reunited with their families. Few, if any, of the black American immigrantcommunities in Canada, like Wilberforce, succeeded.

The next large migration of black Americans to Canada came after the First World

War. Chaffing under Jim Crow and systemic racial intolerance, black Oklahomafarmers, encouraged by the Canadian government’s promotion efforts to settle the

western Canadian prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, moved theiroperations north to Canada. When it became apparent that the immigrants from

Oklahoma were not of European descent, protests and discontent quickly aroseamong the public. The Canadian government responded by blocking blacks from

crossing the border – government officials even travelled to Oklahoma in an attemptto discourage, at the source, any further black farmers from making the treknorth. [15]

By the 1950s, Canada was a very homogeneous society, with the great majority ofits residents being of European descent. Blacks, or any other persons of colour,

comprised an extremely small percentage of the population – according to the 1951Canadian census, over 97 per cent of Canadians identified themselves as being of

European origin, with the next largest group being those of Asian origin, whocomprised about one per cent of the population. And while Canada does not share

the long history of state-supported slavery with the US, Canada’s mid-centuryimmigration and segregation policies were not unlike that of the United States. [16]

This counter-notion that Canada was/is far from open on matters of race is furthersupported by some of the literature on Canada’s primary spectator sport, ice hockey.A significant body of literature exists that points to the struggles faced by African-

Canadian hockey players. [17] Furthermore, ethnicity has also been shown to be an

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issue in Canadian sport, with considerable evidence to suggest that French-Canadianshave been the victims of discrimination in the NHL. [18]

Thus the cumulative evidence on the discriminatory tendencies of Canadians ismixed and often contradictory – on one hand, there is the somewhat idyllic view of

Canada as a country largely free of such problems, while on the other hand there isconsiderable evidence that race and ethnicity issues have been significant factors in

hockey. These mixed findings make it difficult to have conclusive and decisive apriori expectations about what the experiences may have been of those African-

American football players who migrated to Canada in the 1950s, and suggest the needfor empirical investigation.

An Economic Framework: Sources of Discrimination

An additional framework in which to analyse the experiences of African-Americans inthe CFL is to employ Becker’s [19] seminal work on the economics of discrimination.

Becker identifies three possible sources of labour market discrimination – employers,co-workers and customers. With the former, it is the employer himself/herself who

holds the discriminatory preferences towards a certain group, whereas with the lattertwo it is the firm’s employees and customers, respectively, who hold the

discriminatory views, with the employer simply being forced to respond to theseviews for fear of alienating the firm’s other employees or its customers.

In the context of this paper, Becker’s categorizations can provide insight into the

type and extent of discrimination that African-Americans may have been expected tofind in the CFL, relative to their experiences in the US. In this regard, a key question

is this: how did the composition of these three groups – customers, co-workers, andemployers – differ in Canada relative to the US, and to what extent would these

differences have resulted in Canada providing a more favourable playingenvironment for African-Americans?

With the customer group, the differences are most clear – the fans of the CFL werepredominantly white Canadians, while fans of the NFL were predominantly whiteAmericans. To what extent, then, could these two groups of fans be expected to have

different attitudes towards African-Americans? Perhaps most importantly, thehistories of the two countries with respect to racial issues are very different. The

US legacy of slavery, systemic racial terror and government-supported segregationundoubtedly impacted the beliefs and values of white Americans in ways not

generally seen in Canada, and could be hypothesized to lead to African-Americansexperiencing more racist behaviour in the US compared to Canada. In other words,

white Canadians could be expected to exhibit less racial hostility towards African-American players on their favourite team, compared to those fans in the US.

However, this is certainly not meant to imply that one would expect African-American players to be free of racism in Canada. White supremacy is pervasive acrosscountries, cultures and races, and one would not expect Canada to be any exception.

Further, during the 1950s, Canada was a very homogeneous, white European society,

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and could not generally be considered either multicultural or multiracial. To theextent that racism is based, in part, on a fear of ‘differences’, Canada during the 1950s

and 1960s would seem to have been ripe for racist behaviour. The very fact thatAfrican-American players in Canada were so identifiably different from the

population as a whole made them ‘stand-out’, and no doubt made them potentialtargets of discriminatory behaviour. In fact, in some Canadian cities, particularly

those in the Prairie provinces, there were almost no other blacks residing in the cityother than the African-American football players.

Turning to co-worker discrimination, for African-Americans playing in Canadaduring the 1950s, their ‘co-workers’, i.e. teammates, included two groups: whiteCanadians and white US players. A league rule enacted in 1946 limited teams to only

five imports on their roster at any one time; this number was subsequently increasedto seven in 1950. This meant that most of the teammates of African-American players

during this era were actually Canadian. Almost invariably, and unlike today, theseCanadian players were white, reflecting Canada’s homogeneous population at the

time. The issues here, then, are relatively the same as they were for fan discrimination:in particular, to what extent do white Canadians – in this case football players and

not fans – hold prejudicial views against African-Americans? As was hypothesized inthe previous section, while there may be reason to believe that African-Americans

would still face some level of racist behaviour from white Canadian players, this may,in general, be less than what they would have faced from white American teammatesif they had played in the NFL.

This leads to the next complicating issue – some of the teammates of African-American players in Canada were, in fact, white Americans from the US. Thus, to the

extent that African-American players would face discriminatory treatment fromwhite teammates if they played in the NFL, they would presumably also face such

treatment from their white US teammates in the CFL. The only situation where thiswould not be the case is if the white US players in the CFL had fundamentally

different racial views than the white US players in the NFL, something for whichthere is no a priori reason to believe.

While it was true that the African-American player in Canada had many fewer

white US teammates than did the African-American player in the NFL, these whiteUS players in the CFL were generally ‘star’ players and often held considerable

influence and power beyond their numbers.A similar issue arises when one considers the possibility of employer discrimina-

tion. While CFL teams were generally owned by Canadians – either as community-owned entities, or by private businesspeople – the coaching staffs of these teams were

almost always white Americans. In fact, some CFL head coaches came to the leagueafter having been head coaches in the NFL. For example, Jim Trimble coached

Hamilton during the late 1950s after having been a successful NFL head coach withthe Philadelphia Eagles. Steve Owen, who coached the New York Giants for manyyears, coached Saskatchewan during the early 1960s. Other times, the moves were in

the opposite direction. Darrell Royal, who later went on to become one of the greatest

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head coaches in US college football history with the University of Texas Longhorns,was Edmonton’s head coach during the early 1950s. [20] Bud Grant, the highly

successful coach of the Minnesota Vikings during the 1960s and 70s, was previouslythe long-time head coach in Winnipeg.

What this means is that, while African-American players who came to Canada mayhave been distancing themselves from white US fans, they were certainly not

distancing themselves from white US coaches. To a lesser extent, they were notcompletely distancing themselves from white US teammates. In this regard, then, one

might expect some of the barriers African-Americans faced in the NFL to also bepresent in the CFL.

Empirical Evidence

While the preceding discussion provides a useful context in which to frame the issue,the question as to the existence and extent of discrimination against African-

Americans can ultimately only be answered through empirical investigation. Thissection employs both qualitative and quantitative means to attempt to provide

insights into the issue.

Qualitative Evidence

The personal accounts of players who played during that era are an important

source of information. However, these first-person accounts, while certainlydesirable, are increasingly difficult to obtain. With the passage of time, many

players from that era are now deceased, and of those who do remain most are nowquite elderly. Furthermore, former players are scattered across the continent, often

making it extremely difficult to track their whereabouts. These factors essentiallyrender impossible any systematic qualitative analysis. In light of this constraint, this

subsection uses publicly available sources to uncover a series of relevant commentsand observations of players from that era. [21] While admittedly anecdotal innature, these comments help to provide the beginnings of at least some depth of

understanding of the issue. The qualitative investigation is divided into two parts:the off-field experiences of African-Americans in Canada, i.e. their experiences in

their world outside football and in the broader community; and their football-related experiences, particularly as they relate to employer practices in the league

and to the dynamics of the interactions of African-Americans with their teammatesand coaches.

Off-field Experiences in the Broader Community

Perhaps the best place to begin the discussion is with George Reed, an African-American running back who played from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s with

Saskatchewan. Reed is noteworthy for being vocal about the racism he faced in

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Canada. He rejected the idyllic view that Canadians often have of themselves, andnoted that ‘a lot people in Canada kind of shut their eyes and think discrimination

doesn’t exist’. [22] Reed’s views on racism are particularly influential because he wasnot just any ordinary player – a 2006 survey by the Canadian TV network TSN voted

Reed as the second greatest player in the entire history of Canadian football (afterwhite American Doug Flutie). [23]

In a 1967 interview with the Toronto Telegram newspaper, Reed spoke out aboutthe off-field problems he faced:

There is flagrant discrimination against Negroes in Regina. I have come face-to-facewith more racial problems in my five years in Regina than I ever had living in asuburb of Seattle. In the beginning I couldn’t find anyone who would rent me anapartment. . . . My five-year-old son, who never knew what discrimination was, issuddenly called names he doesn’t understand. My wife has become so defensivethat when she leaves the house she’s like a coiled Cobra that’s ready to strike atanybody. Regina is like living in the heart of Alabama as far as I’m concerned. [24]

The Telegram article was seeking Reed’s reaction to comments made earlier that year

by Ted Watkins. Watkins, who had played for the Ottawa Rough Riders since 1963,had told a CBC-TV interview that ‘I have had many problems in Ottawa which made

me feel like I was in Mississippi somewhere.’Years later, Reed said he wouldn’t retract a word, and didn’t regret his comments,

even though they drew a strong backlash at the time.

The Regina media were all over me. Reginans who thought their city was just finewere outraged that I had said otherwise. Molson [the major Canadian brewer thatwas his off-season employer] demoted me and almost fired me. . . . I have neversaid I hate Canada. I’ve never said I dislike Canada. What I have said is, don’t saythose problems don’t exist. [25]

As high-profile athletes, many African-American players often faced an uncertain andunpredictable social world outside of football. Reed once commented:

There would be occasions when racial slurs were said on the field or sometimeseven from the stands. . . . What bothered me more than anything was dealing withsituations away from the job. On Sunday afternoons and at practice I knew where Iwas supposed to be, what my responsibilities were, how I was expected to actbefore, during and after the game or the practice. The rest of the time, though, Ididn’t know where I fit in or what I was supposed to do. Like, you’re not allowed togo and have a beer in this spot. Okay, I understand; am I allowed to go and sayhello to this person or not? I felt sometimes that I could unwittingly get intotrouble just for being in the wrong place or talking to the wrong person. [26]

Reed, like many other African-American players in the CFL noticed a doublestandard: African-American football players were treated differently from other

blacks. He elaborates:

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Another thing that was really hard to take after I became well-known . . . is howpeople started to change towards me. They didn’t change towards the problem,they changed towards me. It actually became harder for me after I was accepted formembership at the Wascana Country Club, after I was welcomed into this placeand that place, but another black person, whether he was an athlete or not, was notaccorded the same privilege. . . . If I wasn’t George Reed, football player, most ofthe people who glad-hand and welcome me wouldn’t give me the time of day. [27]

Calgary’s Ezzert ‘Sugarfoot’ Anderson voiced comments similar to Reed regarding the

double standards that often existed in Canada.

Our country club here in Calgary didn’t allow Jewish people or black people, butthey said Woody [Strode] and myself could come. That kind of struck me as a littleodd and I never did go. If I hadn’t been a Stampeder, they wouldn’t have let me in,so I just didn’t go up. Coming from Arkansas, nothing that happened to me inCalgary was anything to write home about. [28]

These comments of Reed and Anderson regarding invitations to join country clubsraise a further issue. In cities such as Regina and Calgary, where there were almost no

other blacks other than the African-American football players, and where footballplayers were revered in these small cities, the potential ‘costs’ of being black in

Canada could be (at least partially) mitigated by the potential benefits of ‘tokenism’and athletic privilege. [29]

Racism was sometimes very overt. On a road trip to Winnipeg, Calgary coach Les

Lear (one of the few Canadian coaches in the league since the Second World War)threatened to pull his entire team out of a hotel when he was told that Anderson and

Woody Strode, Calgary’s other African-American player at the time, couldn’t stay atthe hotel. Winnipeg coach George Trafton reportedly acted similarly in an incident

involving Tom Casey. [30]There were also complaints from some African-American players about

discrimination in securing off-field jobs. Willie Fleming, a star running back forBritish Columbia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, stated in 1967 that ‘the Negro is ahero on the field, and a bum off it, when it comes to getting work’. [31] Winnipeg’s

Leo Lewis, who played during the same era as Fleming, said ‘In all my years inWinnipeg I was never offered a job that was worthwhile. It would have been different

if I were white.’ [32]La Verne Barnes, whose husband Emery Barnes played for the BC Lions during the

1960s, wrote a book [33] that could be viewed as a strong indictment of the way inwhich African-American football players were treated in Canada. Barnes claimed that

not only were African-American players of that era often lured to Canada withoutrealizing how few blacks actually lived in Canada, but that they were frequent targets

of racist discrimination once they arrived. According to Barnes,

racism in the CFL is very real. All kinds of injustices and little humiliations happento black ball players. The media know it, the management knows it, and the ball

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players themselves are keenly aware of it. But it is something that isn’t talked about.In public. It is very unchic to rap about racism in the CFL out loud. About the wayblack ball players are traded and put on waivers for socializing with whitegirls. . . . About the cities of Vancouver, Regina, and Winnipeg that are well-knownin the league as being less likely to have many black ball players. [34]

Conversely, however, some African-Americans were adamant that conditions forblacks were much better in Canada than the US. George Dixon, who played with

Montreal from 1959 to 1965, felt that he enjoyed a lifestyle in Canada that was notavailable in the US. He commented in 1967: ‘I go to the best country clubs . . . theplushest restaurants, and I live in a fine neighborhood. . . . My wife and I have the

kind of social relationships we couldn’t have in Connecticut.’ [35]Similar sentiments were expressed by Edmonton star Johnny Bright. While he

endured many racist incidents in Canada, these incidents were often relatively covert,as opposed to the more overt racism of the Deep South. In this regard, Bright stated:

‘I never felt in the northern states or in Canada that my life was in danger, but thatwasn’t the case down south. There they’d kill you and throw your body in the swamp

for being a different color.’ [36]There were also considerable differences across teams in attitudes towards African-

Americans. For example, Edmonton and Montreal were considered the mostwelcoming. [37] At the other end of the spectrum was Regina, home of theSaskatchewan Roughriders. Saskatchewan was the slowest team to integrate African-

American players and, by many accounts, offered a climate that was less thanhospitable for African-Americans. [38]

Football-related Experiences

A persistent theme of African-American players from that era was the view that CFL

teams had unofficial quotas limiting the number of African-American players perteam. Ralph Goldston, who played for Hamiltion in the 1950s and was later anassistant coach for Montreal, said in a 1967 interview ‘some cities, some coaches are

afraid to play too many Negros’. [39] Emery Barnes of BC noted that ‘it looks strangewhen players change from year to year, but the number of non-whites remains

constant’. [40] Such a notion was even indirectly supported from the managementside, when Ottawa general manager Red O’Quinn once noted ‘you might have a

clique develop, say, if you have more than five coloured players’. [41]Beyond these unofficial quotas, the attitudes of team management and coaches also

often manifested themselves much more directly and overtly. Saskatchewan’s firstAfrican-American player was Gabe Patterson in 1947 and 1948. He had a brief, and

apparently unhappy and lonely, stay with Saskatchewan, and Saskatchewan wouldnot employ another African-American for almost ten years. There were rumours thatPatterson met hostility from the southern US players on the team and from the

team’s coach, Alabama native Fred Grant. There were also rumours that, at the team’s

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wind-up party following the 1948 season, Grant walked out of the room when he sawPatterson walk in. [42] Herb Trawick, discussed earlier as the first African-American

to play in the CFL, apparently met with similar hostility when Douglas Walker tookover the Montreal coaching duties in 1952. Walker, who was a southerner, and a

long-time coach at Wake Forest University in North Carolina before coming toMontreal, was reported to have been contemptuous towards Trawick. [43]

LaVerne Barnes puts it this way with regard to the American influence on the CFL:

When people talk about the ‘Canadian’ game, they often fail to talk about the factthat the game is completely imported. And they fail to mention many of thecultural and racist concepts that are imported . . . with it into Canada. Many whiteUS coaches and white US GMs project their personal prejudiced views and valuesinto the various football communities across Canada. [44]

Rollie Miles, who would later star for Edmonton, actually came to Canada to play

baseball in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1950. Kelly [45] contends that, while theSaskatchewan Roughriders were aware of Miles’s ability as a football player, they were

not interested in him because he was black. The Edmonton Eskimos, whosemanagement had a more tolerant attitude, soon discovered Miles and quickly signed

him to a contract.Miles was apparently outspoken about race issues, perhaps costing him the league’s

first-ever MVP award. By many accounts, Miles was the best player in Canada in

1953, but did not win the award because of racism. [46] The football reporters ofCanada, perhaps influenced by Miles’s outspoken views on race, voted his Edmonton

teammate Billy Vessels as the league’s MVP. Another of Bright’s teammates at thetime – a star Asian-Canadian player named Normie Kwong – later commented that

‘conditions in the country then weren’t conducive to a person of color winningawards’. [47]

Ron Atchison, a Canadian who played from 1952 to 1968 for Saskatchewan, recallsEdmonton’s on-field power, led by Bright and Miles, and, in the process, notesSaskatchewan’s lack of African-American players, and the racial stereotypes that often

prevailed:

They had Bright, Kwong, and Miles. They were the scourge of the league. That goesback to before the Riders had any black ballplayers. We were just starting to getblack men on our team. We were the last to do so. I remember trying to find outwhy there were no blacks on our team because we had had one black ballplayer herebefore my time. People said the women chased him so damn much the executivesaid they’d never have another one. [48]

African-American players also had to deal with teammates. When Leo Lewis came toWinnipeg in 1955, the beginning of a ten-year CFL career, there was only one otherblack player (Tom Casey) on the team. Lewis recalls: ‘‘There were some negative

experiences. I think any racial problems we had with Canadian ballplayers were

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brought about because of Americans from the southern states. I do believe that.Generally speaking Winnipeg was a good town. There wasn’t much racism that I

could see. Canada was a great place.’ [49]It was reported that Herb Trawick often faced hostility from his teammates – in

fact, one report claimed that Trawick actually faced more racial slurs from hisCanadian teammates than from his American teammates. [50]

Awkward situations would often develop when there were an odd number of African-American players on the team. In Ottawa during the mid-1960s, the team had only three

African-American players, so one of them – Bo Scott – roomed alone when the teamtravelled, despite the fact that there was one ‘leftover’ white player as well, who alsoroomed alone. Scott said: ‘Nobody ever asked me if I prefer to live alone.’ [51]

In Calgary during the mid-1960s, African-American Lovell Coleman claimed that‘there were . . . white players . . . who made sure black players didn’t hear about their

parties’. [52]. Also on that Calgary team was Eagle Day, a white US quarterback fromOle Miss, who, unlike his white teammates, was quite willing to express his views on

race. Day reportedly told a magazine writer of the day that he (Day) believedsegregation was the only successful racial policy. [53]

The experiences of Cookie Gilchrest, an all-pro running back in the AFL and theCFL, also challenged the notion that Canada was a racially tolerant place for African-

Americans. Gilchrest was an outspoken running back with a keen sense of justice. In1957, he led the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to a Grey Cup victory. Following the win,Gilchrest asked management for a $500 dollar bonus to pay rent for his new family.

Not only did the football star not get the bonus, but he was traded to Regina forbeing so bold as to request one. He later returned to Toronto with the Argonauts, but

after the 1961 season, as he puts it, he was ‘sold’ against his wishes to the fledglingBuffalo Bills. Years later, when he was elected to the CFL Hall of Fame he refused the

invitation because of what he claimed were the racist practices of league officials.Gilchrest’s experience with CFL ownership stands in contrast to his US experience.

As in Canada, Gilchrest enjoyed an All-Star career in the AFL, making the league’sAll-Star team from 1962 to 1965. In 1965 Gilchrest led a player boycott against thecity of New Orleans in response to the treatment the black players received from

white service workers at the AFL All Star Game. AFL owners supported Gilchrest andthe black players, and the 1965 All Star Game was moved to Houston.

Some Quantitative Tests

Given these observations from former players that indicate that race did matter in the

mid-century CFL, further empirical testing is warranted. In economics, a variety ofquantitative tests can be employed to test for the various types and forms of

discrimination. These tests rely on data, rather than personal reflection andobservation, to make assessments about the prevalence of discrimination.

However, historical quantitative research such as this can present particular

challenges, since the quantity and quality of data from eras past is not comparable to

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what exists today. For example, in the CFL – as with other professional leagues –detailed and complete salary data are not available for players from the 1950s and

1960s, making it impossible to test for the presence of salary discrimination. Playerperformance data – used to test for a variety of types of discrimination – were also

much more limited than they are today. The CFL did not even keep individual playerperformance data until into the 1950s, and even these data were limited in scope. In

fact, simply determining the makeup of team rosters and attempting to track thecomings and goings of players is a significant challenge.

Within the context of these data constraints, this section employs a variety ofempirical tests in the attempt to gain some insights into the extent and type ofdiscrimination that may have existed in the CFL during the 1950s and 1960s.

Overall Representation Compared to the NFL

As a first test, the overall representation of African-Americans in the CFL can be

compared with their representation in the NFL. While such a comparison doesn’tdirectly speak to whether African-Americans experienced any discriminatory

treatment in the CFL, it does provide insights into whether they were treateddifferently in Canada compared to the US.

Starting with the US, in 1950, only 14 blacks were employed in the NFL – anaverage of about one per team in the 13-team league. Furthermore, they wereconcentrated on just a few teams – not surprisingly, some of the most successful

teams. Nine of the 14 African-Americans playing in the NFL in 1950 were on theplaying field for the championship game between the Browns and the Rams. [54]

These 14 African-Americans comprised only about 3 per cent of the players in theleague that year. Compare this to the CFL, where, by our research, there were about

seven African-Americans in the league in 1950, also an average of about one per team.However, because of the roster limitations on imports, African-Americans

represented about 13 per cent of the US players in the CFL, as opposed to theNFL’s comparable figure of 3 per cent.

By the late 1950s, approximately 40 African-Americans were playing in the NFL

annually, [55] representing about 10 per cent of the league’s players. In contrast, ourresearch reveals that the CFL averaged about 14 African-Americans per year, or about

25 per cent of the slots allocated to Americans. Even as late as 1967, African-Americans occupied only about 20 per cent of the roster spots in the NFL, compared

with about 35 per cent of the spots allocated to US players in the CFL. [56]

Entry Discrimination

Economists define entry discrimination in sport as a situation where the non-preferred group of players is less likely to be hired, relative to counterparts ofequal talent in the preferred group, thus resulting in the non-preferred group

being ‘underrepresented’ in the workplace. Thus, to gain entry into the league, the

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non-preferred players must, on average, actually be superior performers to those inthe preferred group. How much superior the average non-preferred player must be

depends on the magnitude of the discrimination.Table 1 compares the average performance levels of African-American players with

white US players for the same three years examined above: 1953, 1959, and 1968. [57]Two performance measures are employed: whether the player was ultimately elected

to the CFL Hall of Fame, and the number of times a player was voted a divisional All-Star during his career.

The table shows that African-American players were consistently better performersthan their white US counterparts: African-Americans were more likely to be selectedas All-Stars, and (with the exception of the 1959 players) were much more likely to be

voted to the Hall of Fame. This implies that CFL teams failed to employ sufficientnumbers of African-Americans – in other words, by replacing some white Americans

with African-Americans, teams could have increased their overall talent level. Failingto do so implies that teams valued white US players over African-Americans for

reasons other than their on-field talent – presumably indicating some type of racialdiscrimination at work. [58]

Finally, if entry discrimination was, in fact, present, then those teams thatintegrated more quickly should have had a competitive advantage on the field. In this

regard, Table 2 shows, for the CFL’s West Division, each team’s winning percentageover the 1950–61 time period, along with the total number of All-Star selections fromthat team. Most importantly, these All-Star selections are sub-divided into African-

American and white US players.

Table 1 Average Performance Levels of African-American players and White US Players

in CFL, Selected Years

1954 1959 1968

White Black White Black White Black

Career All-Star selections per player 2.06 3.63 1.81 3.11 2.50 3.24Proportion voted to Hall of Fame 0.14 0.63 0.21 0.22 0.15 0.29N 49 8 52 9 60 21

Table 2 CFL West Division teams’ Winning Percentages and All-Star Selections, 1950–61

Win % All-Stars: Black All-Stars: White All Stars: Total

BC 29 2 (5.1%) 15 (7.6%) 17 (7.2%)Calgary 37 6 (15.4%) 33 (16.7%) 39 (16.5%)Edmonton 67 16 (41.0%) 49 (24.7%) 65 (27.4%)Saskatchewan 42 2 (5.1%) 47 (23.7%) 49 (20.7%)Winnipeg 68 13 (33.3%) 54 (27.3%) 67 (28.3%)

TOTAL 39 (100%) 198 (100%) 237 (100%)

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The table shows, not surprisingly, the teams with the most total All-Starselections – Winnipeg and Edmonton – had the highest win percentage during the

time period. However, these two teams were the only teams that captured a greaterproportion of the division’s African-American All-Stars (33.3 per cent and 41.0 per

cent) than of the white US All-Stars. Further, if one looks specifically at Edmontonand Saskatchewan, while both teams captured an almost equal proportion of the

white US All-Stars (24.7 per cent vs. 23.7 per cent), Edmonton captured a muchgreater proportion of the African-American All-Stars than did Saskatchewan (41.0

per cent vs. 5.1 per cent). This may lend empirical support to the notion discussedearlier that Edmonton was a more welcoming place for African-Americans than wasRegina. One could hypothesize that the slow rate at which Saskatchewan integrated

African-American players was at least partially responsible for its relatively poor on-field performance during the 1950s. [59]

Fan Discrimination and Player Card Prices

One source of data that has frequently been employed by economists to test for

customer/fan discrimination is to use player card prices. [60] The theory is that cardprices are a relatively pure measure of fan preferences towards players. If, holding

performance constant, players from the non-preferred group have, on average, lowercard prices, this may be a reflection of fan-based discrimination. Card prices, unlikefor example, a player’s salary, are impacted only by fan preferences, and not by the

preferences of team owners, coaches, GMs or teammates.In this regard, CFL player card prices are examined for three distinct seasons: 1954,

1959 and 1968. Card prices are taken from the 1998 Charlton Canadian Football CardPrice Guide, and these prices are then regressed on a series of independent variables

intended to reflect a player’s performance (HALL, STAR), position (QB, RB-RC),nationality (IMPORT) and race (AA).

The results of the regression are reported in Table 3. Interpretation of theindependent variables is as follows:

. HALL is a dummy variable equalling 1 if the player is a member of the CFL Hallof Fame, 0 otherwise;

. STAR is the number of times the player was a divisional all star during his career;

. QB is a dummy variable equalling 1 if the player was a quarterback, 0 otherwise;

. RB-RC is a dummy variable equalling 1 if the player was a running back orreceiver, 0 otherwise;

. IMPORT is a dummy variable equalling 1 if the player was an import (i.e.American), 0 otherwise;

. AA is a dummy variable equalling 1 if the player is African-American, 0otherwise;

All variables except AA are control variables.

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In terms of the rationales for including these variables, both HALL and STARattempt to measure the player’s career performance. These broad-based measures of

performance are necessary both because of the lack of detailed and/or reliableindividual statistical information from that era, and because they allow players from

different positions to be grouped together in a common measure of performance.Since one would expect that fans would prefer cards of players who were better

performers, one would expect that the coefficients on both HALL and STAR to bepositive. The above results confirm these expectations.

With respect to the variables QB and RB-RC, players who play the ‘glamorous’

high-profile positions such as running back, receiver and, especially, quarterbackshould be more visible to fans, and hence may, all else being equal, have higher card

prices. Thus the coefficients on both QB and RB-RC would also be expected to bepositive. With one exception (RB-RC in 1959), the results support these expectations,

although the statistical significance is much stronger for quarterbacks than forrunning backs/receivers.

The sign on IMPORT is a priori inconclusive, as it captures two opposing effects.To the extent that CFL fans prefer ‘home-grown’ Canadian-born players, thecoefficient on IMPORT should be negative. However, to the extent that the American

players in the CFL were, generally, superior performers relative to Canadian players,IMPORT may be picking-up performance factors not already captured by either

HALL or STAR. To the extent the latter is true, the sign on IMPORT would beexpected to be positive. In terms of the results, IMPORT has a positive coefficient in

1954 and 1959 (indicating American players have higher card prices, all else equal),but a negative coefficient in 1968. However, the coefficient is not significant in any of

the three years.Most importantly, however, is the variable AA. This variable is the primary focus

of the analysis, and captures the extent to which fans may be undervaluing the cardsof African-American players.

The results indicate that, for all three seasons examined, the coefficient on AA is

negative, indicating that, ceteris paribus, the card prices of African-American players

Table 3 Regression results: player card prices (t-statistics in parentheses)

Variable 1954 1959 1968

Constant 19.18 (5.37) 3.12 (5.01) 3.56 (10.61)HALL 36.71 (6.80) 4.13 (3.35) 4.76 (7.11)STAR 1.81 (2.25) 0.33 (1.73) 0.16 (1.73)QB 16.61 (3.07) 5.29 (4.32) 3.09 (4.63)RB-RC 8.87 (1.84) 70.18 (70.19) 0.56 (1.11)IMPORT 5.31 (1.36) 0.24 (0.33) 70.11 (70.27)AA 719.00 (72.83) 70.53 (70.45) 70.15 (70.25)

R2 0.65 0.49 0.58N 80 88 131

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are lower than the corresponding card prices of other players. Statistically, the resultsare strongest for the 1954 season – for that season, the coefficient on AA is not only

significant at the 1 per cent level, but the coefficient is of a relatively large magnitude.It indicates that, all else equal, the card prices of African-American players from that

year are $19.00 lower that other players of equal ability. To put this in perspective, theaverage overall card price for that year was $38, meaning African-American players

had card prices that were about 50 per cent below what would be expected.While these card prices reflect current valuations by fans of past players, the card

prices do not have any direct impact on these former players themselves, either now orduring the players’ playing career. However, any fan biases against African-Americanplayers would not only manifest themselves in current card prices but would have

probably manifested themselves in other ways during the player’s career. To the extentthese fan biases existed at the time, these biases would render African-American

players economically less valuable to their teams than their white counterparts – i.e. iffans prefer, all else equal, white players to black players, teams will find it financially

advantageous to respond to these preferences. This response may have taken the formof teams paying African-American players less than white players, for a given level of

talent (i.e. salary discrimination), or African-American players being underrepre-sented on teams, given their talent level (i.e. entry discrimination).

For both 1959 and 1968, the coefficient on AA is still negative, but the lower t-scores indicate that the results are not statistically significant. How should oneinterpret this? Does this suggest that African-Americans did not suffer from

discrimination during those seasons, despite some of the qualitative evidencepresented earlier in the paper? One must recall that this card price analysis is testing

for only one type of discrimination – i.e. customer (fan) discrimination – and is notable to measure whether other types of discrimination may be present, such as co-

worker discrimination or employer discrimination. Furthermore, the analysis onlypicks up customer discrimination to the extent it manifests itself in player card prices.

Thus, while there is no evidence to suggest that the 1959 and 1968 card prices ofAfrican-American players are ‘undervalued’, this does not necessarily imply thatplayers from these eras did not suffer discrimination. In general, this analysis of

player card prices should be viewed as simply one of many alternative means to testfor the presence of discrimination. The results should not be viewed in isolation, but

rather as a complement to the larger body of other evidence, both quantitative andqualitative, that is uncovered on the issue.

Conclusions

The research presented here complicates our understanding of African-American

football players and their quest to play the game in Canada. Canadian professionalfootball represented a viable alternative for highly skilled African-American playerswho faced racial discrimination in the United States. Further, the fact that African-

Americans were much better represented, in a relative sense, in the CFL compared to

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the NFL suggests that the league was more tolerant towards blacks than its Americancompetitor. But the research also suggests that these players faced discrimination in

Canada and in the CFL. The economic tests support anecdotal data that suggestplayers faced racial discrimination in the hiring practices of the CFL and in the

community at large.This research also suggests that the mid-century racial dynamics of the sport

systems of Canada and the United States may have been more similar than they weredifferent. The colour barriers in sport that existed in the United States were also

practised in Canada. Indeed the colour barrier in hockey remained in place until1958. Further, the racial politics of the northern US and Canada were also similar.During the mid-century, provinces were just beginning to pass anti-discrimination

laws. Immigration laws and practices that barred or severely limited people of colourentering Canada had not yet been challenged. For all these reasons, we contend the

mid-century Canadian sports system was less a refuge for African-American athletes,as it is so often presented in the academic literature, and more simply another

employment opportunity within a North American system of white supremacy. Thisis not to suggest that there were no differences between the leagues or the countries,

but rather that those difference have been overstated. And, as a result, the racialdiscrimination experienced by black American athletes working in Canada has not

been fully explored.Beyond questioning the myth of Canada as the Promised Land for mid-twentieth-

century black football players, our hope is that other researchers will be inspired to

systematically explore a variety of related questions. For example, how did thesituation change during the late 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s? As conditions

changed in the US, and as an increasing number of black Americans were trained asfootball players in American colleges and hired as professional football players, how

does the experience, meaning and conditions change for black American footballplayers in Canada?

Even more currently, what are conditions like today in the CFL for minorityplayers – not only for African-Americans but also for other groups, such as, forexample, Latinos? [61]. Also of value would be to compare the experiences of these

current CFL players with the experiences of black American baseball and basketballplayers who have played in overseas leagues.

Finally, there is opportunity to explore other racial and immigrant groups inCanada – native Canadians, Latinos, Asians and south-east Asians – and their

relationship with the broader Canadian sport system, particularly after 1967 and theofficial end of racial discrimination in the immigration laws.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Steve Hardy for providing helpful comments on anearlier draft of this paper. We would also like to thank Jim Taylor of Vancouver, John

Cooper of the CFL Hall of Fame and Dale West of the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of

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Fame for their invaluable assistance in accessing CFL-related archival material.Thanks also to Jessica Willis and Vivian Chan for providing research assistance.

Notes

[1] ‘Quitting America’ is actually the title of a recent book by Robinson (2004), whose workdraws considerable inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois.

[2] For example, a perusal of the 2007 rosters of professional basketball teams in Italy (found atwww.eurobasket.com) shows the typical team having two to three African-Americans on thesquad, most of whom with little or no previous NBA experience. To our knowledge, therehave not been any academic studies that have chronicled the experiences of African-Americans playing in overseas basketball or baseball leagues.

[3] Technically, the name ‘Canadian Football League’ was not officially adopted until 1958, butfor convenience the term is used here to describe professional football in Canada even before1958.

[4] See Boyd and Scrivener, Legends of Autumn, for a history of the CFL’s ‘glory’ years of the1950s and 1960s.

[5] Kelly, Green Grit, 166[6] Trawick and Wagner were the first ‘official’ African-Americans in the CFL, although a team

picture of the 1930 Regina Roughriders (forerunner to the Saskatchewan Roughriders)includes an African-American player by the name of Stonewall Jackson. It was rumoured thatJackson was a US porter working on the Canadian railway system and would occasionally playfootball as he travelled across the country.

[7] Josh Bell-Webster, ‘Herb Trawick’, available online at www.cfl.ca, accessed 29 Jan. 2007[8] The NFL colour barrier lasted from 1933 to 1946. Numerous African-Americans did play in

the league prior to 1933, with Fritz Pollard being one of the more prominent players. For abiography of Pollard, see Carroll, Fritz Pollard.

[9] That one team in the league, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, was slow to integrate, is similarto the situations found in baseball and the NFL, where the Boston Red Sox and theWashington Redskins lagged well behind their respective league brethren when it came tointegration. In both of these latter cases, the attitudes of the team owner – Tom Yawkey in thecase of the Red Sox and George Marshall in the case of the Redskins – have often been cited asthe reason for this unwillingness to integrate (for a comprehensive discussion of the Red Soxsituation, see Bryant, Shut Out). In the case of the Roughriders, it is not readily apparent whythe team was particularly slow to integrate. The team was community-owned and thus wasgoverned by a group of individuals from the community, rather than one sole individual. Onehypothesis is that the collective attitudes of this management group were such that African-American players were not welcome in the organization.

[10] Harrison, ‘African American Quarterbacks’.[11] Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport.[12] Howell, Blood, Sweat, and Cheers.[13] Humber, A Sporting Chance.[14] Winks, The Blacks in Canada.[15] See ibid.[16] Ibid.[17] See, particularly, Fosty and Fosty, Black Ice, and also Harris, Breaking the Ice and O’Ree and

McKinley, The Autobiography of Willie O’Ree. Fosty and Fosty examine the plight of African-Canadians in the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes – a league that existed from 1900to the mid-1920s. Fosty and Fosty discuss how players in the league met hardship and

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prejudice, and argue that the significant contribution that the league and its players made tothe development of the modern game is almost completely ignored in the annals of hockeyhistory. They state: ‘It is as if the league had never existed. For hockey is today a sport Whiterin history than a Canadian winter’ (195–6).

[18] See, for example, Longley, ‘Measuring Employer-Based Discrimination’.[19] See Becker, The Economics of Discrimination. Becker won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics,

in part for his path-breaking work on the economics of discrimination. For an overview of thecurrent state of the economics literature on discrimination in sport see Kahn, ‘The SportsBusiness as a Labor Market Laboratory’ and Longley, ‘Racial Discrimination’.

[20] Early in Royal’s tenure at Texas, there were accusations of racism in the football program. SeeRoyal and Wheat, Coach Royal.

[21] While locating and conducting detailed first-person interviews of those former players stillliving would be an enormous undertaking, and is beyond the scope of this paper, the authorsdid contact representatives of both the CFL Hall of Fame and the Saskatchewan Sports Hall ofFame, and were given access to a wide variety of archival material from the era. As well, one ofthe authors interviewed Jim Taylor – a sports journalist icon in Canada – and a person veryclose to the CFL scene in the 1950s. Information from these sources was integratedthroughout the paper.

[22] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL’, 5.[23] See http://www.tsn.ca/cf1/feature/?/fid¼10867[24] Chaput, Saskatchewan Sports Legends, 213–14.[25] Ibid., 214–15.[26] Ibid., 213–14.[27] Ibid., 215.[28] Kelly, Green Grit, 122.[29] One measure of discrimination, or lack thereof, might be the extent to which black American

CFL players resettled in Canada. While it is beyond the limits of this project to do a systematicanalysis of the lives of individual black CFL players from this era, we did come across someanecdotal evidence. While some clearly made a life for themselves beyond football in Canada,we were nonetheless struck by how many CFL stars returned to the US – including TomCasey, Woody Strode, Kenny Washington and Cookie Gilchrist. The tension between theopportunity that the CFL represented and the dream of a racially just United States iscaptured in the personal history of the Bright family. Johnny Bright, a symbol for Canadianracial harmony and US racial hostility, made a life for himself and his family in Canada, buthis wife and children never became Canadian citizens. In this way, the journey of African-Americans to the CFL resembles other African-American migrations to Canada following therevolutionary war and prior to the civil war – Canada proved to be a temporary refuge. Thedesire to immigrate was driven by conditions in America, with blacks in Canada often playingthe role of longing exiles in a foreign land.

[30] Kelly, Green Grit, 123.[31] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL’, 5.[32] Ibid., 5.[33] Barnes, The Plastic Orgasm.[34] Ibid., 142.[35] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL’, 5.[36] Kelly, The Grey Cup, 22.[37] Kelly, Green Grit, 123.[38] The fact that some CFL cities were more accepting of integration than others is somewhat

analogous to the situation found in the integration of minor-league baseball during the 1950s.For a discussion of the latter, see, for example, Adelson, Brushing Back Jim Crow.

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[39] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL’, 5.[40] Ibid.[41] Ibid.[42] Kelly, Green Grit, 123.[43] Bell-Webster, ‘Herb Trawick’.[44] Barnes, The Plastic Orgasm, 143.[45] Kelly, The Grey Cup, 22.[46] Ibid., 22.[47] Ibid.[48] Ibid., 324.[49] Ibid., 22.[50] Bell-Webster, ‘Herb Trawick’.[51] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL’, 5.[52] Ibid.[53] Ibid.[54] MacCambridge, America’s Game.[55] Ross, Outside the Lines.[56] Proudfoot, ‘The Negro in the CFL’.[57] Players included in this analysis are only those that had a player card issued for them in the

year in question. Constantly changing rosters and imprecise and inconsistent historicalrecord-keeping for rosters make it extremely difficult to identify all players in a given year.However, by using player cards, one can be reasonably assured that most of the prominentplayers are being identified.

[58] This argument presumes that there was a sufficient supply of quality African-American playersthat could have moved into these positions.

[59] This issue highlights the trade-off involved for teams such as Saskatchewan. To the extent fansmay have had preferences against seeing African-American players on the team, the cost ofindulging such preferences was that the team performed more poorly on the field. In otherwords, fewer African-American players led to fewer wins. One interesting extension to thisdiscussion would be to examine attendance data across the league during this era to determinewhich two competing factors– the desire to have fewer African-American on a team, versusthe desire to win – were the strongest. Unfortunately, consistent and reliable attendance datafrom this era is not generally available.

[60] See, for example Scahill, ‘A Reinvestigation of Racial Discrimination and Baseball Cards’.[61] One of the more prominent quarterbacks in the CFL over the past decade has been Anthony

Cavillo, a Mexican-American. See Longoria, Athletes Remembered, for an overview of Latino/Mexican football players.

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Barnes, LaVerne. 1971. The Plastic Orgasm. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.Becker, Gary. 1957. The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Boyd, Denny and Brian Scrivener. 1997. Legends of Autumn: The Glory Years of Canadian Football.

Vancouver: Greystone.Bryant, Howard. 2002. Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. New York: Routledge.Carroll, John M. 1992. Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement. Urbana, IL: University of

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