THE GREAT BLACK HOPE

A history of Black athletes who crossed the color line that kept them from playing quarterback.

“Being a black quarterback,” wrote a Los Angeles Times sports columnist, “is like being a member of the bomb squad.” Make a mistake, in other words, and Boom! you’re done. In 1979, an era in which, writes Moore, “it was still a foreign concept that Black men could be the field generals,” two Black players set the field on fire: the Chicago Bears’ Vince Evans, the fastest quarterback in the league, and T Doug Williams, a man with the best arm in the game but “the wrong paint job” who played for several teams before becoming a coach. They were the only two starters; before them, coaches rerouted Black players with quarterback skills to play as running backs, with the assumption that, regardless of speed and strength, Blacks lacked the intelligence to helm a team. Indeed, for decades “all the so-called thinking positions” in football were the province of white players only. When Williams and Evans faced off at Soldier Field on September 30, 1979, it was rightly seen as a historic moment. Moore looks back in time at the lineage of Black players who by rights should have preceded them (who knew that Jesse Jackson played quarterback for his HBCU?) and notes a few good-faith efforts in the mid-1970s, as when, for instance, Joe Gilliam started for the Steelers ahead of Terry Bradshaw. Discerning social critics pointed out that the question wasn’t whether Black players were ready for the slot but whether football was ready for them. The answer came with Evans and Williams and then with their many successors, including Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts who, astonishingly, as late as 2023 were the first Black QBs to face off in a Super Bowl.

A piercing look at racial politics on the gridiron.