Black Players in the CFL and the Argos

[jerrym]

I originally started writing this as a response to a post on the thread The mostly unknown story of the first Black player in Argo history. But I think it deserves its own thread because it goes beyond the story of Ken Whitlock, the first Black Argo player.

So you are saying that teams were still segregated, because they didn't have ENOUGH blacks on their teams? So in your opinion, how many blacks on a team is no longer segregation? 100%? Good lord.

There certainly was segregation in many aspects of Canadian society both official and unofficial. One example in employment that I experienced as a white person was on the railway where I worked as a red cap (carrying luggage for tips only at a train station) in Brockville starting at age 13 after school because my father was baggage master there. All the porters on the train were Black on the Toronto-Montreal run, which of course meant they were acting in a servant role. They could not get any other job anywhere.

The first Black player in Canadian football was reported in the following article to be Robert 'Stonewall' Jackson in 1930, likely an American, who was a porter while with the team also. I wonder why? However, an article in 3downnation (see post #4) discusses the career of Russ Gideon, a Canadian, who played for Calgary from 1925 to 1933 and may have been the recipient of the first forward pass in Canada.

Robert “Stonewall” Jackson, who played the last few games of the 1930 season while employed as a porter on the Canadian National Railway. Jackson made his debut in the Western Canada Rugby Football Union regular-season finale against Moose Jaw and dazzled the fans with a 45-yard run. He was also a standout in the Western playoffs and played in the 1930 Grey Cup which Regina lost 11-6 to Toronto Balmy Beach. Jackson's presence was regarded as a curiosity, especially when he actually worked as the team's porter on the train ride to Toronto for the national championship. It is also odd that Jackson is the only one of the 19 men in the team picture not to be wearing football gear (he is neatly garbed in a white short, sweater vest and tie); whether this is due to a shortage of uniforms, Jackson arriving late from work, or some other reason will never be known. In any case, Jackson did not rejoin the team in 1931.

(THEY CAME, THEY PLAYED … BUT NOT FOR LONG: AFRICAN-AMERICAN FOOTBALL PLAYERS ON THE SASKATCHEWAN ROUGHRIDERS, 1910-63 By John Chaput)

A great read for the glory years of the CFL of the late 1940s to the 1960s when the CFL often outbid the NFL for players and Blacks often came north because of the discrimination they faced in the US but still faced to some extent here, is The Migration of African Americans to the Canadian Football League during the 1950s: An Escape from Discrimination? It includes stories of many famous players including the Argos Lew Hayman, the Argo HC and later president who brought the first American Blacks to the CFL while with the Als, Willie Wood, first Black football coach anywhere, Ulysses Curtis, and Bill Bass, as well as such famous CFLers as Herb Trawick, George Reed, Leo Lewis, Normie Kwong, George Dixon, Willie Fleming, Johnny Bright, Rollie Miles, Bernie Custis (the first Black QB), Bo Scott, and many more.
The article describes in detail the mixed racial attitudes to Black players in the CFL of which here are two of many examples:

Ottawa general manager Red O’Quinn once noted “you mighthave a clique develop, say, if you have more than five colored players.” ...


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 WWII) threatened to pull his entireteam out of a hotel when he was told that Anderson and Woody Strode, Calgary’s otherAfrican American player at the time, couldn’t stay at the hotel. Winnipeg coach GeorgeTrafton reportedly acted similarly in an incident involving Tom Casey.

https://web.holycross.edu/RePEc/spe/...rimination.pdf

Obviously things were better for Black football players in Canada than in the US, and things have got better over the decades, but there were and still are many problems here.

There were laws banning Blacks from sitting where whites sit in theatres in Nova Scotia until broken by Viola Desmond who was charged and convicted in 1946, the same year the first Black player, Herb Trawick, played in the CFL. That's just one example. Here are many more.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia....ople-in-canada

In sport there is strong evidence of segregation in hockey. So much so, Black players had to form their own league in Nova Scotia in 1899. None of the three Black players, including the Carnegie brothers, on a very talented all Black line in the 1930s to the 1950s ever made it to the NHL. It took until 1957 for Willie O'Ree to break the NHL colour barrier, at a time when virtually all players and management were Canadian. I sure these attitudes were not confined to only hockey and found there way into the CFL.

The Coloured Hockey League of the Maritimes began in 1895, as an initiative of black Baptist churches in Nova Scotia.^[1] The aim was to increase and retain male membership. The league consisted of teams from Halifax, Africville, Hammond's Plains, Dartmouth, Truro, Amherst and Charlottetown, P.E.I. ...

Herb Carnegie's hockey career began in 1938 with the Toronto Young Rangers and continued in the early 1940s with the Buffalo Ankerites, a team in a mines league that played in mining towns in northern Ontario and Quebec. While with the Ankerites, Carnegie was part of the Black Aces line.^[4] The other line members consisted of his brother, Ossie Carnegie and Manny McIntyre, originally from Fredericton, New Brunswick. They were recognized as much for their talent and skill as their skin colour (Herb was at centre, Ossie was right wing, McIntyre was the left wing). In the semi-professional Quebec Provincial League, Herb was named most valuable player in 1946, 1947 and 1948. In 1948, Carnegie was given a tryout with the New York Rangers and offered a contract to play in the Rangers' minor league system. However, he was offered less money than he was earning in the Quebec league and turned down all three offers made by the Rangers organization during his tryout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_..._in_ice_hockey