Abstract

Excerpted From: Alex B. Long, Victory: How a Lawyer, a Minister, and Twenty Professional Football Players Helped End Segregation in Virginia and Professional Sports, 111 Virginia Law Review Online 109 (March, 2025) (163 Footnotes) (Full Document)

As Chapman Law Dean Matthew Parlow has noted, "[a]thletes in professional sports have long sought to use their platforms as celebrities to bring greater societal awareness to issues of social justice and racial inequality." One of the clearest examples is the 2020 NBA player boycott following the shooting death of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a boycott that spread to several other professional sports organizations. Multiple media outlets covering the 2020 boycott referenced an event that garnered national attention in October 1961, when several members of the Boston Celtics and St. Louis Hawks refused to play in a preseason NBA game in response to discrimination in a hotel in Lexington, Kentucky. Some of the stories referred to this incident as the first professional athlete boycott related to a civil rights issue.

Just two months earlier, however, another group of professional athletes-- this time, a group of football players--had agreed to boycott a professional athletic event in protest of racial discrimination in Roanoke, Virginia. The athletes did so at the behest of a local minister, who was a prominent civil rights activist. At the same time, a local civil rights lawyer was pursuing litigation to challenge the discrimination at issue, specifically enforcement of a Virginia law that prohibited integrated seating at public events, including professional sporting events. But that summer, the lawyer, the minister, and twenty football players would use a preseason NFL game to bring attention to the injustice of Virginia's law and challenge its constitutionality. In the process, they would play an important role in helping to end segregationist practices in the NFL, establishing precedent for future racial protests by professional athletes and helping to bring about an end to Virginia's discriminatory law.

This Essay tells the story of this largely forgotten event from the summer of 1961. The event represents a success story in the history of the civil right movement and illustrates how both legal and extra-legal methods were necessary to achieve the goals of the movement. Much of the focus on how the civil rights movement brought about change in the law focuses on the role that lawyers played. But the history of civil rights advancement is a history not just of how lawyers helped change the law and society, but how non-lawyer organizers and activists were equal partners in the undertaking.

This Essay focuses on how the lawyer at the center of the boycott in Roanoke, along with those who came before and after him, used the legal process to help change the law as well as societal norms regarding racial segregation. At the same time, the Essay explores how the non-lawyers involved in this episode played a vital and complementary role in the desegregation effort. In short, the Essay explores how Virginia's segregation laws were toppled through a combination of legal action and activism. Most importantly, the Essay memorializes the forgotten role that these individuals played in helping to desegregate professional sports and in laying the foundation for future protests by professional athletes.

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In 1968, Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos were widely criticized for raising their fists in what Smith would later call a "human rights" salute (as opposed to a Black Power salute) while on the medal podium. The salute was the most visible display of civil rights protest in the history of sports up to that moment. Looking back on the event decades later, Carlos would explain that he and Smith were expressing concern about "the lack of black assistant coaches" as well as broader societal discrimination. Originally, the two considered boycotting the Olympics altogether, but instead decided "to use [their] athleticism to be a voice for people who were voiceless." "People shouldn't mix politics and sports" was the common criticism at the time. Yet in 2020, NBA players made a different choice when they boycotted playoff games in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. While the players' protest took a different form than that of Smith and Carlos, they were met with similar criticism. The players needed to "shut up and dribble," according to one critic.

There remains strong disagreement about the extent to which the worlds of sports and civil rights should overlap. But in 1961, it was impossible to separate the two. Players might still encounter discrimination on the playing field, and fans might still encounter it while attending live events. It took the work of lawyers, activists, and athletes--sometimes working together--to help bring about change in these arenas. The planned boycott of the preseason game in 1961 between the Colts and the Steelers is a clear example of this type of collaboration. Lawson, Wilkinson, and the players for the Colts and the Steelers deserve credit for having played an important role in the civil rights movement by organizing the first successful professional athlete boycott of a game in support of the cause of civil rights.

The extra-legal measures employed by Wilkinson, the Colts and Steelers players, and those who came after them helped shine a light on racial injustices in sport and society more generally. In 2023, a street in the Gainsboro section of Roanoke was named in Wilkinson's honor. The legal measures employed by Lawson and other lawyers gradually chipped away at the legal machinery supporting segregation, including in the world of athletics. On January 4, 2025, President Joe Biden signed a bill passed by Congress to rename the federal building in Roanoke after Lawson. The legacies of Lawson and Wilkinson live on in the city they helped to change.

Alex Long is the Williford Gragg Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law.