Football And Diversity

Are Blacks Biologically Superior?

While many ethnic groups may have contributed to the development of the sport of football, one race dominates the sport to such an extent in our time that we are led to ask if blacks are biologically superior. However, would we have asked this question forty years ago? In 1968, the National Football League was significantly different. Only 22 years after the integration of blacks into the sport, the racial composition of the sport was still dominated by whites. From 1934 until 1946, blacks had been banned from the league. (Cole 2005) Twenty years did little for significant integration. By 1968, blacks still were only a minority in the league, representing a tenth of the players in league with the other ninety percent being white.

To someone familiar with modern demographics for the sport, the idea of a white dominated league seems unimaginable. However the public prejudice against blacks made this possible. To recreate an image of the state of America at that time, the Civil Rights Movement was dominating culture. It was in April of 1968 that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. (“Psychedelic 60s” 1998) This was a time when that prejudice and discrimination were common place despite the movement against them.

Due to these biases, minority athletes were discriminated against long before they had any chance to be recruited into the National Football League. With favoritism for white athletes dominating high school and collegiate programs, the black athletes had very little opportunity to gain the training and experience needed for a career in professional athletics.

Recruitment for athletes during that time period only occurred at the collegiate level. With a high school drop-out rate of nearly thirty percent and in turn fewer collegiate opportunities, the blacks in America had very few options for professional success. (“Education вЂ" Minorities” 2008) To illuminate the reality of the situation in the colleges at that time, black students only represented 6.9% of the students enrolled full-time at a private or public university or college in the United States in 1968. (Brown 1975) Even though enrollment of blacks increased numerically from 1960 to 1970, the percentage of blacks changed very little increasing