The Ringer NFL Show - 1. Gentlemen’s Agreement | Blackballed

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Six years ago, Colin Kaepernick took a knee, and it cost him the rest of his football career. It’s a modern story that hearkens back to the NFL’s original sin: a secret agreement among team owners to stop signing Black players almost a century ago.  Host: Chelsea Stark-Jones Co-reporter: Lex Pryor   Producers: Isaiah Blakely, Mike Wargon, Justin Sayles, and Vikram Patel  Sound Design and Original Theme Song: Devon Renaldo  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Blackballed listeners. If you're enjoying our show, you might also like some of our other narrative podcasts here at The Ringer, like 22 goals, a history of the Men's World Cup, told through the lens of 22 of the most iconic goals ever scored in the tournament. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll rage against colonialism. Or maybe you'd like, What If, the Limbiased story, a series about the death of a young basketball star and how his legacy reached far beyond the court. You might also like one of our culture podcasts like Gene and Roger, a deep dive into the careers and legacies of legendary movie critics, Siskel and Ebert. Thanks for listening. It was March 2017. I'd been working for the NFL for about six years, and we were about to start a time-honored annual tradition, free agency.

Watching players, especially quarterbacks, changed teams, is fun, but in the NFL, it's also kind of funny. Because the best players tend to get locked up by their teams early. So the ones that are left, aren't that great. Let me read off a few names of the free agent QBs from that summer. There's Brian Hoyer, who signed with the Niners in early March. Soon after, Matt Barclay signed with the Niners as well. Matt Schwab went to the Falcons, and Mike Glennon signed with the Bears. Not a lot of pro bowlers on this list.

And on and on it went. But it wasn't until summertime that the mood went From funny to suspicious. Now, the last place, Bears signing a career backup like Lennon to a $45 million deal and then drafting Mitchell Chubisky could be laughed off as the Bears being the Bears. But when Dolphins QB, Ryan Tannahill, got hurt during training camp, I noticed something really strange was going on. Miami went out and signed recently retired 34-year-old Jay Cutler, who was fine,

but the dolphins were pretty good. They had made the playoffs the previous year. And all this time, a better QB was available. Colin Kaepernick, who, four years earlier, was a few yards away from leading the Niners to a Super Bowl championship. A guy who once rushed for a trillion yards in a playoff game and made Ron Jorsky drool. I truly believe Colin Kaepernick could be one of the greatest quarterbacks ever.

I love his skill set. Kaepernick was a genuine phenomenon. Just a year earlier, he had the best-selling jersey in the NFL. Only a few years before that, he had graced the cover of ESPN, the magazine's famed body issue. He was one of the league's most exciting players and most popular. And sure, the previous season was a down year by Kaepernick standards. But it's not controversial to say he would have been, at the least, one of the best backup QBs in the league. And if you're telling me, Bears fans would rather watch Mike Glennon or Dolphins fans would rather cheer for Jay Cutler, I'm not having it. Nobody was.

But to figure out why Kaepernick was likely being left off the QB carousel, you had to look beyond the field. But not that far, just to the sidelines. Let's go back a little, a year, to the summer of 2016. That summer, two young black men were killed by police on back-to-back days. Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old father from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shot outside his local liquor store. He had been selling CDs, with permission, when someone anonymously reported him to the police. And Philando Castile, a 32-year-old elementary school worker from St. Paul, Minnesota, shot during a routine traffic stop,

pulled over for a busted taillight. Their deaths became part of the national conversation. They were the latest names added to a long list of unjust police killings of black men in our country. Black America was hurting. Once again, countless calls for police accountability had been ignored. And then, on an August afternoon, prior to an NFL preseason game, Colin Kaepernick sat down on the bench during the national anthem.

It was a silent protest about police brutality against black men by one of the most prominent black athletes in the world. For a couple of weeks, it went seemingly unnoticed. But before the 49ers' third preseason game on August 26th, he sat again, and the media took note. Here's what Kapp said about it after the game. I mean, ultimately is to bring awareness and make people, you know, realize what's really going on in this country.

There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust, people aren't being held accountable for, and that's something that needs to change. That's something that, you know, this country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all. And it's not happening for all right now. Then, just before the preseason ended, Kaepernick met with Army Green Beret veteran, Ney Boyer, who was white and had a brief stint in the NFL. Boyer wrote an open letter to Kaepernick saying he was disrespecting the flag by sitting through the anthem. During a meeting shortly after, Boyer offered Kappa suggestion, and he took it.

Cap's protests evolved in what would become a weekly and profound sight. He kneeled before each game for the rest of the season. At the time, I was a young associate producer working at the NFL network. And I'll admit, I was a little naive. Obviously, I knew all about our country's history of racism. You can't be a black woman in America and not understand it to your core. But what Kaepernick was doing was courageous and admirable. I never thought it would get the kind of backlash it did.

It's this country, the country that you have so much disdain for that allows you the right to speak your mind. It protects your right to be a whiny, indulgent, attention-seeking crybaby. I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag. of the United States of America. If Cap wants to be taken seriously and affect real change, he should project a more professional image with his appearance. If he's seeking Twitter fame and the adulation of Capernics,

he should keep the Afro and continue tweeting his way to freedom. Over the course of the 2016 season, the intensity of the discourse only grew. Former NFL wide receiver Kishon Johnson remembers Kaepernick's message getting diluted by the debate. it became a political deal, political stand. And Colin Kaepernick was not disrespecting the flag, so to speak, or better yet disrespecting the military or anything like that.

He was just sending a message letting people understand the hurt that we suffer as black people in America. And the message was hijacked, and it became a disrespect to the military, of disrespect to the flag and all of that. That next offseason in 2017, as Kaepernick remained a free agent while inferior quarterbacks like Cutler and Glynn got contracts, people started asking questions. People, like me, started wondering,

was Colin Kaepernick being passed over by each team? Were they just nervous? Or was he being systematically blackballed? And, silly me. I thought his obvious on-field skisks skills would get him on a roster. Instead, from March 2017, through opening day in September, 38 quarterbacks were signed.

And none of them were Kaepernick. A few weeks into the season, it was all anyone could talk about, including this guy. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now out? He's fired. And that's pretty much what happened.

Kaepernick was effectively fired from the NFL, either because teams genuinely believed he couldn't play or because of something more nefarious. Of course he's blackball. Everybody knows his black ball. That's former Seahawks defensive end, Michael Bennett. Like a lot of people, he did not think teams were passing over Kaepernick for on-field reasons.

I'm not sure if he ever would have really got an opportunity at the role that he was prior to. But who makes that decision? How does the league actually work? Blackballed. It wouldn't be the first time. Almost a century ago, something happened that sounds a lot like the Kaepernick store. That makes me wonder, who gets to play and who doesn't?

This podcast is a story of how professional football was integrated by four black players in 1946. The year before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's colorberry. It's also the story of how 13 years before that, NFL teams cut black players out of the league. And what that has to do with Colin Kaepernick. Kishon Johnson, who recently co-wrote a book about the four men who broke the color barrier in pro football, laid it out.

When you got a bunch of white billionaires getting together and saying that they're not going to sign off for somebody playing, it's almost like what went on with the Forgotten First with these guys, with Kenny Washington and Woody and Mary and Motley and Billing those guys that wanted to play in the NFL back in the 1940s and then they decided to say, you know what, nah, we're not going to allow all that to happen. We're going to keep them out of the league. And this is sort of the same thing that went on recently with Kaepernick, the same thing that went on with them. There's not much difference.

We're going to talk about why you probably haven't heard this story before, and what it tells us about the modern day NFL. About a majority black league that only employs a few black head coaches at a time. A league that is currently facing a lawsuit from Brian Flores accusing it of racial discrimination and hiring practices. A league that settled Colin Kaepernick's grievance, where he claimed ownership across the NFL polluted to keep him out of a job. And we're going to look at how the NFL's past, tells us something about the lead today.

From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, this is Blackball. I'm Chelsea Stark Jones. The story of segregation in football is kind of a strange one. Football had existed in America since the mid-1800s, basically since the end of the Civil War. It was played mostly at the collegiate level, and by 1890, there were a handful of black players

excelling at schools like Amherst, Harvard, and Michigan. This was during the Jim Crow era, but segregation wasn't explicitly allowed. That all changed in 1896, with Plessy v. Ferguson, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was legal as long as each race had the same opportunities. That's where the phrase, separate but equal, comes from. It would be the law in America for almost 60 years. Around the same time as the Plessy decision,

professional football came into being in America. And unlike so many institutions, it did not embrace segregation at first. In fact, in 1902, the first black man suited up in a pro football game. His name was Charles Fulis. They called him the Black Cyclone. I know. Anyways, for four years,

Follas played alongside white players for the Shelby Blues of the Ohio League. To put it in perspective, Follis was a two-sport athlete. And when it came to baseball, he had to play in the Negro leagues. Essentially, when it came to segregation, football was behind the times. And that stayed true through the inception of the NFL. So the NFL was formed under another name in 1920. And even though it was legal to exclude black players in America, the league didn't.

That's Lex Pryor, my co-reporter for this story and staff writer at The Bringer. Lex has been writing about issues around race and sports for a while now. The story is in his willhouse. So when I set out to make this podcast, I asked Lex to join our team. When you're talking about segregation in American sports, the arc is usually pretty repetitive. This stuff tends to happen in unison with what's going on in the rest of the country. At least that's what I've seen in the work I've done in the past on a sport like golf or baseball or even tennis. But what's been really weird to see these past couple of months is that the NFL doesn't

really follow that same pattern. They kind of move at their own pace. Why do you think that is? Why did baseball have a white league and a black league? And America started to really segregate, but football didn't. Yeah, football remained relatively integrated. Now, this is going to sound a little bit terrifying in hindsight, but during this time period, there was a pretty substantial group of people who thought football was going to save the soul of the nation. Excuse me? I know. No big deal. So, long story, Short, at the turn of the 20th century, after the West was won, a bunch of white folks felt like the spirit that made America America was at risk of fading, of getting changed by waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. These second and third generation Americans thought their country was getting weak, and so when football showed up, a lot of folks saw it as a social elixir. People like President Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt, huh? Yeah, he was head over here. feels in love with football. Apparently, he even helped invent forward pass. Okay, Lex. So football is going to save America, or white America. It's going to make everyone tough. Right, but that's only half of it. Football, as we all know, is brutal. I don't know if you've ever seen photos of football players from the 19th century, but not a lot of padding. These guys were playing Mountain Ram without helmets, and people died. A lot. Fielding a team quickly became an issue of supply and demand.

And when that happens, you can't really afford to be choosy about what color the product is. More than 50 black athletes played on white college football teams from 1889 through 1920. And it bears saying that around this same time, historically black colleges and universities like Howard and Tuskegee are starting to field their own teams. So you have an environment where black people are pretty much playing at every level. During the NFL's first two years, at least four black players lined up for squads. Of note, that number includes Fritz Pollard, a Hall of Fame running back, and the NFL's first black head coach. So the NFL had black players, but we should be clear. It wasn't like today. Not at all. Black players made up a tiny percentage of the league. In 1922, there were only five black players in the NFL out of hundreds.

These aren't exactly giant numbers, but they're significant given what's going on in other major sports. The last black major leaguer suited up in 1884. The last black jockey to win a triple crown race was in 1902. And during this time, football was becoming something of a national phenomenon. Though the NFL wasn't as widely popular as college football, it was a paying gig for football players. It was a job, and jobs were plentiful through the decade. Until, they suddenly weren't.

In 1929, years of booming prosperity ended in time. catastrophe. It was the biggest stock market crash since records began. The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression left a lot of bare pockets. Unemployment was rampant. For reference, unemployment rates range from 14% to almost 25% across America in the 30s. And that led to some tension around paying black people to play football. In the late 20s and early 30s, there were never more than 20s. two black NFL players at a time. And then, in 1934, for the first time in the 14-year history of the NFL, there are no black players at all. And this isn't really seen as an accident at the time.

From the moment it happened, there were rumors in the media and in locker rooms that the change was by design. Some people call it a gentleman's agreement. I don't use that term in my everyday life, but I guess it's supposed to mean an unofficial wink-wink deal. But I mean what? A gentleman's agreement? Did they have a meeting? Did they all go golfing and just whisper around the teas? I don't know about you, but when I imagine this, and to be clear, this is just in my head.

I see them hanging out in a dark speakeasy in Chicago. Cigars smoke everywhere, plinking their bourbons and laughing about their new plan. Like Lex said, the gentleman's agreement is technically only a rumor, but it was one that was easy to believe. Some people blamed it on a new owner named George Preston Marshall, who would prove to be, I mean, I don't know how else to say this, a very public racist. I mean, I know Wikipedia isn't the final authority in sourcing, but Marshall's page has an entire section called racism. It's right there between death and personal life. At the time, Marshall owned the Boston Braves, the two,

team that would later move to Washington, D.C., and be named after a racial slur. Today, we call them the commanders. In fact, there are folks who swear that all of this went down because of him, but that narrative strikes some people as a little too neat. George President Marshall has become a convenient scapegoat. That's Damian Thomas, the museum curator of sports of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Why George President Marshall is an important or easy scapegoat is because many of the NFL teams are still owned by the families who owned them in the 1930s and 40s. And in some ways, you know, by acknowledging that this is a much bigger effort than just that of a singular person, it in some ways taints some of the families.

some of the families who are still part of the NFL. For their part, other owners deny the gentleman's agreement. Lex, can you enlighten the listeners on what they said? So we've got a batch of excuses. Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers claimed decades later that the problem was merely one of scouting and financial restraints. Quote, for myself and for most of the owners, I can say there never was any racial bias.

decades after the gentleman's agreement, George Hallis, the legendary owner of the Chicago Bears, swore that there was no coordinated action. He also claimed that there weren't any top black players in college while the NFL was segregated, despite at least nine black collegians getting All-America honors in that time. TechShram, a former executive of the L.A. Rams and Dallas Cowboys, said that this was all just the product of individual choices. Quote, you just didn't do it. It wasn't the thing that was done.

What is clear is that all of a sudden, without any public declaration of segregation, the NFL suddenly employed no black players. Players who at their physical peaks no longer had an opportunity to play. And whatever did happen happened in the dark. Kind of grew up inside the NFL. And I don't just mean watching games. I mean, I watched a lot of games. I've been watching football since I was four years old. I grew up in L.A. without an obvious team to cheer for,

but eventually settled on the Steelers. My stepdad's team. Here we go, Steelers. By the time I was 16, I was obsessively watching the daily ESPN lineup. PTI, Around the Horn, cold pizza. I couldn't get enough. I knew I was going to work in sports somehow. Don't tell my boss is at the ring,

but my dream job was to work at ESPN. I wanted to be the next Lisa Sultors. My first job in sports was an internship at K-CBS here in L.A. I was a sophomore in college, going to Laker Games and Dodger games for work. I mean, pinched me. A year later, I got my first job at the NFL. I was 20, basically a baby. Little did I know I would spend the next decade working almost exclusively for the league.

I worked there during college as an intern and worked my way up as a PA and then a producer, making everything from pre-came hype videos, highlight rules for the season, long-form features, and an original TV series for NFL 100. I got to work on the plays of the year music video, the Jim Brown 80th birthday special, all kinds of NFL content. It was, mostly, a lot of fun. But being on the inside, you get to see the not-so-fun parts too. For me, back then, that meant thinking about the league's relationship with women.

Stories of violence. Think Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, and even the quarterback of my team, Ben Rothesberger. Stories of men hurting women. And then getting to keep playing football. To keep playing for the same league whose name was on my paychecks. Stories that forced me to think about what the NFL stood for, what I started. for and what it meant to hold these ideas in my head at the same time. That football could be as ugly as it is great. I remember the first time I saw the Ray Rice video. It's brutal. Rice punching his

fiance in an elevator. I could barely get the words out today, almost a decade later. And I remember thinking back then, how did this guy only get a two-game suspension? How is he allowed to to play football for millions of dollars. Ultimately, Rice would get a longer punishment and wouldn't play in the NFL again. But it still doesn't feel great that it took a leaked TMZ video and widespread public outrage to get there.

I bring up Ray Rice because even though the circumstances are different, the NFL's relationship with off-field violence reminds me of its relationship with race, how the league won't hold itself accountable until someone else shines the spotlight. Before Colin Kaepernick, the topic of race and football came up, for me, mostly in smaller conversations, conversations with coworkers. But after he nailed in 2016 and after he couldn't get signed the next year, everyone was talking about him. Not just at work, but everywhere.

Remember this guy? Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, get that son of a bitch off the beach off the beach? field right now. On September 22nd, 2017, Kaepernick was still unemployed, but it was clear who Donald Trump was talking about when he broke out that political football. When the NFL season kicked off a few weeks earlier,

only a handful of players protested during the anthem. The debate over NFL player demonstrations had taken a back seat to the games. The president made his son-of-a-bitch speech on a Friday night. That Sunday, NFL players returned to the field, and they responded, but not with words. Some locked arms during the national anthem, some stayed in the locker room, some raised fists. But mostly, they knelt.

To honor the actions of Kaepernick and Eric Reed, one of his former teammates who had taken a knee with Kaepernick a year earlier. Suddenly, the protest wasn't contained to a few players on the 49ers sideline. It was happening before every game on every broadcast on tens of millions of TVs every week. For a time in 2017, it became the dominant national conversation. And the response was pretty awful. The player demonstrations,

plus the grievance that Kaepernick and Reid filed against the NFL for collusion, both of these things were fuel for a bunch of bad faith actors. Lots of loud noises from Fox News personality. and anonymous Twitter trolls. But the opposition was also coming from prominent NFL figures, like Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, maybe the most powerful team owner in the lead.

Jones promised to bench any players who were, quote, disrespecting the flag. You might remember him linking arms with players and kneeling himself. He did that, but only allowed it before the anthem, a half measure at best. And perhaps worst of all were comments by Houston Texans owner Bob McNair. In a closed-door meeting, he reportedly compared the players to convicts. He said, quote, we can't have the inmates running the prison.

By and large, the majority of the NFL is black. That's Keishan Johnson again. I thought, okay, so he's calling us thugs. And he's basically saying that we're inmates. He's the warden and he's in charge. And you can't let a bunch of blacks tell us what to do. Michael Bennett, for one, wasn't surprised. I think a lot of people would take it back by the way that people speak and, like, who's saying what.

It would surprise me if he did the opposite. It was negative. That's a bad thing to say. McNair would apologize for his remarks and then later retract his apology, telling the Wall Street Journal that, quote, the main thing I regret is apologizing. It wasn't surprising to Michael Bennett, to Kishon Johnson, to me, to a lot of people. But it was galvanizing.

This wasn't Trump spouting off. This was an NFL owner comparing a majority black group of players to prison inmates. But if anything good had come out of all of this, it had pushed an important issue to the forefront. And now the league had to grapple with it. Later that year, the NFL formed a joint player-owner committee centered around social justice. They started an initiative called Inspired Change, focused on education, economic advancement, police and community relations, and criminal justice reform. Inspire Change awarded grants, matched donations, and highlighted work players did in the community.

It was a step in the right direction, but a very small one. From the inside, it felt like most of the efforts were fueled by the players, and the league was reluctant but succumbed to the player's demands. Before the 2018 season, the NFL passed a role against kneeling during the anthem, but then pulled it back, saying they wouldn't enforce it. By that time, the discussion had changed anyway. A few players were still kneeling, but it wasn't drawing the same kind of heated responses. Then, in February 2019, there was some small resolution.

solution to the Kaepernick story. He and Reid settled their collusion grievance with the NFL, reportedly for, quote, considerably less than $10 million, according to the New York Times. Look, it's hard to argue that inspired change and the grievance settlement meant that the NFL had solved its issues with race, or especially with Kaepernick, who remains unsigned to this day. But these things did mean that the league had moved on. more or less, or at least, that the owners were ready to sweep things under the turf and get back to business as usual, until the chaotic year of 2020, until Ahmad Aubrey, Brianna Taylor, and then, in May, George Floyd. A few months into the pandemic, George Floyd was brutally killed

by a police officer in Minneapolis. The officer put his knee on Floyd's neck for almost 10 minutes. Floyd called out for his mom. Someone pulled out their phone and recorded the whole thing. George Floyd was murdered, right there in front of us. The video went viral and everything changed. Not long after, I got a new role at the NFL, focusing solely on the league's social justice initiatives. And the work I did that season felt different. Before George Floyd, the NFL didn't really support storytelling around social justice issues.

We made features that frankly were fluff pieces. But for a while after Floyd's death, we were able to tell those stories. Stories that highlighted how players felt about being black in the NFL in America. Stories celebrating civil rights leaders and celebrating the lives of people who were unjustly murdered by police. Stories that were impactful, it didn't feel like lip service. It felt like progress. And it was always funny to me how the work I was. was proudly doing, the stories I was elevating, the names I got to highlight, like Sharonda Coleman

Singleton and Elijah McLean. This was what Kaepernick was trying to do four years earlier, but he got shunned. I think it's timing. I think it was all about the timing. Michael Bennett again. I think the NFL didn't have anything to hide behind. What was happening to Jewish Floyd was a reflection of America and its historical prejudice against black people. So I wasn't really surprised by the NFL because the NFL is a business, right? The business trajectory says, look at the statistics. The statistics want us to do this. So I think the complexities of what happened to George Floyd and how the NFL reacted,

I think that was normal the way they reflect. Because honestly, when we were doing it, it wasn't cool. Bennett's point is well taken. like much of corporate America before 2020, the league had been avoiding the issue of social justice, of racism, until it had to, until it made sense,

until it became good business. And that's a big part of the story of the NFL, part of its identity. The league made over $17 billion in 2021. According to Sportico, the NFL is worth $130, billion dollars. It prints money. And when something threatens the NFL's bottom line, it notices. The story about the NFL protecting itself goes back a long way. And that's really what this

podcast is about. How the modern NFL's problem with race is in its DNA. How the league's reaction to players kneeling and its dearth of black coaches and executives has roots that reach back almost to its inception. Let's go back a bit. 90 years. It's December 3rd, 1933. Halfback Joe Lillard plays for the Chicago Cardinals. Guard, Ray Kemp, dons the beautiful black and yellow

of the then Pittsburgh Pirates. That's what my beloved Steelers were called back then. 800 miles away from each other. They step on two football fields. They're playing the last game of the season. and what would be the last games of their careers. Lillard and Kemp are the last two black players in the NFL. Their path to this point has been fraud.

Kemp climbed out of a coal mine in Pennsylvania and found his way to the Steelers. He kept his head down. He was released in the fall of 1933, then was asked to rejoin the team a few weeks afterwards. Many years later, he said that he didn't need the money, that playing pro football didn't pay that well. but that he, quote, felt someone had to keep the door open. Unlike Kemp, Lillard stood out from the crowd. Along with being in the NFL, he also played basketball and baseball professionally. And he was good.

In 1933, he was responsible for almost half of the Cardinals' points. His nickname was The Midnight Express. Again, I know. He was known for reminding both his opponents and his teammates that he was the best thing they'd ever witness on a field. 800 miles away from each other, they braved the chill and played their final games unknowingly. For the next 13 years,

no one who was black played in the league again. Back in 1933, there were four children, two in California and two in Ohio, who would grow up to be good enough to play professional football, but would, for many years, not be welcome in the NFL. Their names were Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Bill Willis, and Marion Motley. As men, they'd integrate the pro game. They'd save the sport from itself. If the first age of black football ends with Lillard and Kemp, the one we know, the one formed

in the wake of the game's original sin, starts with these four kids. Their story is key to understanding the modern NFL's problem with race. A problem the NFL seems to have never fully confronted. A problem it would rather forget. In the next episode, we'll get to know more about the four men and what it took to end 13 years of segregation in pro football. Playing football was just something that the kids did. There was no organized youth leagues like there are today.

They didn't like that dad and Uncle Woody, neither one of them liked being left behind. But, you know, the school determined that the threat was too great. They found themselves in the situation having to move constantly, you know, because they didn't have money to pay rent. They were already best friends. College life did that to their, you know, Jackie Robinson was there, but he wasn't a best friend.

This is Blackbald, the story of The Forgotten Four. I'm Chelsea Stark Jones. I wrote and reported the series with Lex Pryor. The executive producers of Blackbald are Juliet Lippman and Sean Finacy. Story editing by Justin Sales Produced by Isaiah Blakely, Mike Wargon, and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Julianna Russ.

Copy editing by Amar Burden and Jack McCluskey. The theme song and sound design are by Devin Rinaldo. The other music in this series is from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Special thanks, Connor Nevins, and Lindsay Jones. Thanks for listening.