Bobby Mitchell broke the last color barrier in the NFL

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Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell will be remembered for his football abilities. He also will be remembered for something that he shouldn’t have had to be remembered for.

Mitchell was the first African-American player to play for the Washington franchise. In 1962.

Not 1932 or 1942 or 1952. In 1962.

The NFL, in its early years, had a limited number of African-American players. By 1933, however, black players disappeared from the league. In 1946, African-American players returned. Come 1949, NFL teams were actually drafting African-American players.

But not Washington. Not under George Preston Marshall, who appears on the left in the attached photo, with Sammy Baugh on the right. Marshall held out for another 13 years.

“He loved being a holdout because he loved the attention,” Thomas G. Smith, author of Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins, said of Marshall on NPR in 2011. “His excuse for being the only holdout [was] the Redskins are the South’s team and the South is segregated. So is the nation’s capital, and this is my primary audience.”

Marshall’s intransigence attracted the attention of John F. Kennedy, who became the President in early 1961. Kennedy refused to allow the team to play in its then-new stadium (which eventually would be renamed for his brother, Robert F. Kennedy) over Marshall’s refusal to integrate the team.

Come 1962, Kennedy reiterated that the team would not play in the new stadium unless and until it drafted or signed a black player. Marshall relented, selecting Syracuse running back Ernie Davis. (Marshall refused to select Davis personally, sending his coach to the draft in Marshall’s place.)

The team traded Davis, but Mitchell and five other African-Americans were signed in 1962. And, according to Smith, Mitchell said he never had any issues with Marshall — but that Mitchell absorbed plenty of insults from the team’s fans.

“Bobby was an individual that was thrown into the arena of being a victim for no reason,” Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown said, via the Associated Press. “He had to suffer for being black more than any person I know that played football at the time I played. With that kind of ability, if he were white, everybody on this earth would know who he was.”

Plenty of people currently know who Marshall is, but not for good reasons. And, coincidentally, it was Marshall who adopted for the franchise a nickname that is regarded as a dictionary-defined slur, and that a significant portion of Native Americans regard as offensive.