When Pride Still Mattered<\/a>, has documented times Lombardi would go to a restaurant in the segregated South and be denied service, because wait staff believed he was Black.<\/p>\nWhen the Packers played preseason games in the South, Lombardi used his Army connections to establish team headquarters in integrated military quarters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt stemmed from his faith. His strongest suit is that he would not tolerate racism, ever,\u201d Bill Curry, a Southern white player who had never shared a football huddle with a Black player before playing for Green Bay, told America.<\/p>\n
\u201cSweat smells the same on everybody. We need everybody. I don\u2019t care what color your skin is. I care if you\u2019re a decent person, and I care if you can play football,\u201d said Mr. Curry.<\/p>\n
Lombardi encouraged Davis to get his master\u2019s degree in business from the University of Chicago during the off-season. Davis became one of America\u2019s top Black entrepreneurs and sat on countless boards of directors, including that of Marquette University in Milwaukee, perhaps as a nod to his Jesuit-educated coach.<\/p>\n
That same coach who believed in finding God in all people became the first to regularly draft Black players in the NFL draft\u2019s first round, starting in 1961, with perennial All-Pro defensive back Herb Adderley from Michigan State. Lombardi followed in 1963 with Robinson, an engineering student from Penn State, and helped him grow into arguably the best pass-covering linebacker in NFL history.<\/p>\n
\u201cVince broke the mold in drafting Black guys in the first round,\u201d Mr. Robinson said about the daily communicant who prayed the rosary on the way to his coaching office at Lambeau Field. \u201cLike Vince always said, \u2018I don\u2019t draft by color. I draft by football-playing ability.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Their ability stood out on a defense that was the bedrock of the Packers dynasty that also won consecutive N.F.L. titles in 1965, 1966 and 1967, with the last two titles including wins in the first two Super Bowls in January 1967 and 1968.<\/p>\n
Lombardi also gave vocal support to another one of his Black starters on that 1965 team, the defensive end Lionel Aldridge, when he announced his intention to marry Vicky Wankier, who was white. The pair had met resistance in the era before the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia struck down laws against interracial marriage.<\/p>\n
By 1968, Lombardi\u2019s last year in Green Bay as general manager, his locker room had 16 Black players. Five of Lombardi\u2019s Black Packers\u2014Adderley, Davis, Robinson, Tunnell and Wood\u2014were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n
Integration within what was arguably the greatest dynasty in NFL history also changed attitudes in a league that rarely had rosters on which more than 10 percent of the players weren\u2019t white. By the time Lombardi died in 1970, Super Bowl championship teams had majority-Black rosters.<\/p>\n
Lombardi\u2019s embrace of all people went beyond race. He had witnessed his brother Harold, who was gay, endure prejudice throughout his life.<\/p>\n
Lombardi had three gay players on his 1969 team in Washington\u2014the first-team, All-Pro tight end Jerry Smith and the running backs Dave Kopay and Ray McDonald. Lombardi discouraged any discrimination against these players within his team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know he coached openly gay players, and I think he was the first NFL coach to do that,\u201d said Mr. Curry. \u201cHe saw the whole person. If they could play ball, they would make his teams.\u201d<\/p>\n
No doubt Lombardi\u2019s own experiences with his family and in his childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn did much to influence his open-mindedness and willingness to tolerate difference in an age that did not always welcome it. But so too did the lessons he learned in Keating Hall and elsewhere at Fordham\u2014lessons that helped him integrate faith, philosophy, truth and social responsibility in a way that helped him to reach excellence as a man as well as a coach.<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A sunny Sept. 19, 1965, in Western Pennsylvania saw coach Vince Lombardi\u2019s Green Bay Packers take on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2072],"tags":[7,41,345,2514,2513,6,428,55468,9],"class_list":{"0":"post-469933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-green-bay-packers","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-green-bay","10":"tag-green-bay-packers","11":"tag-greenbay","12":"tag-greenbaypackers","13":"tag-nfl","14":"tag-packers","15":"tag-social-justice","16":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115424943834909081","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}