Who Was the First Black Coach in the NFL?

Who was the first black coach in the NFL? Many people assume that the first African American head coach for an NFL football team was Art Shell, who coached his first NFL game as head coach of the Oakland Raiders in October of 1989. However, this assumption is not correct and Art Snell is was not the first black coach in the NFL.

The name of the person who was the first black coach in the NFL is Fritz Pollard:

• The first African American NFL coach took his position in 1921, coaching the Akron Pros.
• He was what was referred to then as a “co-coach.”
• Fritz Pollard, NFL Hall of Fame inductee, is credited also as being one of the first two African American professional football athletes as well, playing for several professional teams after his extensive collegiate career. 

Let's learn more about Fritz Pollard and his accomplishments.

Collegiate Accomplishments

Fritz Pollard also had a great deal of other athletic distinctions:

• Fritz Pollard was one of the most accomplished college athletes of his era, attending Northwestern University, Dartmouth, and Harvard before finally settling in at Brown University in 1915.
• He finished his college career there, taking the Brown Bears all the way to the Rose Bowl in 1916 and becoming the first African American athlete to participate in a Rose Bowl game.
• Pollard was the second African American student to receive All-American accolades as a college athlete.
• He went on to also coach Lincoln University’s football team in Pennsylvania before entering the pros for the Akron team as a player in 1919, the same team he would act as coach for only two years later. 

Coaching Accomplishments

It's also interesting to look at Fritz Pollard's coaching accomplishments:

• After Pollard accepted the coaching position in 1921, making him the United States’ first African American NFL coach, Pollard successfully coached the team until he left the position in 1926.
• Just two years later, Pollard formed his own team in Chicago, Illinois, called the Chicago Black Hawks.
• Pollard was the creator, owner, and coach of the Black Hawks team, which was formed with the specific purpose of introducing more African American football players and which pitted his all-black team against the predominantly white professional teams in the Chicago area.
• He also coached, for the same purposes, New York’s Brown Bomber squad from 1935 until 1938, when he began encountering difficulties because of color barriers. 

NFL Segregation

Beginning in 1934, the National Football League issued a “no-blacks” rule, refusing the hiring of any African American players into the NFL for any purpose.

Pollard was still allowed to coach his team, however he was not allowed to play any of the all-white NFL teams throughout the 12-year segregation period that was finally disbanded in 1946.

Pollard later entered into the New York business scene and was virtually forgotten about in the realm of professional football until his surviving relatives brought his being passed over as a pioneer of the game to the NFL Hall of Fame Commission’s attention, leading to his induction in February of 2005.