Who you calling a Redskin?

• Author: Banks, Paul M.
• Position: Athletic Arena - Washington Redskins

DURING HALFTIME of the Dallas-Washington National Football League game earlier this season, NBC analyst and broadcaster Bob Costas offered his view of the Redskins nickname controversy: "There is no reason to believe that owner Daniel Snyder, or any official or player from his team, harbors animus toward Native Americans or wishes to disrespect them. This is undoubtedly also true of the vast majority of those who don't think twice about the longstanding moniker--and, in fact, as best can be determined, even a majority of Native Americans say they are not offended."

Washington Redskins founder George Preston Marshall probably did not mean any offense when he named his professional football team. His second coach was a man whose mother was thought to have partial Sioux ancestry. This lineage never was confirmed, but Marshall changed the name from Braves to Redskins in this coach's honor, anyway. However, while it does not appear that Marshall harbored any intentional prejudices or bigotry toward Native-Americans, his attitude against African-Americans was quite clear. He was against racial equality, and quite brazen about it.

"For 24 years Marshall was identified as the leading racist in the NFL," the late university professor Charles Ross famously stated.

Marshall was born in West Virginia in 1896, just 19 years after Civil War reconstruction of the South officially was completed. At the age of 36, he founded a football team that then was located in Boston. He originally named the club Braves, also the "Indian" moniker attached to Boston's National League baseball team, whose stadium they shared. The following season, the team moved to Boston's Fenway Park, home of the American League's Red Sox, and changed its name to Redskins. The club moved to Washington, D.C., in 1937.

Marshall went out of his way to make his team the South's favorite squad, stocking it with players and practices that appealed to the states residing within the old Confederacy. Marshall's primary intentions were more likely economic than sociopolitical, as the franchise actually was the southernmost team in the NFL at the time.

The marketing plan and financial interests held by Marshall dictated appealing to southern audiences and their markets. Southern football fans were fully onboard with Jim Crow during this time period. Many members of Marshall's target audience were relics of the antebellum, who believed in segregation as the status quo; they prized both de jure...