The Era of the Black Quarterback is Now

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Black men were really allowed to play quarterback in professional football. And it took another 20 years or so for Black stars to emerge at the position. The lineage of runs from James “Shack” Harrris, the first black player to start a season at quarterback in the history of pro football, to Doug Williams, the first black player to start and win a Super Bowl, to Michael Vick, the first black quarterback to go first in the draft, to Warren Moon, the first black quarterback enshrined in the Hall of Fame. But in the past few years, we’ve gone from the presence of a black man under center being remarkable, to being, well, unremarkable. Andscape’s Senior NFL writer Jason Reid literally wrote the book on this, Rise of the Black Quarterback: What it Means for America, and he’s on the show to discuss how we got to this era, and also look at the future of the next man up. Jayden Daniels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Jason Reed back in September you wrote about how for years writers would reach out to
0:06.0	James Shaq Harris the first black man to start a season at quarterback in the NFL and
0:10.7	Doug Williams the first black QB to win a Super Bowl
0:13.0	seeking comment anytime a new black quarterback burst onto the scene
0:16.0	but recently those calls have stopped coming my man
0:20.0	why is that?
0:21.0	Well Clinton they stopped coming because there are so many standout
0:26.0	slash star slash superstar black quarterbacks in the NFL many of whom are doing big things
0:31.7	that it no longer became a novelty.
0:35.0	It no longer became something where,
0:41.0	okay, wow, there's this black quarterback who's having a successful
0:44.4	season and leading his team to the playoffs well reporters are always looking for
0:49.4	good stories and things that don't happen often so they would call Doug Williams and James
0:54.4	Shaq Harris to get their opinion especially around playoff time but now when you
0:59.0	have so many black quarterbacks in the playoff it's just not something that's
1:01.9	unusual anymore it's just it's almost not news. While their very existence is no longer news, the current cohort of black quarterbacks in the NFL have been making headlines
1:26.2	for years.
1:27.8	And quite frankly, transforming the league with their various styles of play.
1:33.0	Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson,
1:35.0	CJ Stroud, Geno Smith,
1:38.0	the fact that there are more than a few to name
1:41.0	speaks to the massive shift towards equity that has occurred after decades of discrimination.
	...

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