![]() Reed, for example, played for two months on a broken tibia. Their status was tenuous, so they played through debilitating injuries. They were pitted against each other, knowing that a new arrival would mean a Black veteran would have to be let go. He laboured under an unspoken quota system capping the number of Black players to four or five per team, regardless of their talent. Reed also discovered subtler forms of racism. One Calgary coach forbade Black players from bringing white dates to the team banquet, even though one Black player’s wife was white. Reed said Black players on other CFL teams would get prank calls from teammates pretending to be members of the KKK. ![]() “OK, can I play with you guys now? Am I white enough for you?” the player said. Reed said that after one Roughrider practice, another Black player came out of the shower completely covered in white talcum powder. Some CFL players refused to shower at the same time as their Black teammates. He said most teammates were supportive, but that didn’t mean everyone was equal. “Being a Black man in Western Canada in the 1960s could be, to put it mildly, inconvenient.” “I discovered it wasn’t as tolerant as people made it out to be,” Reed said in his 2011 autobiography, George Reed: His Life and Times, co-written with John Chaput. He also rushed for the winning score in his first playoff game.īut off the field, Reed was questioning his decision to move to the Canadian Prairies. Reed made an immediate impression on the field for the Roughriders, scoring the winning touchdown in his first game. He signed a contract with the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League, and arrived in Regina in 1963. ![]() But like other Black players, Reed had heard Canada was more inclusive. Several teams in the National Football League showed interest in Reed. He endured the long, painful rehabilitation, returned to the team, then rushed for more than 500 yards in his senior year and was named to the national all-star team. They broke off the other engagements, got to know each other better in weekly phone conversations and were married a year later.ĭuring a college game, Reed shattered several bones in his leg. Reed and Levias were engaged to other people at the time, but their connection was undeniable. Everyone attended church together the next morning, and Reed cooked them all brunch. She was on a road trip from Texas with her parents. That’s where he met Angie Levias at a family social gathering. Reed accepted an offer from Washington State University in 1959. He was a star player on both his high school baseball and basketball teams, but switched to football because it offered better chances at a university scholarship. He lived in a diverse neighbourhood and doesn’t recall any overt racism. When he was young, the Reed family packed up and left for Seattle, where his father worked in a steel factory during the Second World War. Segregation, enforced by the justice system and the Ku Klux Klan, maintained the racist social and economic hierarchy. lived in the “coloured” section of Vicksburg in the 1930s. In 1874, Vicksburg did elect a Black sheriff, Peter Crosby, but he was soon kidnapped and run out of town by a white mob, which then murdered as many as 50 Black men in their homes or farm fields. The Union Army captured it on July 4, 1863, after a 47-day siege.Īlthough slavery was officially abolished after the war, Jim Crow laws ensured the oppression of the area’s majority Black population continued. President Abraham Lincoln called Vicksburg, Miss., “the key to the South” during the American Civil War.
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