Sports & Entertainment No matter who wins, the first Super Bowl with 2 Black quarterbacks will make history

By Becky Sullivan, NPR

A couple Sundays ago, Doug Williams was watching football. He wasn’t rooting for any of the teams, exactly, in the NFL’s two conference championship games, the winners of which would advance to the Super Bowl.

Instead, he said, he was rooting for two players: Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes, the starting quarterbacks of the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, respectively — both of whom, like Williams, are Black.

First came Philadelphia, which cruised to victory over the San Francisco 49ers. “I sat there patiently after Jalen and the Eagles had won that game,” Williams said.

Then came the Chiefs game — a tense back-and-forth against the Cincinnati Bengals that came down to a Kansas City field goal in the final seconds to win 23-20.

“When that ball went through the uprights, I can tell you this — cold chills went through my body, and I got a little emotion,” Williams said in an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered. “There wasn’t no tears running, but I had eyes full of water.”

The emotion he felt was decades in the making — 35 long years since Williams became the first Black quarterback to start in, and win, a Super Bowl when he was under center for the

Washington football team in their 1988 championship run.

In the decades since then, Black quarterbacks have come to be a common sight in NFL games, thriving in a position once reserved exclusively for white men.

Yet the sport’s biggest stage had never featured two — until now.

On Sunday, for the first time in 57 Super Bowls, both teams will start a Black quarterback. The two players, Mahomes and Hurts, have had superlative seasons. Both are finalists for the Associated Press Most Valuable Player award, and Mahomes is expected to win.

And speaking to media this week, both acknowledged the long history of Black quarterbacks who fought to pave the way for their opportunity this weekend.

“I think about all the rich history in this game, and to be part of such an historic event, historic moment, it’s special,” said Hurts on Monday.

“It’s historic,” said Mahomes. “So many people laid the foundation before us, and to be playing with a guy like Jalen, who I know is doing it the right way, it’s going to be a special moment that I hope lives on forever.”

A long history of discrimination

The NFL, once entirely offlimits to Black players, began to integrate in earnest throughout the

1950s. Washington, the last team to desegregate, finally drafted its first Black player in 1962.

Yet even as Black players joined teams in growing numbers, team owners and managers continued to discriminate against them — especially in so-called “thinking positions” like center, middle linebacker and quarterback.

“They felt Black men were inherently inferior, that Black quarterbacks — in their minds — could not lead white players in the NFL, and they just weren’t smart enough,” said Jason Reid, a sportswriter for ESPN and author of the book Rise of the Black Quarterback: What It Means for America.

White players dominated those leadership positions, he said, while Black players were relegated to positions that were thought to be more physical than intellectual, like running back, cornerback and wide receiver.

“It was just understood that if you were a Black quarterback in college, you were moving to another position [in the NFL]. And it really just came down to systemic racism,” Reid told NPR’s Morning Edition.

For every “first Black quarterback to ____” milestone, there’s a story about how a Black man’s abilities were underestimated by white coaches and owners.

There’s Marlin Briscoe, the first Black player in the Super Bowl era to start a game at quarterback. The

Denver Broncos wanted to convert him to cornerback, but soon the team’s white quarterback was injured and the white backup played poorly, forcing the Broncos to give Briscoe a chance.

Then there’s Warren Moon, the first Black quarterback to enter the NFL Hall of Fame.

Despite leading the University of Washington to a Rose Bowl victory in 1978, no NFL team showed an interest in him. Instead, Moon spent six years in the Canadian Football League, where he won five straight championships.

After making the switch to the NFL, Moon was named to the Pro Bowl nine times.

“I’m so proud to see Jalen and Patrick as the first 2 African American QBs to face each other in the Super Bowl,” Moon wrote last week when the Eagles and Chiefs advanced to the Super Bowl. “We have come a long way.”

And of course, there’s Doug Williams, the first Black quarterback taken in the first round of the draft, the first Black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl, and the first Black quarterback to be named Super Bowl MVP.

Williams was only scouted by one NFL coach before he graduated from college. He was for a time the lowestpaid starting quarterback in the league. Despite his Super Bowl heroics, his