IASE/NAASE Working Paper Series, Paper No. 07-13 The Migration of African Americans to the Canadian Football League during the 1950s: An Escape from Discrimination? Neil Longley†, Todd Crosset††, and Steve Jefferson††† June 2007 Abstract The institutional racial discrimination that existed in American professional team sports prior to World War II resulted in African American players effectively being barred from playing in the major professional leagues. Although the NFL color barrier did officially fall in 1946, to be quickly followed by the fall of the MLB color barrier one year later when Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers, these events were just the beginning of the struggles for African American athletes. Integration proceeded very slowly during the next two decades, and economists have shown that African Americans continued to suffer from a variety of forms of discriminatory treatment. However, it is the argument of this paper that the literature that examines discrimination during this era is incomplete, in that it ignores the experiences of a small, but relatively significant, group of African American football players who actually chose to leave their own country – and correspondingly leave the racially-charged environment of mid-20th century America – to head north to play professional football in the Canadian Football League (CFL). †Department of Sport Management, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, Phone (413): 545-5059, e-mail:
[email protected] ††Department of Sport Management, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003 †††Department of Sport Management, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003 Beginning in 1946, a steady flow of African Americans began to migrate to the CFL which, at the time, was a legitimate competitor league to the NFL.