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4 Prince’s Black Company In 1946, the undefeated Ken High Red Raiders was the best scholastic football team in western Pennsylvania. The squad’s fame spread far beyond the Pittsburgh area, and consequently, it was selected to play a Texas school in Miami’s Orange Bowl.The invitation must have thrilled the players from the cold, grimy industrial boomtown along the banks of the Allegheny River. Nevertheless, they refused to travel to Florida. Less than a month before the contest, the Red Raiders learned that because of the Sunshine State’s segregation statutes, no African Americans could take the field with whites. As a result, Ken High’s sophomore star, Willie Thrower, was barred from competing. Vince Pisano, one of Thrower’s talented teammates, speaking nearly fifty years later, explained that “[w]e voted not to go. . . . [i]f he couldn’t go, we would not go.” Thrower went on to lead Ken High to another western Pennsylvania championship the following season and to earn All-America honors his senior year. After graduation, he played for Michigan State University, which, by 1950, had ten former Red Raiders on its football team.1 At MSU,Thrower lettered as a backup quarterback (the first black to play the position in the Big Ten Conference) on the undefeated 1952 team that won the national championship. He later played briefly for the Chicago Bears, becoming the National Football League’s first African American quarterback. Hometown area whites did not hesitate to effusively praise Thrower in their recollections. “Willie would compare with the best players today,” Pisano asserted. “He could be right there with the [Dan] Marinos and [Joe] Montanas,” two western Pennsylvania quarterbacks elected to the NFL’s Hall of Fame. “Willie was the greatest ,” proclaimed Ed Modzelewski, a high-school opponent who later garnered 74 / Prince’s Black Company All-America honors at the University of Maryland and played professionally for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns during the 1950s. Ex–high school and college teammate Bill Horrell called Thrower “probably the greatest passer I have ever seen. . . . [h]e could throw 60 yards falling backward and still hit the mark.” The 111-year-old Valley News Dispatch announced Thrower’s death on 20 February 2002 by a front-page headline. Sportswriter George Guido eulogized him in a column that mentioned Thrower’s white schoolboy comrades’ decision to forego a trip to Florida on his behalf. A year before his passing, ABC television had publicized his achievements and travails to a nationwide audience. In 2006, a statue was erected in his honor next to the New Kensington gridiron on which he rose to stardom.2 The laudatory comments of Thrower’s local white former teammates and opponents somewhat cryptically protested his treatment by the football establishment .They beg the question of why, if Thrower was so talented, did he not play more in the National Football League? Stories about the segregated contest at the Orange Bowl suggest an answer. Thrower himself was more direct. Referring to the time after his senior season when he was designated the captain of an all-star team that was slated to play in Corpus Christi, Texas, Thrower recounted how, “[w]hen they found out I was black, they said I couldn’t play in the game.” Regarding his abbreviated NFL career, he criticized the Chicago Bears for denying him a fair opportunity to prove himself. “I was a hell of a passer,” he noted. “If yesterday was like today, I would have been there. Having a professional black quarterback was unheard of.”These statements assume greater significance considering the comments of his white Ken High teammate George France: “From the very beginning, you knew Willie was something special. . . . [he] had lots of reasons to have a big ego, but he never did.” Similarly, upon hearing of Thrower ’s death, his high school coach’s aged widow compared his demise to “‘losing a member of the family’ because she and her husband ‘liked Willie so much.’”3 Willie Thrower often told his youngest son Melvin that “the only way to make it is to be a giant . . . [y]ou got to be a giant in everything you do.” At his funeral in New Kensington’s Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church, the Reverend Mildred C. Taylor, before 150 mourners, which included an NFL representative (from the Pittsburgh Steelers rather than the Chicago Bears), eulogized him by reading the story of David and Goliath.4 Statements by...

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