Teams and Their Names
Back in 1932, George Preston Marshall founded a team that played in the National Football League. They were based in Boston, home to the pro baseball team the Boston Braves. They took that name, since they played in Braves Field. After their first season, they moved to Fenway Park for home games and to round out the change, they dropped the name Braves in favor of what they found to be similar…Redskins. Their coach was part Sioux. It all made sense to them at the time. The team kept the Redskins name when it moved to Washington, D.C. in 1937, and kept the name until yesterday.
I have mixed feelings about the name issue; I’m concerned about how quickly we’re making some of these decisions, in an effort to placate a certain element of society. Maybe it is the right choice, to change…but it seems folks are “waking up” pretty quickly, and perhaps not genuinely.
My thinking on this topic was changed in part about 25 years ago. I was at an academic conference, and Vernon Bellicourt, a Native American leader and activist, spoke on the issue of team nicknames. He displayed a poster they were using at the time to help frame the conversation. It showed images of baseball jerseys with fictional team nicknames…each one, a term that a group might find to be derogatory. Think of slurs frequently used against blacks, Jews, Italians, etc. … each slur emblazoned across a baseball jersey. The heading at the top of the poster simply read, “How Would You Like It?”
That made a huge impact on me. I’ve tried to distinguish between names like Redskins, which is hard to view positively, and Braves or Warriors, which can be construed to be a tribute…I guess like Vikings, Buccaneers and Patriots.
I love and believe we should preserve history. So if Redskins should go, that’s probably fine. But let’s not forget that the team was called that, or else we won’t know enough to avoid doing the same thing in the future.
