Feb. 13 talk: When segregation ended at Victory Stadium

In August 1961, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Colts were scheduled to play a pre-season football game at Victory Stadium in Roanoke. However, a Virginia statute required that seating for the contest be segregated. In response, a local civil rights lawyer and a local minister brought national attention to the injustice of the law by organizing the first successful civil rights boycott of a professional sporting event.

Attorney Reuben E. Lawson, who had served as president of the Roanoke chapter of the NAACP and on the organization’s legal staff and the Rev. Raymond R. Wilkinson, president of the Roanoke chapter, stepped up to suggest it was time to integrate seating. The Roanoke NAACP — which Lawson represented — filed suit but it sat in court, unheard. With the game approaching, the NAACP tried another tack: It sent telegrams to all the Black players and asked them to boycott the game if Victory Stadium wasn’t integrated. That precipitated a crisis that went all the way to the NFL’s new commissioner, Pete Rozelle. In the end, Roanoke agreed to look the other way and ignore state law, and the NFL never again played before a segregated crowd.

Based on his article in the next Journal of the Historical Society of Western Virginia, Professor Alex Long of the University of Tennessee College of Law will deliver the talk, Victory Stadium: How a Lawyer, a Minister, and Twenty Football Players Helped End Segregation in Virginia and Professional Sports. This event is a joint presentation of the Historical Society of Western Virginia, Roanoke College Anthropology Concentration, Roanoke College Center for Studying Structures of Race, Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation and Salem Museum and Historical Society.

The talk is scheduled Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. in the Logan Gallery on the campus of Roanoke College. Admission is free. Parking is available in the following Roanoke College parking lots: P10, P11, P14 and P28.

Alex Long is the Williford Gragg Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law.  He grew up in Roanoke and received his undergraduate degree from James Madison University and his law degree from the College of William & Mary.