Sherman Howard, last of the players who reintegrated pro football in the 1940s, has died at 94

Sherman Howard in 1968. | Sun Times files

Sherman Howard of Richton Park, who died Thursday at 94, had been one of the oldest living African American NFL players as well as one of the oldest living former Cleveland Browns players.

He was the last of the players who reintegrated pro football in the 1940s, after the establishment of a color line in 1933, according to Jon Kendle, director of archives and football information for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

He went on to become a coach, athletic director and physical education teacher at Chicago’s Harlan High School.

But first Mr. Howard played college football for the University of Iowa and the University of Nevada.

In an era in which it was common for black players to face segregation, racial slurs and being spit on when they played, the Wendell Phillips high school alumnus went to play professionally from 1949 to 1953, first for the old New York Yankees, which evolved into the New York Yanks, and then for the Cleveland Browns.

Coach Sherman Howard with players at Harlan High School circa the early 1970s.

“When Sherman played football, the black and the white players could not stay in the same place,” said his wife Jeanette. “The whites stayed in a hotel, and the blacks stayed with [African American] families.”

Among his coaches was the famed Paul Brown, for whom the Cleveland Browns are named. “Paul Brown said, ‘If you don’t accept my players, we won’t play,’ and that helped,” Jeanette Howard said. She said he told her “they would be spit on and called n----- and all kinds of things.”

He had faced racial tensions at the University of Iowa, where, according to his wife, “The white girls liked talking to him, and somebody put on [one of the girl’s] mirror ‘n----- l----.’ And he said, ‘I’m outta here.’ ’’

After that, she said he moved to UCLA “for a hot second” before ending up in the late 1940s at the University of Nevada.

Growing up near Bronzeville, he would see legendary boxer Jack Johnson around the neighborhood. He became friends with Olympian Jesse Owens. While playing football in New York, his wife said, Mr. Howard belonged to a club where fellow member Paul Robeson, the performer and civil rights icon, encouraged Mr. Howard to one day return to Chicago to “give back to our community,”

Mr. Howard died of heart problems at Franciscan Health in Olympia Fields. He had a triple-bypass operation in 1993, and his doctors told him then the surgery might hold him for another 13 years or so, his wife said. She thinks his physical fitness helped him live for years beyond that prediction.

“He was a health fanatic,” she said. “Till the day he died, he was doing his exercises.”