In 1933, NFL owners secretly banned Black players from the league. Thirteen years later, four Black players—Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Bill Willis, and Marion Motley—reintegrated pro football.

The Forgotten Four broke the race barrier in professional football one year before Jackie Robinson’s historic, and widely recognized, debut in the Major Leagues. This is their story.

It's a story that's been largely buried. But it's a story that matters today, to help understand the league's complicated relationship with race.

The four-part narrative podcast is hosted by Chelsea Stark-Jones, who worked for the NFL for a decade before coming to The Ringer. It’s co-reported by Lex Pryor, whose voice also appears throughout the series. Blackballed will run on the Ringer NFL feed.

A Short Q&A With Chelsea Stark-Jones

The men at the center of this story are called the “Forgotten Four.” What inspired you to tell their forgotten story?
I worked for the NFL’s media group for about a decade, and a lot of the content I produced was about Black stories, both inside and outside the NFL. That’s how I first heard about the “Forgotten Four.” When I came to The Ringer in early 2022, I wanted to continue to tell stories that were impactful.

Full disclosure: When I first pitched this story, I didn't imagine hosting it myself. But in conversations with colleagues about my love-hate relationship with the NFL, we realized that my passion for the subject could help bring the story to life.

This is a story about something that happened almost a hundred years ago. How does it help explain the NFL today?
I’m a strong believer in the past informing the present, and that couldn’t be more true than with the story of Kenny, Woody, Bill, and Marion. On the one hand, you have a very old story about Black players being shut out of the league. But fast-forward to the modern NFL, and you see Colin Kaepernick and Brian Flores being shut out of opportunities, among so many others. It's hard to ignore the connection to the league's original sin—its decision to keep Black players out, through what's known today as the “gentlemen's agreement.”

What was the most surprising thing you learned while reporting and researching this project?
I learned a lot during the making of Blackballed, but perhaps the most surprising story was about how the Black media in Los Angeles held the recently-arrived Rams’ feet to the fire, demanding they sign Black players in 1946. If it weren’t for those prominent and powerful Black journalists, led by Halley Harding, we may have never seen Kenny Washington and Woody Strode wearing L.A. Rams uniforms. Without them, I do believe it would have been many more years before the reintegration of the NFL.

Listen to the trailer below:

Listen to Episode 1