Bobby Bell’s journey from segregation to Hall of Fame is a snapshot of race and sports
Bobby Bell lives on a golf course these days. He used to own a barbecue chain. And the room literally labeled “Man Cave” in his home provides a panorama of a remarkable journey enabled by football, force of will and a magnetic personality.
Each of those aspects of his life speak to the essential scope of the story of the Chiefs legend, both on the cusp of his 80th birthday (June 17) and at a time it’s worth reflecting on sports and race in our country.
Bell grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, where he’d cut grass at the country club and wonder why he wasn’t allowed to play golf there … and where he worked in the kitchen at Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge but couldn’t eat in the restaurant … and started his high school football career playing six-man ball since his segregated school didn’t have the resources of the nearby white school.
“People say, ‘Come on, did you live through this?’ ” Bell said.
Even as he rode in the back of buses, drank from “colored” water fountains and knew to avoid “white” bathrooms, nothing quite brought it all into focus like the day a white friend he was playing with said, “Let’s go to the movie show.”
Bell ran home to ask his mother if he could go. When she asked who he’d go with, and he told her, she said he couldn’t.
“And she had to explain it to me,” he said.
‘Can’t win the fight if you’re angry’
It was a lot to explain, then and now — particularly in the wake of the evil embodied in the death of George Floyd beneath the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin that was captured on video and catalyzed a new frontier of protest.
Now, though, Bell thinks many are hearing more clearly and that there is a great awakening in the middle of the pause caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, he figures, people can’t get away with turning away and saying, “I’m not going to get involved.”
“Everyone is involved,” said Bell, who went to the University of Minnesota. “It hurts everyone.”
The prevailing wave that includes an enormous presence of white protesters, Bell believes, has flushed out many of those either prone to denial about racism or not owning up to their own prejudices.
“People have walked away from it for years; you can’t walk away from it now,” he said. “Segregation has been out there, stays out there. People don’t want to talk about it. They’re uncomfortable talking about it.
“If you want to talk about it, I’ll talk to you about it.”
The relentlessly gregarious Bell in part meant the latter point in a more general way: that he typically will talk to anyone about anything.
He’s that guy who constantly calls former teammates and fellow Pro Football Hall of Famers just to see if they are OK, the guy who wants you to remember he was in the room, the guy who will wave at a neighbor again and again and again until they wave back.
But he also had some substantial points to make about current affairs, starting with his observation that all the “good stuff” will be tarnished if not kept separated from the violence and destruction and looting that largely appear driven by interlopers.
When he sees that, he thinks about 1968 and the tumultuous aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
At the request of then-Chiefs coach Hank Stram, Bell said, Bell and teammates Buck Buchanan, Curtis McClinton and Otis Taylor met with angry rioters in the city and urged restraint.
“It’s got to be peaceful,” he said, recalling saying, “‘There’s got to be another way of doing this.’”
Amiable as he is, I asked Bell if he ever had felt angry about racial discrimination, including what he initially encountered with housing here. Whatever anger he might have felt, he always believed he needed to control it instead of the other way around.
“You can’t win the fight if you’re angry,” he said, invoking a boxing analogy and adding, “If you’re mad, the guy’s going to beat you up because you’re going to forget what you’re supposed to do.
“So just keep doing the right thing.”
Face to face with John F. Kennedy
Along with athletic talent and drive that led to him being named one of the top 100 players in NFL history, that mindset helped Bell along his improbable move from Shelby to Minnesota — where he was one of just five Black players when he arrived in 1959 on the first plane flight of his life.
In the process, he went from segregation to what might have been isolation if he weren’t so socially nimble and reaching out to people right and left.
It was like going from one country to another, one with many more people and most of them white and some of whom viewed him as a curiosity. But he set about embracing his father’s advice:
To behave impeccably because he already had three strikes against him as a Black person. And to keep his eyes forward on an education that Bell formally concluded in 2015.
“‘If you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, you have no direction and you’re going to run into a wall,’” he remembered being told. “‘Just keep going, just do the right thing.’”
Even when it was a challenge.
Not long after he got there, Bell recalled, Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Sid Hartman ripped coach Murray Warmath for wasting a scholarship on a kid from another part of the country he’d never seen play instead of Minnesota or Wisconsin boys.
When Bell saw Hartman passing one day, he called out to him and said, “Why don’t you interview me sometime?”
Imitating Hartman’s voice, Bell said he replied, “You have to earn the right for me to interview you.”
As Bell became a factor on Minnesota’s 1960 national championship team, Hartman sought him out.
“I looked at him and said, ‘Sid, you have to earn the right to talk to me,’” Bell said, laughing. “But when I finally talked to him, we just kept on talking.”
Meaning basically ever since. Hartman, who turned 100 in March, became what Bell called a father figure.
By the time Bell’s Minnesota career ended in 1962, he was on trajectory toward a lifetime of adventure.
A little over three years removed from segregation, as an All-America that December he stood on the field at the Army-Navy Game in Philadelphia and met President John F. Kennedy — the first of five U.S. presidents he has met.
The photo of that moment “speaks a million words,” said Bell’s wife, Pam Held.
Kennedy, it turned out, had watched the Minnesota-Wisconsin game a week before, in which Bell was called for a pivotal roughing-the-passer penalty despite the Wisconsin quarterback still having the ball in his hands when Bell hit him.
“‘You got a raw deal on that call,’” Bell said Kennedy told him.
Full circle
That wasn’t the first or last time Bell got a raw deal, including when he arrived here in Kansas City only to discover that he wasn’t welcome in all restaurants and was shunned from buying dozens and dozens and dozens of homes.
“It was like, ‘No Blacks can live here, no Blacks can do this, no Blacks can do that,’” he said.
But Bell remained committed to making the best of things and appreciated his opportunities … including those earned through the vehicle of sports.
As a child, he ardently followed the exploits of Jackie Robinson, who changed America when he broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947. As a young man, Bell was grateful for what Warmath and Minnesota provided him.
As an adult, he reveled in the opportunity provided by the Chiefs and owner/founder Lamar Hunt.
“Lamar Hunt started the AFL!” said Bell, sitting up in his chair at the thought of the upstart league that liberally ushered in Black athletes and ultimately merged with the NFL.
That meant livelihoods for many who might not have had them otherwise.
As in the integration of other sports, it also meant hearts and minds were being converted in locker rooms across the country as bonds were forged toward common causes.
“You can’t win without being together,” he said, meaning both on the field and beyond.
It meant fans seeing the teams they loved become diverse … and young Black children able to envision themselves one day playing on those teams, too.
Now we’re at a new juncture, seeking another tier of progress, with the bright young likes of Patrick Mahomes and Tyrann Mathieu of the Chiefs standing as beacons in the cause from the athletic world.
But how we got here remains pivotal, too, built on the inspiring, painstaking steps of those who showed the way.
And remembering where they came from — in this case Shelby, N.C., where on Sept. 5 they will rename the main thoroughfare “Bobby Bell Boulevard” — and how they got here from there.