Who is George Flippin?
George Flippin University of Nebraska, 1891-1894 (Running Back)
The son of freed slaves, George A. Flippin starred at halfback for the University of Nebraska football team from 1891 to 1894. Flippin was a sensational athlete and remarkable player, but his presence on the Nebraska gridiron was the cause of controversy on several different occasions. In 1892, the Nebraska football team was scheduled to travel to Columbia, Missouri to take on the University of Missouri Tigers. However, as historian Charles Martin details, the game never took place because of Missouri’s policy of athletic segregation and Nebraska’s refusal to keep their star black player on the bench:
Upon discovering Flippin’s race, Missouri demanded that Nebraska leave him behind for the game. Nebraska officials and students rejected what they considered to be an unfair request. Nebraska’s student literary magazine denounced the ‘race prejudice’ of the Missourians and declared that its school ‘shall play with our team made up according to our fashion, or not at all.’ Unmoved by these protests, Missouri administrators forfeited the match, thereby avoiding what one critic sarcastically termed ‘the risk of being knocked down and trampled on by a negro.’1
Missouri’s refusal to play against Flippin in Columbia was not the only act of discrimination he faced during the 1892 season. When the Nebraska team traveled to Denver, Colorado, to play the Denver Athletic Club, “management of a hotel dining room and an opera house in Denver refused admission to Flippin,” yet “his teammates demonstrated their support for him by walking out of both establishments.”2 Moreover, during Nebraska’s final game of the 1892 campaign, a contest against Iowa played in Omaha, hotel management of Omaha’s Paxton hotel objected to Flippin getting a room. Once again, Flippin’s teammates stood up for him. Eventually, management relented and allowed Flippin to stay in a room, but did set up a separate dining area so the other white patrons of the hotel would be kept unaware of his presence. 3
Flippin in team picture, circa 1894
Via Univerity of Nebraska-Lincoln
Flippin’s play was never negatively affected by the mistreatment he received, as he established himself as Nebraska’s star player during his remaining two years there. He became known for his punishing running style, and for his ability to score touchdowns: recording twelve for the Cornhuskers during the 1894 season in just eight games. Despite Flippin’s success, and the fact that his teammates and university officials had stood up for him during the various controversies he dealt with in 1892, Flippin was never able to become captain of the team. This was because Nebraska’s head coach at the time bought into one of the prevailing stereotypes of black athletes during this era: that were naturally gifted physical specimens that lacked the mental capacity to truly lead.
“It takes a man with brains to be a captain; all there is to Flippin is brute force…I don’t take exception to him because he’s colored, but it takes a head to be a football Captain.”
Nebraska Coach Frank Crawford
As the team’s star player, Flippin was elected as team captain in 1894 by a player vote of 8 to 7. Yet his election was voided by Head Coach Frank Crawford who called Flippin “overrated.” Though he claimed the veto had nothing to do with race, Crawford explained his rationale for the veto by saying, “It takes a man with brains to be a captain; all there is to Flippin is brute force…I don’t take exception to him because he’s colored, but it takes a head to be a football Captain.4
Despite Crawford’s insistence that his blocking Flippin from the captaincy was not racially motivated, it clear from the language he uses that he had fallen prey to the common perceptions about black athletes during this time period. Indeed, as historian Robert Bellinger points out, in the 1890s “African Americans were represented in popular culture as physical beings. They were the antithesis of whites who were represented as intelligent beings. Black were the body while whites were the brains.” Moreover, Bellinger notes that because the majority of African American football players in this early period—including Flippin—played halfback or fullback, a position whose requirements were almost entirely physical (run past someone or through someone), it was a position that whites of the era felt was “ideally suited” for blacks.5 Running back or not, Crawford’s implication that Flippin was a man that lacked intelligence was simply untrue: Flippin was a stand-out student who would go on to receive a medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago, and become a successful doctor in Nebraska. He passed away in 1929, but in 1974 he was posthumously voted into the Nebraska Football Hall of Fame, becoming the first African American to receive that honor.
