Background
Kenny Washington was born in Los Angeles, Calif. , the son of Edgar Washington, a standout baseball player in the Negro League.
Kenny Washington was born in Los Angeles, Calif. , the son of Edgar Washington, a standout baseball player in the Negro League.
He attended grade schools and graduated from Lincoln High School in Los Angeles, where he was acclaimed by many as the greatest high school football player in southern California history. In 1936, Washington enrolled in the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), at the time one of the few universities to recruit African-American athletes.
He starred in baseball and football, as well as in boxing and track. Although his performance on the baseball diamond surpassed that of his UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson-Washington batted . 454 in 1937 - it was on the gridiron that he excelled. Sportswriters stereotyped Washington as "The Kingfish, " a character on the "Amos 'n' Andy" radio show, and the backfield combination of Washington and Robinson as the "Gold Dust twins, " a reference to the two black children pictured on boxes of Gold Dust soap flakes. In three years, Washington brought UCLA's previously unheralded football program into the national spotlight and its athletic fund out of the red - while waiting on tables at nearby movie studios to earn his living expenses. He called signals and ran with exceptional power and deception as the tailback in UCLA's single-wing offense. His passes as quarterback were often spectacular; six times he completed passes of more than sixty yards in the air. In his senior year, Washington played both offense and defense, 580 of a possible 600 minutes, and carried UCLA to its first undefeated season. That year he led the nation in total offense with 1, 370 yards and was the first UCLA Bruin chosen for an All-American Team. As he left the last game of his collegiate career, more than one hundred thousand spectators in the Los Angeles Coliseum rose to applaud him. "It was my greatest thrill, " he recalled. Washington said that after the 1940 All-Star game, "George Halas kept me around for a month trying to figure out how to get me into the league. I left before he suggested that I go to Poland first. " National Football League (NFL) owners had blocked Halas's plan to sign Washington for the Chicago Bears. After earning his B. A. in arts and letters in 1941, Washington worked as a Los Angeles policeman. From 1941 to 1945, his only opportunity to play football was on semiprofessional pickup teams and in the Pacific Coast League. During these years, he was "beaten up" for as little as $50 per game. Fans came early to witness Washington's long warm-up throws. "They say I passed one hundred yards. But to tell the truth, " he confided, "the distance was really ninety-three. " On March 21, 1946, at age twenty-eight, Washington signed with the Los Angeles Rams, the first African American to be signed by any modern, major-league professional sports team. (Jackie Robinson did not join the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team until 1947. ) The Rams' press release described Washington as "one of the greatest all-around halfbacks in the history of American football, the first player of his race to be signed by a National Football League club since Joe Lillard played for the Chicago Cardinals more than a dozen years ago. " It disingenuously continued, "The National Football League has never had a rule against the use of Negro players and no precedent is being set in the signing of Washington, though for one reason or another members of that race have not played in the league since about 1933. " Newly transferred from Cleveland, the Rams had been negotiating to play in the publicly owned Los Angeles Coliseum. "The Coliseum people warned the Rams that if they practiced discrimination, they couldn't use the stadium. When the NFL people began thinking about all those seats and the money they could make filling 'em, they decided my kind wasn't so bad after all, " Washington explained. Washington's NFL career lasted only three seasons. The years of brutal semiprofessional football had damaged his already fragile knees, but after a slow first year, he hit stride in 1947. Running out of the "T" formation, he led the NFL with 7. 4 yards per carry. His ninety-two-yard touchdown run against the Chicago Cardinals was the longest of the NFL season. Despite his success, when the Rams visited Washington, D. C. , Washington could not stay in the team hotel and was barred by the guard at the Griffith Stadium players' entrance. His revenge that Sunday was three touchdowns against the Redskins. Throughout his career, Washington was targeted by racist opponents. After a particularly vicious battering on the field, Washington told a Ram teammate, "It's hell to be a Negro, Jim. " "I'll never forget the hurt in his eyes, " recalled Jim Hardy. "But his statement wasn't one of self-pity by any means. It was simply a social comment, and he was alone, and there wasn't any way to comfort him. " In his last two seasons with the Rams, Washington gained 859 yards, averaging 6. 1 yards per carry. Jackie Robinson praised him as the "greatest football player I have ever seen. " Ram quarterback Bob Waterfield, a member of the Football Hall of Fame, remembered Washington as "a great gentleman. If he had come into the National Football League directly from UCLA, he would have been, in my opinion, the best the NFL has ever seen. " After the last game of the 1948 season, which took place on a date designated "Kenny Washington Day, " he retired from football. At age thirty, his knees were beyond rehabilitation. In 1950, Washington tried out with the New York Giants baseball team, but his knees again did not cooperate and he was cut before the season started. In later years he was a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers and represented a Scotch whiskey distribution firm. Washington died of polyarteritis at the University Medical Center in Los Angeles, within sight of the UCLA football practice field.
