I was 16 years old when my father and I watched Doug Williams carve up the Denver Broncos up to win Super XXII in January of 1988 and I still remember what he told me when Doug won both the game and Super Bowl MVP.
“You’re don’t understand what this means right now, but you will.”
He was right because while I was happy for Doug, I didn’t truly understand what his victory truly meant until I became older and learned about the type of history that wasn’t taught at the high school I attended.
I started playing football when I was 12 years old, and wanted to be the next Walter Payton. I even convinced my mother, who knew nothing about football, to buy me a pair of Kangaroos because that’s what Payton wore.
Then in 1985, I watched Jamelle Holieway win the national championship at Oklahoma and I instantly became a Sooners fan. At that moment, I wanted to play QB and run the wishbone while playing in youth football games in the Bronx.
Holieway was the first true freshman QB to win a national championship, but he wasn’t the first Black quarterback to win one.
Minnesota’s Sandy Stephens was the first Black QB to lead a D1 college team to a title in 1960, but Clemson’s Homer Jordan was the first to actually win a title in 1981 with Clemson.
In 1988, Tony Rice led Notre Dame to a perfect 12-0 seasons and a national title, giving us another Black championship-winning college quarterback.
Yet we still lacked a Super Bowl winning Black quarterback, a fact that dissuaded many from playing the position and deterred others from believing Black players could play QB.
In 1988, that all changed when Doug Williams started for the then-Redskins in Super Bowl XXII and did what no other Black NFL quarterback had done.
But like my father told me, I didn’t truly understand the significance of the moment when Doug walked off the field with his helmet raised in the air.
Then on the night of July 19th, 1988, it hit me.
That night, I watched Jesse Jackson give his impassioned, historic speech at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, a speech that brought the house down and left people with their faces streaked with tears as he chanted “Keep hope alive!”
It was Jackson’s second attempt at running for president, his first coming in 1984 when he finished third in the primaries behind Gary Hart and Walter Mondale. It was then that he first unveiled the uniting idea of a rainbow coalition to include “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.”
Four years later, Jackson finished second in the primaries behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor, Michael Dukakis.
While Jackson didn’t duplicate Doug’s history-making feat, he showed us, especially Black and Brown people, that you could do what others doubted you could.
He united rich and poor, old and young, and all other groups who felt left out and made them feel valued. He made us believe that we could accomplish what we thought we couldn’t, and that a Black man could gain national support as a presidential candidate.
While he didn’t win, Jackson set the stage for Barack Obama to complete what he started 20 years earlier in Atlanta.
