Racism in the NFL and Jim Trotter's Lawsuit Against the League

Jim Trotter, formerly of the NFL Network and currently writing for the Athletic, filed a lawsuit against the NFL alleging a pattern of discriminatory behavior that extends beyond the newsroom, into the league office and among the ownership.

You can find the lawsuit here.

Trotter is litigating this through standard federal and New York state law. At the federal level, his legal team is specifically citing 42 U.S. Code § 1981 – often referred to as “Section 1981” of the legal code, a reference to the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Historically, the courts have found this to apply in employment contexts to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color and ethnicity. The courts have also found that this prohibits retaliation, one of the charges alleged by Trotter.

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While Trotter may indeed be looking for damages, a primary goal is for the courts to implement a method of investigating and monitoring the NFL’s employment practices.

In this sense, Trotter’s suit is more than a legal battle about his termination from the NFL Network, but towards the NFL as a whole – and the scope of the lawsuit is meant to launch the specific experiences of Trotter into a larger campaign for racial justice inside the NFL.

A quick summary before getting into the details of the suit. Jim Trotter alleges:

There are eye-catching specifics in his lawsuit. Let’s break it down.

The most explosive elements of the report involve the behavior of two current NFL owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Terry Pegula of the Buffalo Bills, but those are two elements of a much larger argument that Trotter and his team are making about the nature of the NFL.

The two specific allegations are fairly important, though. Trotter’s legal team accuses Pegula of saying, in reference to player protests about police violence against Black people, “If the Black players don’t like it here, they should go back to Africa and see how bad it is.”

This is not an allegation that Trotter brings forth from his own personal interactions with Pegula; Trotter instead references a meeting during an NFL Media videoconference call, where one reporter described a conversation he had with Pegula.

Though the meeting was held with 40 employees, including two of Trotter’s superiors, he may need evidence from the reporter himself that this conversation with Pegula occurred, or that the reporter heard it directly from Pegula and created a contemporary record of it.

Trotter’s legal team may have already engaged that reporter in order to procure that evidence when needed. If not, they will instead have to rely on some of the other allegations surrounding NFL owners discussed in the document.

This isn’t the only specific story mentioning Pegula in the lawsuit. A more well-documented example with discusses Pegula’s reaction to the emerging controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick. In 2018, the New York Times reported that Pegula suggested that Kaepernick’s absence from the league – which the lawsuit refers to as blackballing – was primarily a media relations problem and that the NFL needs a spokesperson to improve the league’s image. That spokesperson, Pegula argued, should be Black.

The lawsuit argues that this characterizes the NFL’s overall approach – that they want to appear inclusive when it helps with public relations but not engage with actual solutions to real problems.

The Kaepernick story provides its own set of arguments for Trotter’s larger point about the NFL’s failure to foster an environment of inclusion, but that wasn’t the second story that drew headlines.

Instead, it was the allegation that Jones, as owner of the Dallas Cowboys, repeatedly expressed to Trotter that the league should not be concerned about the concerns or welfare of Black people, especially Black players.

At the 2020 Hall of Fame game, Trotter had an opportunity to talk to Cowboys Vice President of Player Personnel, Will McClay, about the paucity of players drafted from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Trotter suggested that one issue inhibiting HBCU prospects was the lack of Black executives in primary decision-making roles. This is particularly prescient for McClay, who is Black, and plays an enormous role in the Cowboys’ player acquisition strategy but does not have the final say – that belongs to Jerry Jones and his son, Stephen Jones.

Jones joined the discussion, according to the suit, and refused to answer a question about why so few general managers (and equivalent) were Black in a league that was 60 to 70 percent Black.

Jones responded that players get a large percentage of league revenue, ignoring the point completely. The lawsuit suggests that this reflected a sentiment that Jones believed that Black people should, in effect, be satisfied with the current state of affairs and not seek out positions of power or concern themselves with equality.

More directly, Trotter alleges that Jones said “If Blacks feel some kind of way, they should buy their own team and hire who they want to hire.”

Trotter continued engaging in the conversation by pointing out that the league’s rule requiring primary owners buy at least 30 percent of the team with no more than $1 billion in debt prevented the possibility of that happening. The lawsuit further points out that this attitude reflects that equality and rights for Black people should only be the concern of other Black people.

This is not the only incident mentioned in the lawsuit involving Jones. Trotter’s team also brings up a photo recently surfaced by the Washington Post depicting Jerry Jones, then a sophomore, at North Little Rock High School in Arkansas as white students protested to block Black students from attending.

The Post pointed out in their story that Jones’ excuse – that he was just there to observe what was happening out of curiosity – doesn’t make much sense given the geography of the location.

As the Post argues, “Jones had to scurry around the North Little Rock Six to reach the top of the stairs before the Black students completed their walk up to the schoolhouse door. And while Jones offered a common explanation of the confrontation — that it was the work of older white supremacists — most of those surrounding the six young Black men were teenagers.”

The Post also shared stories about Jones’ father and grandfather. Though he is not either of those men, his response to their history on race was also revealing. After being asked about the fact that his father ran for office, opposing federal desegregation mandates on the grounds of “states’ rights,” a common racist dogwhistle, Jones argued that states rights were a good thing and that he felt betrayed that minorities did not vote for his father after he did them the favor of not segregating the grocery store he owned.

Jones’ grandfather was a member of the White Citizens’ Council in Arkansas and its Little Rock branch the Capital Citizens’ Council — two organizations the reemergent KKK drew upon. A leader on that council argued that integration was a communist plot “founded in Moscow … to mongrelize the White race in America.” The council organized protests of desegregation at local high schools.

In response to this information, Jones argued that his grandfather was a hard worker, an irrelevant point.

His father and grandfather were involved in opposing desegregation while he stood on the steps of North Little Rock High School as his fellow white students barricaded and harassed Black students attempting to enter the school. That should not be lost on the NFL – especially as Jones has not disavowed his actions and had attempted to defend his father and grandfather when confronted with their racism.

What Trotter alleges and what others, including the Post, have reported are in alignment. When Jones spoke at the NFL Accelerator Program, he emphasized that it was resourcefulness and hard work more than race that mattered when it came to hiring, and regaled the audience with a story about using his connections with the Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters is played, to land a deal with an oil executive.

He seems blind to the idea that not everyone will have access to those kinds of connections.

Jones and Pegula are not the only current or former owners implicated by the lawsuit.

Woody Johnson, owner of the Jets and former US Ambassador to Britain under the Trump administration, was investigated by the US State Department for allegations that he made sexually and racially inappropriate comments to embassy staff. The New York Times reported that Johnson asked investigators to remove claims that he had made inappropriate comments in their report. 

CNN’s original reporting on the topic uncovered specific statements Johnson is alleged to have made, including disparaging the idea of hosting an event for Black History Month, asking if the audience would be “a whole bunch of Black people.” Three separate sources told CNN that Johnson questioned the necessity of Black History Month and added that the “real challenge” for the Black community was absent fathers.

The Trotter lawsuit references that incident as well as one involving former Texans owner Bob McNair, whose son Cal McNair currently owns the team. When players were protesting racial injustice in 2017, Bob McNair said “we can’t have the inmates running the prison.” McNair later apologized and then retracted his apology.

Trotter’s team argues that these are just “a few examples” of openly racist behavior from NFL owners, and that’s accurate.

There’s been evidence of former NFL owners engaging in racist behavior outside of what Trotter’s legal representation brought up int their suit, including from former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson – who allegedly directed a racial slur at a Black scout.

This was not an attitude unknown to the NFL; when Richardson applied to own an NFL franchise, he was embroiled in multiple racial discrimination lawsuits filed by thousands of Black customers, who alleged that his resstaurants would segregate diners, require them to pre-pay meals, charge additional fees and more. This behavior even extended to the security detail for President Bill Clinton, whose Black secret service agents were refused a table while white colleagues were seated.

At the same time, Richardson was specifically accused of bias by an employee, who alleged that Richardson claimed her restaurant “was filled with monkeys” in reference to the number of Black employees she had hired.

After she brought this and other discriminatory behavior up in a meeting specifically designed to address racial discrimination inside the company, she was fired. She filed a lawsuit and settled.

With the Panthers, Richardson would continue to engage in racist behavior from the casual racism of controlling the dress code, body art and hair of Black employees – on and off the field – to asking Black employees, and only Black employees, perform menial labor outside the scope of their job descriptions.

None of this was objectionable to the NFL until 2017 when Sports Illustrated broke the story based on a number of anonymous sources corroborating the events while he was owner.

The same is true of how the NFL handled Dan Snyder and the issue of the team name assigned to Washington. George Preston Marshall, perhaps the most racist owner in NFL history, changed the team name from the Boston Braves after confusion with the baseball team of the same name.

That new name was an explicitly racist reference to the bounty put on Native Americans by the government during colonial expansion westward.

Snyder, when asked about the team’s racist name, claimed as recently as 2014 that he wouldn’t change it, saying it would happen “over my dead body.” He said a year prior to USA Today, “We'll never change the name. It's that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

For some time, a myth propagated behind the name – that it was chosen to honor coach “Lone Star” Dietz, whose Native American heritage has been in dispute. But contemporary accounts quote Marshall as saying that it did no such thing. Rather, he chose the name in order to keep the imagery already associated with the Braves.

The NFL was comfortable with this until very recently, when Snyder was forced to change the name as a product of multiple pressures – not the least of which was an inability to secure a deal for a new stadium, one of the NFL’s most important financial priorities.

Trotter’s lawsuit did not bring up the ongoing arbitration claim between former Cardinals vice president Terry McDonough and owner Michael Bidwell, who served as president of the team during the events McDonough describes in his claim. Because the parameters of the arbitration claim are confidential, there is no full report available, but the broad strokes have been leaked.

Relevant to Trotter’s suit are the claims that Bidwell mistreated a Black employee and “created an environment of fear for minority employees”. Bolstering that claim is a second allegation apparently in the filing – apparent only because the Cardinals’ external public relations firm felt the need to respond to it but not because independent reporting confirmed it – that an interaction with potential free agents carried evidence of “some sort of racial animus.”

It is not clear what evidence that firm is responding to.

The NFL, not just individual owners, is implicated in the lawsuit. In addition to pointing out that there are no Black owners in the league, the lawsuit additionally brings up the fact that there has never been a Black commissioner. They argue that that filters down into the fact that there are only eight Black general managers and only three Black head coaches – despite a player population that is 60 to 70 percent Black.

Trotter’s team brings up the race-norming controversy from not too long ago, where the NFL was found to insist that doctors evaluating NFL players create different cognitive baselines for Black players when compared to white players. These baselines that would save the NFL money in payouts related to the concussion settlement the NFL agreed to and also happened to assume that Black players started with worse cognitive functions than white players.

As alleged in the lawsuit brought forth by former NFL players Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport, “the Black player is presumed to have suffered less impairment, and he is therefore less likely to qualify for compensation.”

This is why Trotter’s lawyers are dismissive of the NFL’s turn towards embracing the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 following the George Floyd uprisings. Goodell never acknowledged the league’s behavior towards Kaepernick, instead throwing some money at his foundation and putting up anti-racist signage.

The lawsuit describes this behavior as “pandering,” instead of starting a serious conversation about policing in the United States in deference to the kinds of conversations that protesting NFL players wanted to have in 2017. They have also not engaged in a serious attempt to resolve the internal problems with the racial makeup of the league, according to Trotter’s lawyers.

The state of NFL coaching is briefly mentioned in a few ways. The first is in the league’s hiring practices, which of course is related to the behaviors and attitudes of ownership.

Trotter’s lawsuit references the case that former Dolphins head coach and current Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores filed against the league. It is a class action lawsuit on the basis of racial discrimination. Trotter’s team points out that the NFL rejected the claims as being “without merit” before conducting a formal investigation.