Faster than you can say “Jackie Robinson,” the first sports topic always cited during Black History Month is that Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Famer breaking baseball’s color line in 1947.

Naturally. At the time, baseball’s prominence in American society was uncontested—the NBA had been formed only the previous year; the NFL was small peanuts; only college football had any sort of national awareness—so Robinson’s breakthrough represented a vast public advance in civil rights.

But an evening listening to one of Evan Weiner’s wide-ranging excavations of historic nuggets regarding Black sports history adds crucial layers to the subject.  Weiner—who describes his career as “radio, a lot of radio, some TV, some pundit work”—lays out the numbskullery and scullduggery in the story of segregated sports.

Such as the dumb “belief”—based on ignorance—by Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, in 1987, that Blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager.” (Campanis was summarily fired.) And the 1950s NFL edict that its teams could have “up to four Negro players [but] none could be quarterbacks, centers or middle linebackers”—theoretically “cerebral” positions.

Then there was the thoroughly undisguised racism that for years prevented the few Black players on white professional teams from service at whites-only restaurants and hotels. And the kind of double-dealing of George Preston Marshall, who owned the NFL’s Washington Redskins from 1932 to 1969 while barring all Blacks from his team and his Washington baseball counterpart, Clark Griffith, refusing to sign Blacks even as he profited from renting out his D.C. ballpark for Negro League games.

Weiner covered all this and provided other relevant tidbits during a recent 90-minute presentation beamed on Zoom to my Hofstra University sports journalism students—one of countless talks Weiner gives on radio, TV documentaries, libraries and others public forums. He also produces books and podcasts on varied human affairs from rock-n-roll, censorship and World War II.

Here’s one detail I hadn’t realized before Weiner’s talk: When Cleveland Rams owner Dan Reeves maneuvered the transfer of his team to Los Angeles in 1946, making the NFL the first professional coast-to-coast sports entertainment industry, a pre-condition to play at the publicly funded Los Angeles Coliseum was that the team be integrated.

Reeves therefore signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, two former UCLA football teammates of Jackie Robinson—the year before Robinson became baseball’s first Black player. In Cleveland, meanwhile, the new franchise in an upstart league, the Browns of the All-American Football Conference, also signed two Black players for the 1946 season, Bill Willis and Marion Motley.

Weiner noted how Baltimore manager John McGraw in 1901 had attempted—unsuccessfully—to sneak a light-skinned Black infielder, Charlie Grant, into the newly formed American League by identifying Grant as a Cherokee Indian named “Tokohama.” Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey objected and McGraw left Grant off his roster. And the so-called “Gentleman’s agreement,” in which baseball owners conspired not to offer contracts to Blacks, prevailed for almost a half-century.

Then there were tales from Weiner of resistance. By Lakers star Elgin Baylor who, in 1959, refused to play an NBA exhibition game in Charleston, W.Va., after Black players couldn’t get equal accommodations with their white teammates. (That led to a league rule against playing in states with such practices.)

And the refusal of Walter Beach, a Boston Patriots defensive back, to stay by himself in segregated living conditions during the team’s 1961 exhibition game in New Orleans. And the Black players joining Hall of Fame center Bill Russell of the Celtics in boycotting a game in Lexington, Ky., after being declined restaurant service in that city. And Black members of the Oakland Raiders protesting segregated seating at their scheduled Mobile, Ala., exhibition game against the Jets, forcing the game to be moved to Oakland.

Weiner’s interactions with key figures spiced his talk, particularly first-person recollections from the late Wally Triplett, who had been Penn State’s first Black player and in 1949 was the first Black drafted by an NFL team (the Detroit Lions). Triplett, Weiner reported, had befriended Jackie Robinson early in Robinson’s career and served as Robinson’s chauffeur, confidant and card-playing buddy, making a point of bringing Robinson to Triplett’s mother’s house for a home-cooked meal whenever the Dodgers were in town to play the Phillies.

One of Triplett’s former Penn State teammates, a fellow named Joe Tepsic, had been a Dodger rookie in 1946, when he played only 15 games and was hitless in five at-bats. The story was that the struggling Tepsic’s Dodgers’ mates wanted Tepsic demoted to the minors and replaced by a veteran pinch-hitter.

Jackie Robinson that season was spending his first season under Dodger contract with their top minor-league team in Montreal, “and while there was no indication that Brooklyn would have brought up Robinson if Tepsic had gone down to the minors,” Weiner said, “Triplett, who was a close friend of Tepsic, believed that Dodger manager Leo Durocher wanted that to happen.”

It didn’t. Until the next season. How’s that for a Black History Month morsel?