Black Cyclone the Triumph & Tragedy of Charles Follis: America's First Black Football Player and Two Sport Superstar

 

 October 1904.

Clad in an all blue uniform without a helmet, leaping and spinning, the ball carrier breaks free of the line of defenders and takes off down field like a flash of lightning.

The Shelby Ohio football faithful, a crowd of about 1,000 out of a local population of less than ten times that number, stand and wait in breathless expectation.  The opposing defenders, stunned by the speed and quickness of the Shelby Blues running back turn and begin to give chase, but soon realizing the futility of their quest, the opposing players from Fremont Ohio, quickly give up and stand in awe as twenty-five year old Charles Follis runs for daylight.

Follis runs eighty-four yards for a touchdown.  His astounding seventh and final score of that game.  The Shelby Blues have defeated the team from nearby Fremont, Ohio, by a score of 58 to 0.

Charles Follis tosses the ball to the referee and is mobbed by his teammates in the endzone.  The city of Shelby has adopted the young football phenom as their own and he is a player like no other.

Charles Follis is the first professional African-American football player in history.

Known as the “Black Cyclone” Follis stands at an imposing six feet tall and weighs over two-hundred pounds--extremely large even by football standards in his day.  However, despite his intimidating size, Follis is renowned for his ability to move with quickness and agility, like a ballerina, causing defenders to miss tackles and allowing him to sprint off down the field with relative ease.

That day in 1904 marked the pinnacle of Charles Follis’ professional football career, but getting to that point had been a long, arduous and courageous journey for the first professional black football player in American history.

Only known action photo of Follis (1904?)

        Born on February 3, 1879 in rural Cloverdale, Virginia, Charles is the son of former slaves Catherine and James Henry Follis.  Charles is the third of seven children.  In 1885, when he was six years old, Charles’ family seeking to rise out of the poverty of rural life in the south, and to free themselves of racist and dehumanizing Jim Crow laws, moved north to Wooster, Ohio.

At the end of the 19th century the new and burgeoning game of American gridiron football was all the rage in the state of Ohio.  The game of football at the turn of the 2oth century was played in every city and town, both big and small, in Ohio.  Social clubs, towns, even factories and department stores all organized their own football teams to play against one another each Sunday in the fall and winter.

As a young man, after his family moved to Wooster, a city about fifty miles south of Cleveland, Charles Follis took a keen interest in the physical nascent sport of American gridiron football.  As a Junior in high school, while still only fifteen years old, Charles Follis would organize the Wooster High School varsity football team and serve as both the team’s starting halfback and coach!  During that 1899 season the Wooster High School Football team, which played school’s from all across northern Ohio, would be neither defeated nor even scored upon thanks to Follis’ leadership and playing abilities.

Follis' 1899 Wooster High School Varsity football team

In 1901, after graduation from high school with both athletic and academic honors, Charles attended Wooster College where he played both football and baseball for the local Wooster Amateur Athletic Association.

During his time playing for Wooster Charles Follis came to the attention of pro football head coach Frank C. Scheiffer.  Schieffer was the head coach for the Shelby Blues of Shelby, Ohio, who were the defending champions of the Ohio League.

The Ohio League was an organized association of paid professional football teams spread throughout Ohio that operated between 1902 and 1919.  Prior to the 1920 season the Ohio League would expand to include teams from throughout the midwest and northeast United States and rename itself the American Professional Football Association before changing its name once again two years later to the National Football League.

After watching Follis play a game for Wooster in 1902, in which Follis both dominated on offense as a running back and on defense as a linebacker, Frank C. Schieiffer told a local sports reporter from the Wooster Republican that, “he wanted Follis playing for him and not against him.”

After seeing Follis in action, Schieffer approached the young man with an offer to play professionally for the Shelby Blues in 1902.  However, though Follis would play the 1902 and 03 season’s for Shelby, he technically, would still not be paid for his play on the field.

Fearing the backlash that he, and his organization might receive from racist fans and media for openly employing the only black man in an all white football league, Schieffer concocted a plan to both pay Follis to play football for the Shelby Blues while at the same time making it appear as if he was using Follis’ talents free of charge so as not to alienate or enrage any white players in the Ohio League who might have taken offense at being paid less than an African- American.

Schieffer, during the 1902 and 1903 seasons, employed Follis at a local Shelby hardware store where he arranged his star player’s work schedule around the practice and playing schedule of his professional football team.  This allowed Shelby to use Charles Follis, the by now famous ‘Black Cyclone’ as their star running back each weekend, while still paying his wages through the local hardware store.

Follis’ play was so dominant on the football field, and he became so beloved in Shelby, that after two seasons public pressure from both his teammates and the fans demanded that Charles be signed to a legitimate professional contract by the Shelby Blues.  Just prior to the 1904 season Charles Follis broke the color barrier in professional football by signing an official contract with the Shelby Blues of the Ohio League.

In 1904, Follis’ first season officially under contract, Shelby would go on to win the Ohio League Championship with a record of 8 and 1.

Charles Follis with the Shelby Blues

However, as the only black player in an all white league in the prejudiced and racist environment of 1904, his beloved game of football was not all fun and games for Charles Follis.

Opposing players would constantly kick and stomp on Follis while he was down after the whistle had blown and a play was ended.  Referees almost never called a penalty and often intentionally turned their backs to the play when unsportsmanlike conduct, or unnecessary roughness was directed towards Follis.  Fans in opposing cities would shout and chant racial epitaphs and slurs constantly throughout games against Shelby, sometimes so loudly, that it was difficult for the players to hear which play was being called.

Years later teammates would recall one game against Toledo during 1905 when local fans used epithets and slurs directed at hollis that were particularly cruel and hateful.  The Toledo crowd’s race-baiting became so degrading and vitriolic that their own team’s captain stopped play and came out onto the field with a megaphone.

The captain of the Toled team begged his own fans to stop and said that he, “could personally vouch for the fact that Follis was a clean player and a gentleman and did not deserve such disrespect.”  After the Shelby team nearly refused to retake the field if the invective against Follis did not stop, the fans finally quieted down and play resumed.

Follis would go on to continue to star for Shelby throughout the 1905 and 06 seasons, but injuries soon began to take their toll.  Charles Follis played his last professional football game on Thanksgiving Day 1906 before his football career ended due to injury.  Though, Follis’ premature retirement from football may have been to due to accumulated injuries sustained over the course of time where he was often the victim of intentionally rough play and cheap shots, newspapers reports of the time mention Follis, “limping off the field with the help of teammates,” on Thanksgiving Day 1906 so it is probable that a leg injury akin to a torn ACL ended his career with the Shelby Blues.

But though his football days may have been done in 1906 the indomitable Charles Follis had only just begun to make his mark on the American sports landscape.

In 1907 Charles Follis signed a contract with the all black Cuban Giants of professional baseball where he would go on to play nearly four seasons as the team’s all star catcher.  Though baseball was rigidly segregated at the time, and Follis never got to play in the all white major leagues, there were many who saw him play who thought that Follis was the best catcher in the history of baseball up to that time.

Follis as a member of Loudonville Ohio baseball team (1905?)

Interestingly, while at Wooster College Follis had played baseball against, and would later go on to play football with, pioneering baseball executive Branch Rickey.

In later life Branch Rickey would go on to be the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and it would be Rickey who would sign Jackie Robinson in 1947 as the first African-American to play in the Major Leagues thereby breaking professional baseball’s nearly 100 year old policy of racial segregation.

It is very probable that Rickey, who was reported to always have had fond memories of Charles Follis, was inspired by his relationship with the man they called the ‘Black Cyclone’ to sign Jackie Robinson and finally break baseball’s color barrier.

Tragically, in early April of 1910 after playing in a baseball game in Cleveland on a cold and rainy early spring day, the then 31 year old Charles Follis developed pneumonia and died later that month.  He is buried in Wooster Cemetery in Wooster, Ohio.

Though technically he never got to play in the modern NFL, nor did he ever get to play Major League Baseball, Charles Follis the man they called the ‘Black Cyclone’ was a true hero and the first in a long line of black athletes that helped to better even the playing field for men and women of all races in all walks of life in America today.

His life may have been cut tragically short at the young age of only 31, and we can only speculate at the even greater impact on society Follis may have had if God had permitted him to live just a little bit longer, but there is one thing of which we can all be certain and that is that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Charles Follis for his courage and perseverance.

Today a plaque stands outside the National Football League Hall of Fame in Canton Ohio which honors the trailblazing legacy of Charles Follis and just this past year in September of 2020, the city of Shelby Ohio renamed a main street in Follis’ honor proof that the legacy of Charles Follis yet lives on.