CANTON — Ignorance of Marion Motley’s contributions to football and civil rights will no longer be tolerated in Canton — and shouldn’t be anywhere else.
The Cleveland Browns fullback, and product of Canton McKinley, was bronzed into perpetuity on Wednesday when a statue of him was commemorated on a patch of ground near the entrance to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Numerous speakers, civic leaders, and Motley family members were part of the delegation that drew a crowd approaching 500 people as a kickoff to Canton’s Hall of Fame weekend festivities.
Motley was one of four players, along with Browns teammate Bill Willis, and two West Coast athletes Woody Strode and Kenny Washington, to break pro football’s color barrier in 1946 — a year before Jackie Robinson did the same for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Major League Baseball.
Motley was enshrined in the Hall in 1968 for his contributions as a player (he still owns the highest yards per carry average in NFL history at 5.7 ypc). Yet even in his hometown, a man that Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman dubbed “the greatest player in the history of football” had somehow managed to slip into anonymity.
Former McKinley standout and current football coach Antonio Hall noted that students in his class were unable to identify Motley, without question the greatest football player in the school’s storied history. Incredulous, Hall resolved to take action.
“I vowed at that time that I was going to do something to educate people in this community and remember this forgotten hero,” Hall said.
Others in the community had the same thought.
A Canton city street was named for Motley in 2002, but something bigger was needed. Yours truly produced a chapter on Motley in a book titled Ohio’s Autumn Legends that detailed each game of Motley’s spectacular high school career as a Bulldog. A couple of years ago, an Emmy-award winning documentary was produced titled Lines Broken, detailing Motley’s life on and off the field.
The statue was a capstone project, and Jim Porter, president at the Hall of Fame, hopes it triggers something much more.
“The Hall is going to use this as a model across the country,” Porter said. “(We want) to honor other Hall of Famers in their hometowns.”
In Mansfield, that would mean a statue for the incomparable Pete Henry, a charter member of both the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame, one of only eight men in the history of the sport to have that distinction.
For Motley, who died in 1999, the honor is long overdue, and a number of his family members wore shirts with his image to distinguish his roots in the community during the ceremony.
“He’s a hometown hero and his story needs to be known, and to be told,” said Motley’s grandson, Joe Dose. “I don’t think he could’ve fully imagined the gates he threw open for future athletes.
“This statue will forever welcome athletes for generations to come … because it needed to be done.”
