For four seasons, from 1946 through 1949, American football fans had two major leagues to follow.  In addition to the National Football League, there was the All-America Football Conference.  Competing head-to-head with the ten-team NFL for fans and players, the AAFC offered a product that was clearly the equivalent of that provided by its older rival.

In this year’s Super Bowl, the two surviving franchises of the AAFC will, for the first time, square off against each other for the championship of professional football.

The AAFC began play in 1946 with eight teams: the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, Buffalo Bisons, and Miami Seahawks in the East, and the Cleveland Browns, Chicago Rockets, Los Angeles Dons, and San Francisco 49ers in the West.  (These Cleveland Browns are now the Baltimore Ravens.)

In 1947, the Miami team was replaced by the Baltimore Colts, and in 1949, the New York and Brooklyn teams merged (resulting in a seven-team league) while the Chicago team changed its name from Rockets to the Hornets.

After the 1949 season, the two leagues agreed to merge into a single league initially known as the National-American Football League (though the title returned to NFL the following year).  Three of the seven AAFC teams—the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts—were admitted into the NFL, and the AAFC New York Yankees were merged with the NFL’s New York Bulldogs.

Although the combined New York team—which competed against the New York Giants—was owned by the Bulldogs owner, the coach, most of the players, and the team’s name (Yanks) were taken from the AAFC franchise.  The other three AAFC teams were folded, and their players distributed to the remaining 13 teams through a draft.

The Baltimore Colts folded after the 1950 season, a decision that reduced the number of NFL teams from 13 to 12.  (In 1953, a different, and unrelated, version of the Colts began play in Baltimore.)

The two franchises remaining from the AAFC, the Browns and the 49ers, flourished in the NFL.  Those two teams had been by far the strongest teams in the AAFC, with the Browns winning all four league championships while the 49ers finished with the second best record in the league each year.  The Browns won the NFL championship in their first year in the league and finished first in their division in each of their first six years in the NFL.  While the 49ers could not match that level of excellence, they had winning seasons in four of their first five NFL campaigns.

Of course, in 1996, the Cleveland Browns left Cleveland for Baltimore, where they became the Ravens and subsequently won a Super Bowl in 2000.  (Although the NFL persists in the silly claim that the current Cleveland Browns are a continuation of the Browns of the past, all that the current team shares with the Browns of the past is the ownership of the “Cleveland Browns” trademark.)  After a couple of unexceptional decades, the 49ers emerged as one of the modern NFL’s premier teams, winning five Super Bowls in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Although the Browns and 49ers have been in different conferences in the NFL since 1950, this is the first time that they have met for the NFL championship.  The closest that they previously came to meeting was in 1990 (following the 1989 season), when the Browns lost to the Denver Broncos in the AFC championship game.  Had they defeated the Broncos, they would have played the 49ers two weeks later in the Super Bowl.

They almost met much earlier.  In 1953, the 49ers finished one game behind the Detroit Lions in the NFL’s Western Conference while the Browns won the Eastern Conference for the fourth consecutive year.  During the 1953 regular season San Francisco lost three games, all by very narrow margins.  They lost twice to the Lions, by scores of 24-21 and 14-10, and to the Browns in an inter-conference game, 23-21.  Had they won any two of those games, they would have played the Browns for the NFL championship.  (Had they won just one, they would have played an additional game with the Lions with the winner playing the Browns for the championship.)

Since the AAFC played its game more than 63 years ago—fittingly the 1949 AAFC championship game in which Cleveland defeated San Francisco, 21-7—it is unlikely that there are large numbers of AAFC fans still around to appreciate the special character of this year’s game, but for those that are, and for students of the history of professional football, this year’s Super Bowl probably seems very significant.

For the past several years Georgia-native Roosevelt Jackson has been making appearances across the country at baseball parks and at public events commemorating Negro baseball.  At these events, the now 95-year old African-American is usually hailed as the “oldest living former Negro Leagues player.”

Moreover, in 2010, the Georgia State Senate adopted a resolution praising Mr. Jackson for his contributions to baseball, to civil rights, and to African-American culture.

Though by all accounts, Jackson is a gracious, intelligent, and compassionate individual who devotes much of his public remarks to the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Barrack Obama, and the Civil Rights Movement, a number of individuals knowledgeable about the history of the African-American baseball have pointed out that there is no record that Roosevelt Jackson ever played in the Negro Leagues.

Is there merit to such charges?  Well, yes and no.

There is no doubt that Jackson (pictured below) played and managed in a number of black-only professional and semi-professional baseball leagues in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  That much is uncontested.

What Jackson did not do was to play in any of the all-black leagues traditionally thought of as the Negro “Major” Leagues. So the “problem” of whether Roosevelt Jackson is a veteran of the Negro Leagues is really one of semantics.

(This terminology problem is not limited to the history of the Negro leagues.  Even today, many baseball fans use the terms “professional” baseball” and “Major League” baseball interchangeably, although “professional” baseball is logically a much broader category that includes the Minor Leagues of Organized Baseball as well as independent professional leagues.)

The “Major Leagues” of black baseball are usually viewed as those leagues which contained teams drawn from a wide geographic area and which included most of the top African-American baseball players.  The seven leagues widely viewed as “major leagues” are listed below:

• Negro National League I (1920-1931)
• Eastern Colored League (1923-1928)
• American Negro League (1929)
• East-West League (1932, folded mid-season)
• Negro Southern League (major league, 1932 only, otherwise a minor league)
• Negro National League II (1933-1948)
• Negro American League (1937-1960)

Most of the historical accounts of Negro League baseball focus upon the above leagues, hence, the frequent assumption that “Negro League” and “Negro Major League” are synonyms.

To his credit, Roosevelt Jackson has never claimed to have played in any of the above listed leagues.  His career was spent almost entirely playing in all black minor or semi-pro leagues, most of which were located in southern Florida.  The list of teams with which he played includes the largely forgotten Miami Globetrotters, Hollywood Redbirds, Miami Red Sox, Belle Glade Redwings, Florida Cuban Giants, the Lucky Stars, the Danny Dodgers; Ft. Lauderdale Braves, Pompano Beach Yankees, Ft. Lauderdale Lucky Stars, Ft. Lauderdale Gray Sox, and the Buffalo Red Sox (a travelling team that appears to have played many of its games in West Virginia and Pennsylvania).

Jackson is a survivor of an era in which even baseball was rigorously segregated, and even if he did “only” play in the Negro “minor leagues,” his accomplishments, memories, and character are clearly worthy of remembrance.

Milwaukeean Dennis Biddle has for many years claimed to have been one of the younger veterans of the Negro Leagues, and has even presented statistics he supposedly compiled as a pitcher for the Chicago American Giants in 1953 and 1954.  He also has claimed to have been signed by the Chicago Cubs in 1955, only to suffer a career ending injury in spring training.

The problem with Biddle’s story is that the team he supposed play for, the Chicago American Giants of the Negro American League, went out of existence after the 1952 season, before the time that Biddle allegedly played for the team.  The Chicago Defender, the Windy City’s leading African-American newspaper reported in the spring of 1953 that the American Giants might be revived for the second half of the 1953 season, but no revival was forthcoming.

It is possible that Biddle could have played for some semi-pro team in Chicago that took up the name Chicago American Giants in 1953, but Biddle’s version of his story clearly indicates that he played in the Negro Major Leagues.  (There also appears to no independent evidence of his signing by the Cubs.)

Although a number of Milwaukeeans, ranging from Marty Greenberg to the Brewer upper management to Tom Barrett, have in the past uncritically accepted Biddle’s story, others in the baseball world have questioned its veracity, including the National Sports Law Institute, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and the Black Athlete Sports Network.

Whatever the merits of Biddle’s claim, the existence of veterans of black baseball, whether they played at the major, minor, or semi-pro level, is an important reminder of an unpleasant aspect of our society’s past.  It is profoundly sad that a country founded on the premise that “all men are created equal” could exhibit such a degree of racism in the sport that was for a long time the “National Pastime.”  However, it is also a reminder of the true resilience of African-American culture in the age of Jim Crow, and the history of the Negro Leagues is clearly worth preserving.