Mar 21, 2024 - Sale 2663

Sale 2663 - Lot 439

Price Realized: $ 531
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(SPORTS--FOOTBALL.) A southern white woman describes watching Duke Slater and Jim Thorpe at an Illinois game. Autograph Letter Signed as "Jessica" to her grandmother Josephine Salter of Americus, GA. 6 pages, 7¼ x 8¼ inches, on 3 sheets; minor wear at folds. With original postmarked envelope. Dubuque, IA, 20 October 1924
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Additional Details

This letter was written by Jessica Physioc Spellman (1897-1986), a recently married Georgia woman writing home to her grandmother during what was apparently her first trip north. Attending a professional football game, she appears quite unsettled by the respect paid to the star tackle of the Rock Island Independents, Frederick Wayman "Duke" Slater, the first Black lineman in the National Football League. Superstar running back Jim Thorpe is also name-checked.

"I went to Rock Island, Ill. to a big football game. . . . There were several thousand people at the game. I saw some of the biggest football stars of today: Jim Thorpe, an Indian; and Slater, a Negro. Imagine a Negro playing with white men. He is the best football star in the country, & has graduated from several big colleges. At the end of the first half of the game, white fellows would be washing the players' face & rubbing them & they treated this Negro the same way. You couldn't see any difference at all. That got my goat, & the Negros sat among the white people too. . . . Believe me, they were dressed, too."

Rock Island defeated the Dayton Triangles that day, 20-0. Duke Slater went on to serve as a Chicago municipal court judge, and was elected to the Football Hall of Fame in 2020.