Days before reporting to the Cleveland Browns training camp in Hiram, Ohio in 1964, John Wooten took a detour to Washington, D.C. for the sake of history.
Wooten, then a veteran guard who blocked for Jim Brown, was at the White House on July 2 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964.
No, Wooten wasn’t inside the Oval Office when LBJ signed the sweeping measure into law that banned discrimination and ended segregation in public places. Yet the football player, invited by Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights activist Whitney Young because of his progressive social efforts with the Negro Industrial Economic Union, was close enough in the corridors of the White House.
“When President Johnson did the signing, there was just a mass of people all the way back out of that office, all down the hall, everywhere,” Wooten, 88, recalled during an interview with USA TODAY Sports. “You’re talking about hundreds. That’s where I was.”
Wooten ultimately left a huge footprint on the NFL as a champion of equal opportunity for coaches and executives while serving as the longtime chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. Yet to hear him flash back to 1964 – when the Browns, by the way, claimed the franchise’s last championship by winning the NFL title – is a special kind of history lesson.
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Especially now.
Sure, it’s Black History Month. It’s American History, too. LBJ, who picked up the mantle after the 1963 assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, signed the Act roughly two weeks after it passed in the U.S. Senate following a 72-day filibuster by opponents resistant to social change and, well, equality.
“This was the beginning of us being able to move forward as a people in this country,” Wooten said. “Now it’s the law of the land. I can’t tell you how privileged I was – not as a football player, but as a young Black guy – to be there.
“It gave us a completely new look on life as a people.”
Wooten certainly remembers the resistance, particularly from the Deep South, where Jim Crow laws of that era legalized segregation in all areas of life. The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin; and it required equal access to public places, schools and the right to vote, among other impacts.
“LBJ took it up as his legacy,” Wooten said. “That’s how he wanted to be remembered. You have to give him credit for picking up the banner that John F. Kennedy carried. He could have very easily let it go.
“But in his speech, he said: This would be one of the greatest things that’s ever happened in this country, to letting the world know that all of us are equal.”
Wooten is so passionate in sharing his perspective on history. It is hardly surprising that for all he has accomplished over many years as an athlete, activist, NFL scout and executive, one of his most cherished mementos came from that day at the White House more than 60 years ago. It’s a pen that LBJ used.
“I walked out of there with that pen, and with a new fight,” he said. “The significance will never change.”
That trip to the White House for Wooten came less than a year after more than 250,000 people participated in the March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when MLK gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. Wooten has a vivid memory of that event, too.
On August 28, 1963, the Browns were on the West Coast for back-to-back exhibitions against the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams. Wooten remembers his roommate, Brown, asking coach Blanton Collier to reschedule practice for earlier on the day of the March. Collier obliged. Then Brown and Wooten took it a step further.
“Of course, we announced that we were going to be watching it in our room,” Wooten recalled. “We invited everybody, Black and white, to sit there and watch.”
And who showed up?
“We had guys on the floor, on the beds, watching this together,” Wooten said.
Fast forward to now. It pains Wooten to consider how the Trump administration has attacked DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) as a core principle.
“It hurts your heart,” Wooten said. “We had come so far in terms of moving this country in the right direction. DEI, all of that, has come from the Civil Rights Act. It was what we stood for as a nation.”
Yet decades since he reveled in the White House with the passage of civil rights legislation, which paved the way for other measures, Wooten shudders in weighing plans outlined in Project 2025. He may be well into retirement, but his spirit hasn’t waned as he considers social and political ramifications projected in Project 2025.
Said Wooten, “When you read through it, you see immediately that it would destroy every single thing we have worked for and won in this country.”
In other words, some history lessons beg for fresh perspective.