[...]The silver lining – Inside the Oakland Raiders – A look inside the world of the highly classified Oakland Raiders from the writers of Bay Area News Group[...]…

[...]The silver lining – Inside the Oakland Raiders – A look inside the world of the highly classified Oakland Raiders from the writers of Bay Area News Group[...]…

To the Mod/Troll when she is on her period she will boot you from this blog.

That angry little gal needs some love….who wants to pork a fat chick

Raider Joseph,… the Earth is not flat, and you are in denial…

When Chubbustus indeed had protection,( admittedly a rare sight- thanks largely in part to the dufus-tackle-bookends), routinely,… he couldn’t hit the broadside of Caveman Ryan’s pickeled liver…

To make matters worse, he was noticeably absent on his off days- failing to at least ATTEMPT to do whatever it takes to compete at the level of Mssrs Brady, Manning etc…

A visably improved work ethic would do wonders to deflect inherent critisism…

I was a receiver in College. Most routes are option (depending on the defense) and timing plays. If I ran the wrong route or made the wrong read, the QB would throw the ball based on where I was SUPPOSED to be. To the naked eye it would look like he made a horrible throw. The QB has about a three second process time on any given play, that gives 75% of them “accuracy” issues.

J-Russ has started one year and is the best QB we have had since Gannon, and the only one we have trained from the draft up (worth anything) Since Stabler. Wait. He is not Marinavich. He will be at the very least good. If you watched the last six games (when Cable took over play calling), there was an improvement.

I am glad that Al D is more patient than some of you, because you guys would trade him and watch him be “Elway” for someone else. Then you would say we were crazy for trading him….be patient (it was a practice).

Hired first African-American Head Coach
Hired first Hispanic Head Coach
Hired first African-American official
Hired first African-American league executive
Draft first African-American QB in first round
Drafted first African-American QB #1 overall

Quotes from African-Americans

“Racism in this organization was not an issue. Mr. Davis would
not let that happen.” Art Shell

Brad Pye, Jr., Former AFL administrative assistant, first African-American administrator in football
“A lot of people think of Al Davis as a maverick. He’s also a maverick in opening up opportunities for minorities.”

Dr. Aaron C. Wade, former AFL official, first African-American official
“I’d say he’s a trailblazer. He had no color barrier.”

Willie Lanier:
“Hiring (minority) coaches, players, this is something he did over the years. This is not something new where he came to some politically correctness in the 1990s.”

Denny Greene:
“I think Al Davis opened up the game up. I think he opened the game up for the African- American athlete.”

Willie Brown:
“He’s a pioneer, in terms of getting black players to play and letting them be the best they can be.”

Bernie Custis, Black quarterback and teammate of Al Davis at Syracuse University, 1948-50:
“I came to know Al as someone that lived by a certain code and this code was to judge everybody by their content of their character and capabilities and nothing else. That’s the code that I detected at the time and I think it’s stayed with him throughout the years.”

Gene Upshaw:
“It was Sid Gilman and Al Davis who said here’s an opportunity to give these people (black players) a chance to play.”

George Atkinson:
“Al found a ton of good players in the black schools.”

Eddie Robinson:
“Al’s word was important. If he’s tell you something, this is it.”

Defiance led to tolerance
Oakland Tribune, Sep 25, 2006 by Jerry McDonald
…
Clem Daniels was one of those players.

“We had to take stands to break down a lot of the bigotry and things that were going on,” Daniels said. “There were still some very segregated cities, and we were confronted with a lot of situations. And that’s the best thing I can say about Al Davis — he backed us.”

Davis moved a Raiders preseason game from Mobile, Ala., to Frank Youell Field in Oakland because of the concerns of his African- American players, which included Daniels, Powell, Bo Roberson and Fred Williamson.

He did it despite losing gate receipts for attendance that would have been considerably more than the 8,317 that came to the rescheduled game in Oakland.

In Mobile, the stands were segregated and blacks were not allowed to use the bathroom, Powell said.

Daniels said the black players met and told sportswriters they wouldn’t play. He also said he told Davis.

“He said, ‘I’ll call (AFL Commissioner) Joe Foss and get it changed,’” Daniels said. “Just like that.”

Davis, Powell and Daniels were also involved in having the 1965 AFL All-Star Game moved from New Orleans to Houston when 23 black players left town in protest over the way they were treated.

“When we got to New Orleans, I get my luggage, run into the street, hail down a cab, and the driver says, ‘I can’t take you,’” Powell said. “I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t take me?’ He says he can only have white customers and that I had to find myself a colored cab. There weren’t a hell of a lot of colored cabs at the airport in those days.”

“Colored cabs,” according to Raiders assistant coach and Hall of Fame cornerback Willie Brown, came with restrictions in terms of where they could and couldn’t go.

“They wouldn’t go in certain areas,” said Brown, who made the All- Star team playing for Denver in 1965. “They’d drop you off.”

Black players met at their hotel and signed a legal pad produced by Powell in which they decided not to play.

In the book “America’s Game, the Epic Story of how Pro Football Captured a Nation,” author Michael MacCambridge writes that city officials produced Ernest N. “Dutch” Morial, an African American who would later be the city’s first black mayor.

Morial, the first African American to receive a law degree from Louisiana State, told players they were overreacting and defended the New Orleans record on civil rights.

Powell remembers feeling insulted.

“He blamed it all on Dr. (Martin Luther) King, that he was a troublemaker for trying to do change,” Powell said. “I told the guy, ‘You just blew it. Those were the worst possible combination of words you could have said.’”

Powell said he then got a call from Davis, who said he would see what he could do. Players left New Orleans, and by the time most of them had gotten back home, the game was moved to Houston.

Davis, in an Aug. 1 press conference, talked about how the 1960s affected the Raiders and professional sports.

“In’65, we had cultural revolution in this country,” Davis said. “We had the Watts riots, we had Detroit, we had Martin Luther King in’68 getting killed. It’s tough to go back in retrospect and remember, but there was a little turmoil in every organization, in every league, over the diversity issue and what was going to happen about it in the country.”

Davis helped build the Raiders into a power by aggressively seeking talent from small, predominantly black colleges.

“He’d have someone go to Grambling, Southern, Jackson State, Alcorn State, all the black schools,” Brown said.

Art Shell, whom Davis made the NFL’s first African-American coach in 1989, is fond of recounting the Raiders draft class of 1968, in which he was taken in the third round.

That year Davis also selected quarterback Eldridge Dickey of Tennessee A&I in the first round, George Atkinson of Morris Brown in the seventh round and tight end John Eason of Florida A&M in the ninth round.

“He has always felt, and he tells me to to this day, that there are players in those schools,” Shell said. “They’re out there. You’ve just got to find them.”

Powell said he always appreciated the fact that Davis stuck by him when he requested a trade to Buffalo in 1966 so he could pursue a business opportunity in Toronto.

Labeled as a locker room lawyer and a divisive force by some of football’s establishment, Davis’ parting words have stuck with Powell 40 years later.

“He told me, ‘Don’t let people try and get it in your head that you should change. There’s nothing wrong with you,’” Powell said. “He could have just said adios.”

By the time Shell arrived in 1968, players such as Powell and Daniels had helped pioneer a more tolerant era.

“There were a lot of people that took a stand, and I’m very appreciative of it,” Shell said. “I would hope that if players today would go back and look at their history, how things occurred, they would appreciate it too.”

Brown said he doubts there is a single player on the Raiders roster who knows any details of the struggles of African-American players in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“That’s the thing that’s changing about our society,” Shell said.

“They don’t know their history. Players don’t know the history of this league or the history of the team they’re playing for. I think that’s regrettable because they’re missing out on a lot.”

Perhaps the next time our resident playground bully wishes to challenge Shane Lechter, the subsiquent confrontation might more aptly be discribed as “David vs Goliath jr”…

…Dakota, Remember during the Laker pre-season, Lamar Odom’s inappropiate- “too cool for school” reaction to his intentional/ unintentional pass out of bounds ?

…Based on the recent embarrasing debacle in Houston, Odom’s affliction appears contagious….