Packers legend Vince Lombardi was the original “DEI” defender

You know who supported “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) long before it was ever an acronym? Vince Lombardi.

The football legend famously created a “prejudice-free culture” in Green Bay:

🖤 When Lombardi took over the Packers, they had one black player. He immediately added 12 more and hired Emlen Tunnell — the first Black assistant coach in the NFL.

🖤 Lombardi wouldn’t let his players frequent any restaurant, bar, or hotel that denied any services to Black people and famously blessed the interracial marriage of defensive lineman Lionel Aldridge and his wife Vicky.

🖤 And he was one of the first coaches in the NFL to offer opportunities to Black players — who had previously been sent to the startup AFL.

“My father was way ahead of his time,” Lombardi’s daughter Susan said. “He was discriminated against as a dark-skinned Italian American when he was younger, when he felt he was passed up for coaching jobs that he deserved. He felt the pain of discrimination, and so he raised his family to accept everybody — no matter what color they were or whatever their sexual orientation was.”

But Lombardi didn’t “just” accept them, he created opportunities for them — the exact purpose of DEI.

A Lombardi story you haven’t heard

Did you know Lombardi almost pulled the Packers out of a 1961 exhibition game in the Deep South?

The game was in Columbus, Georgia, which was highly segregated at the time. Green Bay was scheduled to play Washington in what would be the city’s first pro football game.

The exhibition’s sponsors wanted both teams to arrive early and help promote the game. Washington agreed and flew in six days early. They practiced in Columbus all week, and provided plenty of content for the local papers.

Lombardi, however, refused to comply because of the South’s Jim Crow laws. The Packers flew into Lawson Army Airfield the day before the game, stayed together — white and Black players — at Fort Benning, a U.S. Army post located 10 miles outside of Columbus, and held a practice and clinic there for the doughboys.

The result? The game drew a disappointing crowd of 18,000 — about 6,500 below capacity.

After playing in Columbus and staying at Fort Benning again in 1962, Lombardi refused to approve the proposed segregated seating plan and canceled a third game in late July 1963.

From the field to the State House

Lombardi didn’t just care about his players as athletes, but as people.

In 1960, when the Black players on his team were having trouble finding places to live — Lombardi worked with a local real estate developer to get a fair housing bill passed in Wisconsin, despite fierce opposition from most Republicans.

In April 1965, before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Lombardi submitted a written endorsement of the bill:

“On the football field or the baseball diamond, players are judged not on their race or religion but by their performance and this is as it should be,” Lombardi wrote. “Since I so firmly believe in equality of opportunity in athletics, I think the same degree of opportunity should prevail in other areas as well.”

Lombardi also told his players that he considered many Packers fans to be hypocrites — only caring about them as football players.

“Lombardi was very bothered,” wrote the author of “Lombardi’s Left Side.”

“He said, ‘It’s just a shame that the people want and expect you to come and play, and the next minute they almost don’t care enough to find a place for you (to live).'”

After many hearings and several years, the bill finally passed — but Lombardi’s fight for not just equal, but equitable treatment of all athletes continued until the day he died.

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