The remarkable Pollards, the first Black family to settle in Rogers Park

As his son saw it, the challenges Fritz Pollard and his siblings faced as the first Black family in West Rogers Park were a major reason for their success in life.

“Growing up in an all-white neighborhood made you an overachiever,” Fritz Pollard Jr., who lived in his family’s house at 1928 W. Lunt Ave., on Chicago’s Far North Side, is quoted as saying in the book “Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement” by John M. Carroll.

Whatever the formula that led to them, the achievements of the Pollard family in athletics and other endeavors are remarkable. The family’s notable history led the current owners of the home to try to get an adjoining park renamed for the Pollards.

That should be a no-brainer. The park, a small weed-strewn space, now bears the name of a onetime city building commissioner who was convicted of tax evasion. But the process has been tied up in Park District bureaucracy for three years.

As a Brown University student, Fritz Pollard was the first Black athlete to play in a Rose Bowl game. His brother Leslie played football at Dartmouth College. Another brother, Hughes, was the drummer in the Melody Four, a Chicago jazz band with a following abroad.

A sister, Artemesia, was Illinois’ first Black registered nurse. Another sister, Naomi, was the first Black woman graduate of Northwestern University and the head librarian at Wilberforce College in Ohio.

Yet another brother, Luther, founded a silent film production company, was a leading Chicago advertising executive and wrote a family history.

Members of the next generation were also accomplished. Fritz Jr. won a bronze medal in the high hurdles in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where Jesse Owens famously made his mark.

The Pollards’ roots were in Virginia where a forebear was emancipated during the Revolutionary War, possibly for his loyalty to the American cause.

One of his descendants was John Pollard. As an 8-year-old, he was sent to live with an aunt in Leavenworth, Kansas, because in the run-up to the Civil War, pro-slavery vigilantes in Virginia were kidnapping children of free Blacks.

During the war, Kansas recruited Blacks for the Union’s cause. John Pollard signed up as a drummer boy in the 2nd Colored Kansas Regiment in 1862. Black troops went into battle knowing that most Confederate officers didn’t take Black prisoners. Pollard’s regiment distinguished itself in the 1864 Battle of Jenkins Ferry in Arkansas, a Union victory.

Upon being mustered out, John Pollard intended to enroll in Oberlin College in Ohio, the first in the U.S. to admit Blacks. His goal was to be a lawyer. But that dream was dashed by an attack of smallpox when he reached St. Louis. While recovering, he learned barbering and wen to to worked in a ritzy hotel where he became a skilled barber, a trade he taught his sons.

“When you go out in the world you can have any job you want but you’ll never be broke. You can always go back to barbering,” Fritz Pollard recalled his father saying according to Carroll’s book.

He gave each son a barber’s kit when they left home.

John Pollard settled in Mexico, Missouri. There he and Catherine Amanda Hughes met, married, and had three children. In 1886, John Pollard moved the family to Chicago, “because he could be assured of a good education for his children as well bringing them up in desirable environment,” recalled Fritz Pollard, one of the five children born there. The family lived briefly in Edgewater before moving to the home in Rogers Park, which was annexed by the city of Chicago in 1893.

John Pollard opened a barbershop on Ravenswood Avenue. His wife reserved judgment on Rogers Park. Before answering on a knock on their front door, she’d tuck a gun in the pocket of her apron.

Fritz Pollard Sr.’s parents named him Frederick Douglass Pollard, in honor of the famed Black abolitionist who died in 1895. German neighbors nicknamed him Fritz, and it stuck.

He and his siblings rewrote the athletic record books of the schools they attended.

Ruth Pollard, who died young, was a star sprinter at Lake View High School. In grade school, his sister was faster than him, Fritz said. Luther quarterbacked the school’s football team. On the baseball team, he threw an in-drop, a mean pitch akin to what later was known as a screwball.

Leslie played halfback and shortstop at North Division High School. Fritz played football, baseball, and competed in track and field events at Lane Tech high school.

But in a 1983 interview, Fritz recalled the team departing for a game on an earlier train than scheduled. Leaving him stranded on an empty platform meant the coach didn’t have to explain to the other team’s coach why there was Black player on Lane’s team.

Fritz went on to win national acclaim playing for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island When Brown beat two football powerhouses in 1916, the Louisville Courier ran headlines that became indelible memories for Aaron Payne. Four decades later, Payne, then an Chicago attorney recited them at an Olympic club dinner, Chicago Defender columnist Russ J. Cowans wrote.

“Negro Beats Yale, 21 to 6,” the first headline read.

“Same Negro beats Harvard, 21 to 0,” the paper noted the following Sunday.

The headlines he made were even more remarkable because he lacked a football player’s physique. He weighed 150 pounds and stood 5-8. But when Brown beat Yale in 1916, he taunted the Elis with a toreador’s catch- me-if-you-can moves.

“At every stage of this dazzling performance sturdy arms clad in blue yawned for him, but Pollard trickily shot out of their reach,” The New York Times reported. “An ordinary tackle did nothing more than make him swerve slightly out of his course.”

Pollard in 1916 was the first Black player to participate in Rose Bowl, which ended in a loss for Brown.

Pollard was busy off the field, too. For $1 a month, he would press an unlimited number of a dorm mate’s shirts. On occasion he would “borrow” the laundry he was taking in, earning him a reputation as a sharp dresser.

America entered World War I shortly after Fritz Pollard’s 1916 gridiron triumphs. He served as the Army’s director of physical exercise at Camp Meade in Maryland.

His brother Hughes was fighting halfway around the world. Touring Europe with his band, he enlisted in the French Army. He survived a German gas attack but never fully recovered.

Fritz Pollard Sr. went on to play professional football in an era when leagues came and went. In order to have a steady income, he’d sometimes work for two teams. After coaching the Union Club on Saturday, he’d board a train in Philadelphia and coach the Akron Indians on Sunday.

Fritz Pollard Sr. was posthumously inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005.

But long before that, Pollard’s name evoked reverence when fans heard it. In the shadow of his alma mater, it could be redeemed for cash value in the 1970s, when Fritz Pollard III was a student in Brown.

He recalled asking the clerk in a local haberdashery if he could pay with an out-of-state check. She had to ask the owner.

“And she went in the back and this little old man came out. And he said: ‘Are you related to the Fritz Pollard?’ I said ‘Yes, that’s my grandfather.’ He goes, “Well, this money’s no good.’

I said: ‘There’s money in the bank!’ He said: “No, your money’s no good here. Anything you want, it’s yours.’

He said: ‘My father took me to see your grandfather play when I was a little boy.’ And he said it was the greatest experience to see him run.”

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