Redskins’ Name Change Remains Activist’s Unfinished Business
By Ken Belson
WASHINGTON — Suzan Shown Harjo still becomes tense when she recalls the only Washington Redskins home game she attended, nearly 40 years ago.
After she moved to Washington, she and her husband were given tickets. Fans sitting nearby, apparently amused that American Indians were in their midst, pawed their hair and poked them, “not in an unfriendly way, but in a scary way,” Ms. Harjo said.
“We didn’t know what was next,” she said.
Ms. Harjo and her husband left the game, but they never left Washington. The incident fueled her opposition to the team’s name and her hope to get the team to change it. Since the 1960s, Ms. Harjo has been at the center of efforts to persuade schools, colleges and professional sports teams to drop American Indian names and mascots that some consider derogatory. The fight has escalated in recent days as groups have intensified lobbying efforts and organized protests, even prompting President Obama to weigh in.
The debate tends to settle on one question: how many people must be offended by a team’s name for a change to be warranted? The Redskins and the National Football League cite polling in which most respondents said they were not offended by the name, while those lobbying the team to drop its name dispute the accuracy of that data and say that no matter, the word is widely regarded as a slur.
More than two-thirds of the roughly 3,000 teams with American Indian mascots have dropped them, many voluntarily and without incident. Along the way, Ms. Harjo, the director of the Morning Star Institute, a group that promotes Native American causes, became something of a godmother to the cause of eliminating disparaging mascots.
“She has led this fight early,” said Ray Halbritter, a representative of the Oneida Indian Nation, which has paid for advertisements calling on the Redskins to abandon their name. “We stand on her shoulders.”
But Ms. Harjo considers her work unfinished because the Redskins and other professional teams have insisted on keeping their names. The Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians have also been under scrutiny. In May, Daniel Snyder, the Redskins’ owner, echoed his predecessors when he vowed never to change the name. This week he sent a letter to fans defending his decision to keep the team’s name, saying: “The name was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.”
The Redskins, playing in the nation’s capital and in the country’s wealthiest league, have remained steadfast as many other teams have changed their nicknames since the 1960s. The Redskins’ owner at the time, George Preston Marshall, opposed desegregation. Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the team in the 1970s, met with American Indians to discuss the team’s name, but little followed.
“There are so many milestones in this issue,” Ms. Harjo, 68, said Monday at an event held by ChangetheMascot.org, a group urging the Redskins to change their name. “It is king of the mountain because it’s associated with the nation’s capital, so what happens here affects the rest of the country.”
Ms. Harjo, Mr. Halbritter, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota and others who attended the event said that they would continue to call on Mr. Snyder and the N.F.L. to change the team’s name. Ms. McCollum, via social media and letters, has received the brunt of the backlash from some fans who think the Redskins should hold their ground.
(“I’m offended by the name Vikings as I have family from Denmark,” one person wrote on Ms. McCollum’s Facebook page, imploring her to “concentrate on a budget and don’t worry about the Washington Redskins.”)
Last week, days before the league’s 32 owners were to meet in Washington, the debate was inflamed when President Obama said that he would consider changing the name if he owned the team. Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has also called on broadcasters to avoid using the team’s nickname.
In what amounts to a break in the stalemate, Adolpho Birch, the N.F.L.’s senior vice president for labor policy and government affairs, sent a letter last Friday to Peter Carmen, the chief operating officer of the Oneida Indian Nation. Mr. Birch suggested that they meet before their previously scheduled meeting on Nov. 22.
Speaking at the N.F.L. owners meeting Tuesday, Commissioner Roger Goodell reaffirmed his view that the Redskin name stands for honor and is not derogatory. “But whenever you have a situation like this, you have to listen and recognize that some people might have different perspectives,” Goodell added.
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