Professional football team owner George Preston Marshall (October 11, 1896 - August 9, 1969) was the only child born to Thomas Hildebrand “Hill” Marshall and Blanche Preston Sebrell Marshall. Many sources list his birthplace as Grafton, where his father published a newspaper. However, Marshall himself later gave his birthplace as Point Pleasant, his mother’s native city and where his parents had been married in 1888.

By the time of the 1900 census, the Marshalls were living in Washington, D.C., where his father ran a laundry business. It appears the Marshalls may have maintained dual residences because his family appears in the 1910 census for Grafton, with his father and uncle listed as operating a laundry. Little information exists about Marshall’s time in Grafton. According to various sources, he played some baseball, was a batboy for a baseball team, organized a local traveling football team when he was 14, and made money breeding and selling rabbits.

In the early 1910s, the Marshalls moved to Washington permanently. Marshall attended Randolph-Macon College for a brief time before quitting to become an acting apprentice, also briefly. He served stateside during World War I. After his father’s sudden death in 1918, Marshall took over the family laundry business and pursued a bon vivant lifestyle, enjoying the nightlife, dating film and stage actresses, and gambling.

Oddly, for someone who had shown only a passing interest in playing athletics, sports would become his life. His laundry business boomed, eventually growing from two to 57 Palace Laundry stores. The income afforded Marshall a chance to own the Washington Palace Five, an early professional basketball team that started play in 1925 and folded in 1927. His interest in backing financially risky sports ventures attracted the attention of the National Football League (NFL), then in its infancy and struggling to survive.

In 1932, Marshall paid $2,500 to the NFL and was awarded the new Boston Braves franchise, replacing the defunct Newark Tornadoes. One of his first signees was Cliff Battles, who had starred at West Virginia Wesleyan and would later join Marshall in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The following year, Marshall moved his team across town from Braves Field to Fenway Park and changed the name to the Redskins, theoretically to honor his new head coach, William Henry Dietz, who claimed to be part Sioux but most likely was not. Marshall probably chose the new name to avoid changing the team’s Indian head logo. In 1937, he relocated his team to the nation’s capital, where it was known as the Washington Redskins until dropping that nickname altogether in 2020 and then becoming the Commanders in 2022.

Marshall had a profound impact on the NFL, which had produced low-scoring games since the league’s inception in 1920. Relying on his acting instincts, Marshall insisted to other owners that the NFL needed to be more entertaining. He introduced rule changes that separated pro football from its college counterpoint by promoting the forward pass, establishing hash marks to move the action closer to the middle of the field, and implementing a season-ending championship game. He also proposed moving goal posts from the back of the end zone to the goal line to encourage more field goal attempts; it was initially rejected but soon instituted, remaining in place until the 1970s. Due largely to Marshall’s input, NFL scoring increased, and as the Great Depression eased, game attendance increased. He would later become an early proponent of using television to spread football’s popularity.

Marshall, though, is best remembered for his racial attitudes. Unlike Major League Baseball, the early 20th-century NFL was not segregated. A number of Black athletes played in the 1920s and early 1930s, but none were on rosters between 1934 and 1945. While no formal ban on Black players existed during those years, NFL owners had a handshake agreement on the matter. Most historians attribute this unofficial policy primarily to Marshall, who spoke publicly in support of segregation in general. Even when the NFL was reintegrated in 1946, Marshall refused to sign Black players and was increasingly vilified in the press for his stance, particularly by noted Washington sportswriter Shirley Povich, who wrote that Marshall was “one of pro football’s greatest innovators, and its leading bigot.” In 1961, in the midst of the nation’s Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. government threatened to revoke the lease on Marshall’s Washington stadium unless he integrated his team. The next year, Marshall drafted Ernie Davis, a Black Heisman Trophy winner from Syracuse, who refused to play for Marshall. Marshall traded Davis to the Cleveland Browns for future hall of famer Bobby Mitchell, who, with John Nisby and Ron Hatcher, became the first Black players in Redskins’ history.

In 1963, Marshall was one of 17 inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s inaugural class. Shortly after his induction, he suffered a massive stroke, and three conservators took over operation of the team, despite a lawsuit filed by Marshall’s children. He died in Washington in 1969 and was buried near his parents in Indian Mound Cemetery in Romney, his father’s native city.

Along with George Halas, Tim Mara, Bert Bell, Curly Lambeau, and Art Rooney, Marshall deserves much of the credit for inventing modern professional football. The NFL arguably would never have survived without their support and innovations. Marshall’s bigger legacy, however, is one of deeply entrenched racism, for which he never expressed any regrets. As every other NFL team integrated, the Redskins fell far behind the rest of the league. During his 37 years of ownership, the Redskins won only two championships (1937 and 1942) and posted only three winning seasons between 1946 and his death 23 years later.