Henry ‘Model T’ Ford was first Black Pitt quarterback
The unlikely pairing of the name of an early 20th-century automobile and its creator with the name of a midcentury Pittsburgh varsity football phenomenon inspired the Henry “Model T” Ford moniker.
When Henry Ford became the first Black quarterback at the University of Pittsburgh, his status rejected the past and foreshadowed the future. A historic rarity in 1950s America, African American college quarterbacks have taken their place in the legend and lore of sports Americana.
Henry Ford died on June 10, 2021, at age 89, in Palo Alto, Calif. Ford had built a family life and business career out West. But, he was a son of Pennsylvania — industrial Homestead and the Hill District, Pittsburgh’s Harlem. Born on Nov. 1, 1931, he grew up to be a good student and superb athlete.
At Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School, Ford not only starred at quarterback on the Spartans football team, he helped with strategy.
“The coach let me design the strategy and draw up the plays,” Ford explained decades later. The resulting formations caused the youngster to be given the nickname Model T by acclaimed Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope. Ford graduated from Schenley in 1951 as class treasurer.
Ford enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh at midcentury. Several firsts, onlies and bests characterized the small number of Black students at 1950s Pitt. As quarterback, Ford contributed to the distinctions.
According to E.J. Borghetti, Pitt’s top sports information official, in 1953 Mr. Ford became the first African American to start as quarterback for the Pitt Panthers, and he led the team in passing, total offense and kick returns.
In those days, team members played both offense and defense. And as a defensive back, he led the team in interceptions. Although he was no longer quarterback in his senior year, he was a four-year letter winner from 1951 to 1954.
In Jim Crow America of the Eisenhower years, Henry Ford endured racism in accommodations when the team traveled. He was segregated from all but his Black Panther teammates, such as Bobby Grier, who in 1956 became the first Black student-athlete to play in the New Orleans Sugar Bowl.
Ford also fell in love. During the Schenley Spartans training camp stay in Ligonier, Pa., he spied from his seat on the team bus a neighborhood teenager. At the time of his death, Rochelle and Henry Ford had been married for more than 61 years.
With a facility for mathematics, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh College of Business in 1955. The Black Panther was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in 1955, and he played there that season and during the next for the Pittsburgh Steelers. The two seasons comprised his NFL career, but his Browns won the NFL championship in his 1955 rookie season.
Rochelle Ford is a Lebanese American from an upper-class family that owned retail dealerships in tony Ligonier. Over the decades, the couple maintained that the brevity of Henry Ford’s NFL career resulted from the Fords’ interracial dating at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet struck down anti-miscegenation laws in post-World War II America.
I first met Henry “Model T” Ford in San Jose at the NCAA March 2007 Pitt vs. UCLA men’s basketball game in the West Regional tournament. After the disappointing Pittsburgh loss, Ford took me to his Palo Alto home to meet Rochelle Ford, also a Pitt alumnus and a renowned California metal artist. Their elegant home was brimming with her enormous eye-popping artistic installations .... but not with much love for their alma mater.
That needed to change. And it did. During the 2007 Pitt Homecoming, Henry “Model T” Ford was given the African American Alumni Council Distinguished Alumnus Award. In 2008 he was designated an Awardee of Distinction by the Varsity Letter Club during homecoming. The latter honor is awarded to varsity letter winners who later distinguish themselves “in their professions and communities.”
In the Fords’ community, Henry was a respected businessman who owned the Coca-Cola vending franchise in California between San Francisco and Los Angeles, among several businesses. He taught math, as well as developed a school integration initiative. And he coached the Menlo-Atherton High School football program to dramatic turnaround success.
He and his wife raised two boys, Michael and Mark, and had given love and guidance to two grandchildren.
The back-to-back homecoming recognitions occurring decades after his ascent from the Hill District seemingly cast a Pitt-infused blue-and-gold — and Black — warmth over the home that had been missing previously when I visited in March 2007.
Wrote Rochelle Ford of this development: “Had it not been for his full ride athletic scholarship, he would never have received his college education.” Warmly recognizing ... what “Pitt did for him, the education that changed his life and headed him on a road to success,” she praised the alma mater that finally showed love to Henry “Model T” Ford a half-century after he earned it.
In 2015, the team that fired him, after he refused to forswear the woman he loved in order to continue his Pittsburgh Steelers football career, honored Henry “Model T” Ford. The NFL team awarded him the Pittsburgh Pro Football Hall of Fame President’s Award. Although he accepted in good style, there is no report that restoration of lost wages accompanied the honor.