One stroll through the Neville Public Museum and their current exhibit  ‘Delay of Game’, and you’ll see just some of the history for the Green Bay Packers. Not in green and gold, but in black and white.

“I grew up in Green Bay. This was pretty much a literally white community, and the Packers, the black Packers were the exception,” says team historian Cliff Chrystal.

In the early days, the team had barely  more than a handful o African American players, and it took until 1950 for the door to open once again.

“Emlen Tunnell is a great story. When Lombardi got here, and he inherited really one black player, he brought in Emlen Tunnell, who already had a Hall of Fame career with the New York Giants. A great safety, one of the greatest safeties in the history of the NFL. Lombardi brought him here, basically I think, the philosophy. Of changing the culture. Tunnell was essentially a de facto assistant coach. There were no black coaches at that point in time, but he really serve as a player coach.”

Prior to Vince Lombardi’s arrival, the team was bad on the field and the community wasn’t very diverse culturally.

“We’re talking about the civil rights era 1959 all the way through ’67, even then after that. But for that timeframe having African American players in a predominately white community, Vince was perfect. When you read the quotes and you look at it we didn’t interpret what was there we took the national storyline and said OK what were these players saying, what was the families saying, what was the coach saying at that particular time, what were they feeling because nobody can say it better than an in their own words.”

“He changed the culture of Green Bay. And he did do that, the Packers and Washington used to play a preseason game in Columbus, Georgia. And I think it was back to back years one Lombardi was here. He had them stay at Fort Bragg outside of Columbus because, of the Jim Crow laws, the entire team could not stay together. And the same in Green Bay. He let it be known, that he expected people who owned restaurants and taverns that they serve his African American players.”

Former Packers Running Back Harry Sydney: “That just shows, that as backwards as we thought Green Bay was, they were so far ahead of times. When it came to integration of African American players into modern football.”