Above is U.S. Coast Guard photo of Emlen Tunnell, who served in the Coast Guard during and after World War II, was the first Black player inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Before he became the first Black player inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Emlen Tunnell served in the U.S. Coast Guard during and after World War II, where he was credited with saving the lives of two shipmates.
Now, a Coast Guard cutter and an athletic building on the Coast Guard Academy campus are being named in honor of the former NFL defensive back, who died in 1975 of a heart attack, as the service aims to highlight his little-known story and celebrate diversity.
Above, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter named for Tunnell is docked in Bollinger Shipyard, in Lockport, La.
“I think it’s important, because you have a teachable moment with young people when you talk about a guy like Emlen Tunnell,” Coast Guard Academy football coach C.C. Grant said. “They need to understand what he did, what he went through and what kind of a person he was.”
Tunnell was the first Black player signed by the New York Giants and later played for the Green Bay Packers. But not much was known about his Coast Guard service until 2008, when Cmdr. Bill McKinstry recognized Tunnell’s name on the back of a photo showing a Coast Guard basketball team from the late 1940s.
His research uncovered a remarkable career that Tunnell, who had been a steward’s mate, had downplayed.
In April 1944, Tunnell was unloading fuel and explosives from a cargo ship in Papua New Guinea when it was hit by a Japanese torpedo. He used his bare hands to beat out flames that had engulfed a shipmate. Two years later, while stationed in Newfoundland, Tunnell jumped into freezing water to save another man who had fallen from the USS Tampa.
Given the context of what a Black steward’s mate was expected or even allowed to do during that time in U.S. history, his accomplishments are all the more remarkable, McKinstry said.
“If you look at the pictures of him in uniform, he is the one African American in a sea of other people,” McKinstry said. “It is so important that we take a look at these trailblazers just like Mr. Tunnell and we honor them, because of all the things they faced in laying the groundwork for where we are today in making a better future.”
In 2011, the Coast Guard posthumously awarded Tunnell the Silver Lifesaving Medal. Tunnell played college football at Toledo before the war and after the war — he enlisted from 1943 to 1946 — and continued his collegiate career at the University of Iowa, suffering a serious neck injury. But after leaving college in 1948, he hitchhiked from his home in Pennsylvania to New York for a tryout with the Giants.
He ended up playing 14 seasons in the NFL, helping fully integrate both the Giants and the Green Bay Packers.
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