Delay of Game

The winter after his debut ­season with the Montreal Alouettes, Herb Trawick, the Canadian Football League’s first African American player, noticed something unusual, but also something searingly familiar.

Trawick was twenty-­five and a two-way lineman who had signed with the Alouettes after playing college ball at the historically black Kentucky State University. He moved to Montreal in 1946, the same year Jackie Robinson played baseball with the Montreal Royals. Together, Trawick and Robinson navigated a new, bilingual city and placed Montreal at the epicentre of a seismic shift in sports and civil rights.

Before Robinson graduated to the Brooklyn Dodgers for his groundbreaking 1947 season, he spent a year with the team’s minor league club...