08/30/2026
Two names on Buffalo’s 1967 roster marked a first that professional football barely explained. Tony King and his brother Charlie became the first African American brothers to play as teammates on a pro football team.
On the surviving roster, Charlie’s name appears directly above Tony’s. The list makes their place look simple, as though all they had to do was arrive.
It does not show the father who spoke up in an Ohio home, the racist abuse Tony later described at training camp, or the playbook he resisted surrendering when Buffalo told him he was being released.
Before the Bills, Tony spent 1962 through 1965 at Findlay College. He played on both sides of the ball, earned all-conference honors three times, and helped the Oilers reach the 1964 NAIA playoffs after a 9-1 regular season.
Findlay later remembered him as one of its finest defensive ends. Even so, Tony recalled, the Bills came to the King family’s home to sign Charlie, not him.
General manager Dick Gallagher was speaking with their father about Charlie when the older King pointed out that he had another son who had earned All-American recognition on offense and defense.
Gallagher called Bills owner Ralph Wilson, and a visit intended for one brother opened an opportunity for two. Tony’s path changed because his father named the ability the visitor had not come to see.
Charlie still had a college all-star game to play, so Tony reported to camp without him. He later said racist slurs followed him so relentlessly that the insult was treated like another name.
Tony recalled his father teaching both sons not to answer every racist word thrown at them. That discipline did not make the abuse harmless; it was one way of getting through a place that wanted Black performance without granting Black men ordinary respect.
He also remembered a white team captain saying he could play beside Black teammates but would not eat with them. Buffalo could trust Black men to absorb the game’s punishment while one of its white captains still refused to share a table.
As the team prepared its final cuts, a knock came at Tony’s dormitory door. After confirming his name, the person there told him he was being released.
Then Buffalo asked for the playbook.
Tony hesitated. The notebook held the assignments that told each player where he belonged and how the team was supposed to move as one.
“We worked too hard for that,” he later recalled.
Those six words carried his years at Findlay, his father’s intervention, and the distance from Alliance, Ohio, to professional football. Returning the book meant being pushed outside the active team before he had played a regular-season game.
Marty Schottenheimer persuaded Tony to hand it over after explaining that Buffalo would keep him on its practice team. He would still receive a paycheck, but he could not travel with the active club.
The arrangement kept him close enough to learn and far enough away to feel the limit being placed on him. He remained with the organization.
Charlie arrived at camp a week later. Tony remained on the practice team, then made Buffalo’s active roster in 1967.
The two names that look effortless on paper were earned through a year the paper does not describe.
Tony’s regular-season career with Buffalo was brief and included no starts. The record can count appearances, but it cannot measure the pressure that came before the first one.
In 2009, the Pro Football Hall of Fame included the brothers’ achievement in its “Remember the AFL” exhibit. Charlie and Tony visited the display that carried their story.
They were honored in an exhibit, not inducted as Hall of Famers. That distinction protects an accomplishment strong enough to stand without enlargement.
Football did not become Tony King’s final stage. He moved into modeling and acting, entering another business that could profit from Black presence while controlling how Black people were shown.
The American Film Institute credits him as Davies in Shaft in 1971, Roy Green in Gordon’s War in 1973, and Satin in Sparkle in 1976. He also appeared in Bucktown and Report to the Commissioner.
Much of that work belonged to the 1970s Black film wave commonly called Blaxploitation. The era created new opportunities and put Black characters at the center, but it also drew criticism for recycling stereotypes and selling narrow images back to Black audiences.
Tony was not limited to standing in front of a camera. AFI records him on a 1976 feature with credits in writing, associate producing, casting, assistant camera work, makeup and hair, and stunt coordination.
Those jobs reveal a worker learning how a film was built, not merely waiting to be placed inside the frame. His career was never as simple as the labels “actor” or “B-movie performer” make it sound.
Gordon’s War placed him inside another overlooked first. On August 8, 1973, the film premiered on Broadway and opened that same day at five theaters in Black New York neighborhoods.
Industry reporting cited by AFI called it the first movie to break the city’s theater-booking color bar. Before then, even films aimed at Black moviegoers commonly opened in white neighborhoods first, asking the very audience being courted to wait.
Tony played Roy Green in the film. The man who had once fought for a place on a football roster was now part of a production challenging where Black audiences were allowed to stand in line.
By the early 1980s, he was working in Italian genre productions, including The Last Hunter, Tiger Joe, and Atlantis Interceptors. Often dismissed under the broad label of B movies, those films also show a Black American actor continuing to find international work after the genre’s peak years had passed.
Tony’s public life shifted again when he became known as Malik Farrakhan and moved into Black nationalist activism. By 2015, he was heading security for Public Enemy.
That work changed his position once more. After years of being selected, cut, photographed, and cast, he became responsible for helping protect Black artists moving through public spaces.
Director Réda Zine spent more than six years turning Tony’s life into the documentary The Long Road to the Hall of Fame. The film followed him through professional football, Black cinema, Black nationalism, and his work with Public Enemy.
At a 2015 screening, Tony offered no polished slogan for everything he had lived. “Hopefully you can pick up something from it, even if it’s a small fact,” he said.
One such fact sits in plain sight: Charlie King directly above Tony King on Buffalo’s 1967 roster.
The official record gives Tony seven games. It cannot count what happened before he reached them or what he built after football ended.
A number is not the same as a measure. Tony King’s place beside his brother holds more than the record was designed to keep.
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