The Anti-Redskin

In the fight over the team's name, Ray Halbritter is an adversary unlike any the NFL has faced before.

- Ariel Sabar

Ray Halbritter, the leader of the Oneida Indian Nation, and Dan Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, couldn’t be further apart on the question of the NFL team’s name. But in other ways, the two have much in common. Both are bullheaded multi­ millionaire CEOs who hate losing, which has made their clash nearly as bruising as the boxing matches Halbritter hosts at his casino in upstate New York.

I caught up with Halbritter in early April at Harvard Law School, his alma mater, where he’d come to give a lunch­ time talk. Halbritter, who is 65 but has a boyish face, had flown in on his tribe’s corporate jet. He wore a cashmere blazer and a gold Rolex. Martha Minow, the law school’s dean, who’d taught Halbritter civil procedure in the 1980s, wrapped him in a hug—“So good to see you!” Then Halbritter walked to the podium and lik­ened Snyder and his backers to those on the wrong side of the 1960s civil­rights movement.

“Back then, these forces of the status quo were sitting in the halls of Congress,” he told the audience of law students and professors. “Today they are sitting in an NFL team’s front office.”

Native American activists have been saying since the late 1960s that the Redskins’ name is a slur. But their com­ plaints drew little sustained notice until 2013, when Halbritter almost single­ handedly vaulted the issue into the head­ lines. Drawing on his tribe’s wealth, he launched Change the Mascot, a campaign of radio ads, polls, opposition research, academic studies, YouTube videos, Twit­ter hashtags, and media interviews.

For once, powerful people seemed to be listening. Marquee sports journalists such as Bob Costas said they would stop using the name, as did more than a dozen news outlets and the editorial board of the Redskins’ hometown paper,