1. Ernie Barnes was a professional football player, actor and author.
45 Facts About Ernie Barnes
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Ernie Barnes continually sought refuge in his sketchbooks, finding the less-traveled parts of campus away from other students.
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Ernie Barnes was discovered hiding there by the masonry teacher, Tommy Tucker, who was the weightlifting coach and a former athlete.
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Ernie Barnes was intrigued with Barnes's drawings, so he asked the aspiring artist about his grades and goals.
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Ernie Barnes's mother promised him a car if he lived at home so he attended the all-Black North Carolina College at Durham.
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Ernie Barnes played the football positions of tackle and center at NCC.
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At age 18, on a college art class field trip to the newly desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Ernie Barnes inquired where he could find "paintings by Negro artists".
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In 1990, Ernie Barnes was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by North Carolina Central University.
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In 1999, Ernie Barnes was bestowed "The University Award", the highest honor by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.
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In December 1959 Ernie Barnes was drafted in the tenth round by the then-World Champion Baltimore Colts.
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Ernie Barnes was originally selected in the eighth round by the Washington Redskins, who renounced the pick minutes after discovering he was a Negro.
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Until then Ernie Barnes was always known by his birth name, Ernest Ernie Barnes.
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Ernie Barnes was the last cut of the Colts' training camp.
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Ernie Barnes decided to accept a previous offer from Coach Al Davis at the Los Angeles Chargers.
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Ernie Barnes joined their team at mid-season as a member of their taxi squad.
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Ernie Barnes illustrated several articles for San Diego Magazine during the off-seasons in 1962 and 1963.
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Ernie Barnes was often fined by Denver Coach Jack Faulkner when caught sketching during team meetings.
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Many times during breaks, Ernie Barnes would run off the field onto the sideline to give his offensive line coach Red Miller the scraps of paper of his sketches and notes.
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In 1965, after his second season with the Broncos, Ernie Barnes signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in Canada.
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In spite of references on Ernie Barnes' website implying that he played only in the NFL, he was never on an active roster in that league.
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Shortly after his final football game, Ernie Barnes went to the 1965 American Football League owners meeting in Houston in hopes of becoming the league's official artist.
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Ernie Barnes paid for Barnes to bring his paintings to New York City.
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In 1971, Ernie Barnes wrote a series of essays in the Gridiron newspaper titled "I Hate the Game I Love".
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In 1993, Ernie Barnes was selected to the "Black College Football 100th Year All-Time Team" by the Sheridan Broadcasting Network.
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All his life, Ernie Barnes was ambivalent about his football experience.
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In interviews and in personal appearances, Ernie Barnes said he hated the violence and the physical torment of the sport.
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Ernie Barnes sold his first painting "Slow Dance" at age 21 in 1959 for $90 to Boston Celtic Sam Jones.
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Ernie Barnes framed his paintings with distressed wood in homage to his father.
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Ernie Barnes noticed the usually well-maintained white picketed fence had gone untended since his father's illness.
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Ernie Barnes created many styles of athletic pieces of art that weren't just football related.
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Richardson and Ernie Barnes were Baltimore Colts teammates briefly in 1960.
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Shortly after Ernie Barnes was drafted by the Baltimore Colts, Ernie Barnes was invited to see their Colts' NFL Championship Game vs the New York Giants at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore on December 27,1959.
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When Ernie Barnes first created The Sugar Shack, he included his hometown radio station WSRC on a banner.
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Ernie Barnes contributed $1,000 to the winner of a slogan contest among the city's junior high school students that best represented the painting.
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At the time of his passing, Ernie Barnes had been working on an exhibition Liberating Humanity From Within which featured a majority of paintings he created in the last few years of his life.
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Ernie Barnes appeared on a 1967 episode of the game show To Tell the Truth.
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The panelists correctly guessed Ernie Barnes was the professional football player-turned-artist.
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Ernie Barnes played Deke Coleman in the 1969 motion picture Number One, which stars Charlton Heston and Jessica Walter.
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Ernie Barnes played Dr Penfield in the 1971 movie Doctors' Wives, which starred Dyan Cannon, Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman and Carroll O'Connor.
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Ernie Barnes had a bit part on two episodes of Good Times: The Houseguest and Sweet Daddy Williams.
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Ernie Barnes's artwork was used on many television series, including Columbo, The White Shadow, Dream On, The Hughleys, The Wayans Bros.
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In 1981 Ernie Barnes played baseball catcher Josh Gibson of the Negro leagues in the television movie Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy 'Satchel' Paige with Lou Gossett Jr.
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Ernie Barnes passed away on Monday evening, April 27,2009, at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California, from myeloid leukemia.
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Ernie Barnes was cremated and his ashes were scattered in two places: at his hometown Durham, North Carolina, near the site of where his family home once stood, and at the beach in Carmel, California, one of his favorite cities.
45.
Ernie Barnes was recognized as a main honoree by the Sesquicentennial Honors Commission at the Durham 150 Closing Ceremony in Durham, North Carolina, on November 2,2019.