For more than sixty-five years, up until his death, on May 6th, at the age of eighty-nine, William Nunn, Jr., served as a one-man pipeline bringing talented football players from historically black colleges into the National Football League. As a sports columnist in the African-American media and, later, as a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he made sure that such gridiron brilliance would not be ignored. In both parts of his career, he was a pivotal figure in the full desegregation of what is now the most popular spectator sport in the United States.

From 1975 to 1980, the Steelers’ four Super Bowl championship teams abounded in players whom Nunn had found in black colleges: the defensive backs Mel Blount, from Southern, and Donnie Shell, from South Carolina State; the receivers John Stallworth, from Alabama A. & M., and Frank Lewis, from Grambling; and the defensive linemen L. C. Greenwood, from Arkansas A. M. & N., and Ernie Holmes, from Texas Southern.

All of these achievements resulted from a decision that Nunn had made decades earlier, as a teen-ager. Nunn was a star basketball player at Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse High School in the early nineteen-forties, and he yearned to play for Clair Bee, a legendary coach at Long Island University. But his father, William Nunn, Sr., who was the managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s leading black newspapers, was bothered that his son had not had a single black teacher in high school. He wanted Bill, Jr., to attend a black college. Nunn enrolled at West Virginia State University. He did play varsity basketball there, and, even more important, he started writing press releases about the college football team. After graduating in 1948, Nunn turned down an offer from the Harlem Globetrotters to become a reporter at the Courier, where he covered black college football.

Back then, there was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, no Twitter or Facebook. The N.C.A.A. permitted only two or three games to be televised on a typical Saturday, and those games featured the legacy teams that were largely, if not entirely, white. John Merritt, the longtime coach of Tennessee State, bitterly joked that black college teams like his played “behind God’s back.” James Harris, who was a star quarterback at Grambling before becoming the first black player to regularly start for an N.F.L. team, once said, “We had to talk trash because it was the only publicity we got.”

College football, as a kind of civic religion in the South, was deeply embedded in the Jim Crow regime. Until about 1970, nearly every major state university or private college south of the Mason-Dixon Line fielded an entirely white football team. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana State, Georgia, Texas—schools that desegregated their student bodies, however begrudgingly, in the early nineteen-sixties kept their football teams lily-white for nearly another decade. The region’s newspapers, except for the handful that supported civil rights editorially, ignored the extraordinary black teams, players, and coaches in their midst. The box scores of the black-college games were indifferently assembled and riddled with errors.

The modern-era N.F.L. was desegregated in 1946, when Kenny Washington signed with the Los Angeles Rams, but black players remained a small minority. Coaches and executives in the N.F.L.—with a few exceptions, like George Halas, of the Bears, Vince Lombardi, of the Packers, and Paul Brown, of the Browns—seemed to assume that they didn’t need to bother looking for talent at obscure black colleges. The Washington Redskins remained all white into the sixties, integrating only under pressure from the Kennedy Administration.

The upstart A.F.L., in contrast, had been plucking players from black colleges since its founding, in 1960, partly owing to the coverage by journalists such as Nunn, Sam Lacey, of the Baltimore Afro-American, and Marion Jackson, of the Atlanta Daily World. Beginning in 1950, Nunn selected the Courier’s All-America team, one of the chief ways of publicizing black-college standouts to the pros.

For a long time, Nunn’s home town Steelers drafted very few of the players he touted in the Courier. Nunn complained to Dan Rooney, whose family owned the team, and wound up being hired as a scout, in 1967. In that position, Nunn joined the first wave of black N.F.L. scouts, which also included Tank Younger, of the Rams, and Lloyd Wells, of the Kansas City Chiefs.

“We felt there was going to be change,” Nunn told me when I interviewed him, in 2010, for my book “Breaking the Line.” “One guy would make a move here, another would make a move there. One guy came into the pros and did a job, then you got another guy in.”

“Had it not been for the likes of Bill Nunn or the likes of Lloyd Wells, we would not have had that pipeline,” R. C. Gamble, who was a star halfback at South Carolina State before his pro career with the Patriots, said. “Those guys, being in the position they were in, were key to make the owners aware that you got to look beyond the proving grounds you’ve been digging at. We got a lot of ‘firsts’ in pro football because of them.”

During football season, Nunn would travel to the most important black-college matchup on any given weekend. He would gather intelligence on top players from the coaches and sports-information directors whom he trusted as friends, and then he would assess those athletes with his own metrics in mind. After the game, Nunn would go to the Saturday-night campus dance to see which players were “light on their feet” and which linemen, in particular, could “sink their hips” easily—a clue to how well they could drive block. Nunn understood, too, why coaches like Grambling’s Eddie Robinson refused to let their quarterbacks run the forty-yard dash. A fast time would provide the rationale for a pro team to switch the quarterback to receiver or defensive back—a common occurrence at a time when conventional, bigoted “wisdom” held that no black man was smart enough or poised enough to be the field general.

However, not all the stories of the players Nunn brought to the Steelers ended well. In 1972, the team drafted the quarterback Joe Gilliam, Jr., out of Tennessee State. The son of Nunn’s college teammate, Gilliam seemed bound to fully crack the N.F.L.’s quarterback color barrier. He put up a 4-1-1 record as the starter, in 1974, before being benched in favor of Terry Bradshaw, who led the Steelers to their first Super Bowl. Within two years, Gilliam was out of football altogether and headed toward a struggle with drug addiction, which contributed to his death, at the age of forty-nine.

Dan Rooney, the team’s owner during most of Nunn’s tenure, was integral in devising the requirement that N.F.L. teams interview at least one minority candidate for top coaching and executive positions, which became known as the Rooney Rule. Mike Tomlin, an African-American head coach, has led the Steelers to two Super Bowls; in 2006, they won the championship.

When Michael Hurd started researching his definitive book “Black College Football: 1892-1992,” Nunn was one of the first people he called. “Bill Nunn and other writers in the black media put a face on black college football and brought it out of the shadows,” he told me. “Talk about a giant.”

Samuel G. Freedman is the author of “Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”

Above: Bill Nunn, Sr., is inducted into the first class of the Black College Football Hall of Fame, on February 20, 2010. Photograph: Don Juan Moore/AP.