1948, 80,000 people attended his final game and the entire stadium gave him a standing ovation. Later years Washington was a Republican in his younger years and strongly supported Richard Nixon's 1950 U.S. Senate campaign. The night before Nixon's victory over Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the candidatea great football fanspent the evening at Washington's south Los Angeles home playing music and trying to relax. However, in the 1960 presidential election, Washington voted for John F. Kennedy instead of Nixon and tended to vote for Democrats for the rest of his life, but he never declared a political party affiliation. After retirement from football, Washington returned to the LAPD. He also worked for a grocery store chain and a whiskey distributor, and was a part-time scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where his son Kenny Jr. played. Thanks to his connections from when he had worked at movie studios during his undergraduate years, he was also chosen for a few film roles, including Rope of Sand (1949), Pinky (1949), and The Jackie Robinson Story (1950). Death Washington died of heart and lung problems at the age of 52 in Los Angeles, California. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery. Legacy For his contribution to sports in Los Angeles, Washington was honored with a Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum "Court of Honor" plaque by the Coliseum commissioners. He was inducted to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1956 and his number 13 jersey was the first to be retired at UCLA. He was posthumously inducted into the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame. His alma mater Abraham Lincoln High School has annually awarded the Kenny Washington Trophy to the school's best football player since 1949. One legacy of Washington's and Strode's experience in the NFL – paralleled in 1946 by racial trailblazers Marion Motley and Bill Willis in the rival All-America Football Conference – was that Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, saw that blacks and whites could coexist in a violent sport without much disruption, and decided that Major League Baseball could be integrated as well. He signed Washington's and Strode's UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers in 1947. However, for many years, Washington was ignored by the NFL and the story of professional football's postwar integration received little attention. One reason is because for most of the 20th century, baseball was by far the top sport in the U.S., and