Maury
Allen |
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 Should the Paul Revere statue be wearing a white hood? |
Boston was the last team
to add a black player
of TheColumnists.com
“Get that nigger off the field.”
That racist rabble uttered
by Cap Anson, the Iowa-born manager of the Chicago Cubs in 1884,
sealed the fate of hopeful African-American baseball players
for 63 years.
No laws were passed against blacks in baseball. No resolutions
were drafted. No documents on the subject remain sealed in private
chambers.
It just remained so through the earliest days of the 20th century,
through the legacy of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who never saw
a black man as a man, through all the owners and all the teams
until a cigar-smoking, ballsy, religious nut named Branch Rickey
went for morality, economy and history with the signing of one
Jackie Robinson to a contract in 1945.
A guy named Pee Wee Reese was returning from combat service in
the South Pacific aboard a transport ship after World War II
when a Navy radio operator rushed up to the Brooklyn Dodger shortstop.
“Pee Wee, the Dodgers just signed a nigger,” he explained.
Reese, son of a railroad cop and a native of Louisville, Kentucky,
just shrugged at the supposed big news.
“The radio said he was a shortstop,” said the radio
operator.
“Now I got pissed,” Reese said, with a grin years later
as he told me the tale.
Reese, of course, was the strongest supporter of Robinson and
the man who had as much to do with successfully integrating the
game by his acceptance of Robinson as a teammate as Rickey for
signing him.
Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947. A few months later Larry
Doby joined the Indians. Each big league team added a black until
the circle was closed in 1959 when the Boston Red Sox put a player
named Elijah (Pumpsie) Green on the field at Fenway.
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Jackie Robinson broke into Major League Baseball in 1947, but Boston didn't add a black player until 1959 |
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Boston was the last big league club to integrate and Green was the least likely man to accomplish the fact. He had an undistinguished .246 five year career and a nickname he never could explain.
In a strong book on the raging racism of the Boston franchise, lain at the feet of owner Tom Yawkey, GM Eddie Collins and manager Pinky Higgins, sportswriter Howard Bryant has detailed the Boston epic in "Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston" (Routledge, $27.50).
Bryant, one of the few black baseball beat reporters, describes the Boston attitude toward a guy named Robinson in 1945 and another kid named Willie Mays in 1950 trying for a Fenway spot.
He describes Yawkey, the owner, as more or less a laissez faire racist while Collins and especially Higgins were of the old Cap Anson school. He suggests that Yawkey actually repeated Anson’s line about “get that nigger off the field,” at the Robinson tryout, a highly unlikely scenario he seems to back off late in the book.
He delves deeply and significantly into the history of Boston’s collective racism, its volatile and violent attacks on integration, forced busing and equal opportunity housing.
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takes a hard look at racism in the baseball world. |
He makes a strong case for the bitterness of Bill Russell, despite his legendary basketball greatness, and the lack of Hall of Fame honors for Jim Rice. Russell was the best at his trade but always hated the city of Boston. He cites as a Russell example of racism a fan asking the Boston center for his autograph after calling him, “Wilt.”
Rice might still make the Hall of Fame but his nastiness with the press has slowed his immortal progress. He has Thurman Munson’s personality, anger at life, and gentle sportswriters always react to that the same way: They punish the guy in any voting opportunity they have.
Bryant does a wonderful job of exploring the newspaper history of Boston coverage of the racist Red Sox. Few fought for equality in Boston as few sportswriters did almost anywhere else.
I wrote a book about Jackie Robinson and described the general ignorance of New York teenagers in 1947 when Robinson was brought up to the Dodgers. Few knew there were no blacks in baseball. In my neighborhood, after Jackie joined the team at Ebbets Field the question always was, “Can he play?
He sure as hell could but never shook that chip from his shoulder. Sure, the pain was too great for Jackie but maybe his life would have been longer and softer with more smiles and less bitterness.
Bryant points out how few blacks get those managerial jobs or the more important general manager posts. Part of it is racism, still perking along in America in every aspect of life, and part of it is in the comfort zone.
George Weiss, the general manager of the Mets at the time, once explained his racism by saying, “How can you bring them to your golf club?”
While all the current fuss in the Augusta National Golf Club is about female members, the black members can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Elston Howard, the first black New York Yankee, a rookie in 1955, was a helpful veteran to the 1967 Boston Impossible Dream team. Casey Stengel was his Yankee manager.
“When I get a nigger,” said Stengel, talking the way most whites born in 1890 talked, “I get the only one who can’t run.”
Howard proved he could hit and catch and became one of Casey’s favorites.
Bryant’s sparkling work is a clear indictment of the Boston racist baseball scene. Unfortunately the same story can be written about just about every team in baseball history. None of them went out of their way to bring a black in for 63 years.
Imagine a young Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson battery. Imagine Jackie Robinson playing for Brooklyn when he was 20 years old instead of a 28-year-old rookie. Imagine, as Bryant points out, an outfield with Mays and Ted Williams and an infield with Robinson and Bobby Doerr in Fenway Park. It might have been the Damn Red Sox we hated instead of the Damn Yankees.
Then again, imagine a black president of the United States, a black vice president, a black owner of a baseball team, a black commissioner.
To my mind Jackie Robinson was a more significant American than Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Bill Russell. He made it all happen.
There are few black managers, no black general managers, no black commissioners, no black U.S. Presidents.
Despite the Red Sox and because of Jackie Robinson, blacks dominate the playing fields in basketball, baseball and football.
By the way, these athletes are doing a good job of integrating America all by themselves. Check out the races of the wives of most black star athletes. Black women certainly have done that.
© 2002 by Maury Allen.
The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The Boston
illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco
Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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