“America was a racist society in the first half of the twentieth century. A society is not a soulless abstraction. It is people; in this case, the white majority of America – our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents.
“They grew up in a time when populists like William Jennings Bryan and William Allen White openly opposed any form of integration. Newspapers and popular music regularly used terms like coons and darkies.
“The president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, addressed a group of alumni on February 8, 1903. Referring to Teddy Roosevelt’s nomination of a black man to be customs collector in Charleston, South Carolina, Wilson drew laughs when he joked, 'The groundhog has returned to its burrow because it feared that Roosevelt would put a coon in to replace him.'”
– Norman Macht, American freelance baseball historian
Did you know that Branch Rickey’s White scouts, unfamiliar with the Negro Leagues, couldn’t help him find the Black player he wanted to be baseball’s trailblazer? Instead, Rickey had subscriptions to the major Negro newspapers, which published Negro League box scores, statistics, and schedules, and whose sportswriters gave accounts of its best players. In 1945 Rickey gave his scouts a list of players to follow, pretending that he was interested in starting his own all-Black baseball league to compete with the existing Negro Leagues.
Rickey’s search for the right player was inadvertently aided by Isadore Muchnick, a progressive Jewish member of the Boston City Council. In 1945 Muchnick was determined to push the Boston Red Sox to hire Black players. But owner Tom Yawkey was among baseball’s strongest opponents of integration. Muchnick threatened to deny the Red Sox a permit needed to play on Sundays unless the team considered hiring Black players. Working with Smith and White sportswriter Dave Egan of the Boston Record, Muchnick persuaded reluctant general manager Eddie Collins to give three Negro League players – Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams – a tryout at Fenway Park on April 16.
Robinson had already endured the earlier bogus tryout with the White Sox four years earlier in Pasadena. He was skeptical about the Red Sox’ motives now, He and the other two players performed well. Robinson, the most impressive of the three, hit line drives to all fields. “Bang, bang, bang; he rattled it,” Muchnick recalled. “Jackie hit balls over the fence and against the wall,” echoed Jethroe. “What a ballplayer,” said Hugh Duffy, the Red Sox’ chief scout and onetime outstanding hitter. “Too bad he’s the wrong color.”
(Bill Nowlin, Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox. 2018; Bill Nowlin, ed., Pumpsie & Progress: The Red Sox, Race, and Redemption. 2010).
The Red Sox, Pirates, and White Sox had no intention of signing any of the Black players from the tryouts. But the public pressure and media publicity helped raise awareness and furthered the cause. And it helped give Rickey, who did want to hire Black players, a sense of urgency that if he wanted to be baseball’s racial pioneer, he needed to act quickly.
After the phony Fenway Park tryout, Smith headed to Brooklyn to tell Rickey about Robinson’s superlative performance. Smith was convinced that among major-league owners, Rickey was the desegregation campaign’s strongest ally. The meeting cemented the relationship between the two men. Smith kept offering Rickey the names of Black ballplayers, but gave Robinson his strongest endorsement. You know the rest of the story.
(Peter Dreier. “Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball’s Civil Rights Movement." https://sabr.org/journal/article/before-jackie-robinson-baseballs-civil-rights-movement/. Society For American Baseball Research.)
But, perhaps you didn't know this …
On September 23, 1997, Rober Kahn – author of the 1972 bestselling book The Boys of Summer, considered by many to be one of the best sports books of all time – attended an event in Princeton, New Jersey called “Remembering Branch Rickey.” Among those in attendance was Branch B. Rickey, Branch Rickey’s grandson, who spoke about a private meeting between baseball owners and executives that reportedly took place in 1945 – a meeting which some later denied ever happened.
Kahn writes:
The most passionate speaker turned out to be Branch B. After his grandfather moved to break the big-league color line, Branch B. said, the other owners gathered in a secret meeting and denounced him. According to young Branch, the rival magnates stormed about and shouted that integration could very well destroy baseball. Talk about slash and burn.
“To a man,” young Branch said, in ringing tones, “everyone in the room condemned my grandfather. No other owner, not a single one, stood up for him. Among men he thought were colleagues and friends, my grandfather found himself utterly and completely alone.”
When the Princeton proceedings ended, Branch and I eased back with a few drinks at the Nassau Inn, a Princeton tavern that dates from 1756, when Princeton was a mostly Quaker town, a small colonial landmark between New Brunswick and Trenton. I asked where he had heard about the meeting that so roundly condemned his grandfather. “From my grandfather himself,” Branch said. “He spoke about it more than once.”
(Ron Cervenka. “‘Rickey & Robinson’ reveals many unknown facts about the integration of baseball.” https://thinkbluela.com/2014/09/rickey-robinson-reveals-many-unknown-facts-about-the-integration-of-baseball/. September 12, 2014.)
Roger Kahn (1927-2020) writes this story in Rickey & Robinson – The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball, his 20th and final book. Kahn, was said to be the last known living sportswriter/author who was actually there during one of baseball’s (and our country’s) greatest moments – the integration of blacks into Major League Baseball. But the true Jackie Robinson/Branch Rickey story, according to Kahn, was often times tumultuous at best – not between the two of them but between them and the rest of baseball.
This was America in the 1940s – a country where racial equality simply did not exist. The courage and determination Branch Rickey employed to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball resulted in a a landmark achievement of the time. Lieutenant Jackie Robinson's entry into MLB caused untold upheaval even though he had served during WWII in the all-Black 761st Tank Battalion, an outfit that called itself the “Black Panthers. Rickey and Robinson were two very special men at a time when racism threatened the lives of Blacks and their White civil rights advocates.
This 1941 ad for Kentucky Club Tobacco features a row of Black men looking almost inhuman and chomping on some watermelon as white men pass by. The tobacco also makes a selling point out of being “all-white.”
Ira Glasser, editor of Current, a monthly magazine of public affairs and Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1978-2001), writes …
“The dissonance between the American ideal of equal opportunity based on individual merit and the reality of oppressive inequality based on skin color threatened, after World War II, to split America asunder …
“This moral contradiction between what America said it stood for and the way it was actually organized was most clearly articulated at the time by the eminent sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma, published in 1944. The thesis of his book was that a terrible tension existed in American society between our professed ideals of equality and fairness based on individual merit and the reality of harsh, suffocating exclusion and oppression based on skin color.
“The evidence of that oppression was manifest, most clearly in the South. In those days, blacks and whites were kept apart by law and custom, in schools, buses, and theaters; at restaurants, hotels, and public toilets; at drinking fountains, swimming pools, parks, and baseball games; at the ballot box (where blacks were in various ways discouraged from voting and intimidated if they tried); in the jury box (where blacks were effectively excluded altogether); in the workplace (where blacks were pervasively denied fair opportunities); and in housing. Whereas such separation was enforced by law in the South, much the same separation was found in the North, effectively maintained by custom and tradition.
“Moreover, such separation was not benign; 'separate but equal' was a lie. Indeed, the purpose of separation was to maintain subjugation and inequality. Inferiority and exclusion was enforced by the police power of the state and by traditions so strong they nearly had the force of law. If you were black, individual merit was irrelevant, even dangerous.”
(Ira Glasser. “Branch
Rickey and Jackie Robinson: Precursors to the Civil Rights Movement.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jackie-robinson-civil-rights_b_3093810.
April 16, 2013.
This Maxwell House coffee ad ran in the 1950s and portrays the Black men as extremely ugly servants pouring coffee into a white woman’s cup. If you look close enough, you don’t have to look hard to see that the Black men are actually white males in blackface. The text on the ad is also broken English and presents the Black men as uneducated.
So, it must be acknowledged that it wasn't just Major League Baseball that was segregated and largely racist at the time. No, not by a long shot. Racism was an ugly, deep-rooted part of American society during those days, and not just in the Deep South as many believe. Please, allow me to paint a frightening picture …
From Maryland to California there were lynchings every year until the 1950s. Respectable citizens who did not take part stood by and condoned them. In 1933 the governor of California went so far as to declare a lynching in his state “a fine lesson for the whole nation.”
From 1933 to 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt never proposed a single civil-rights law, never supported efforts to pass a federal antilynching law, never pushed Congress, which had jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, to end any aspect of segregation there.
In 1941 it took the threat of a march on Washington to force the president to issue an order ending discrimination in employment in defense industries.
Deadly riots in Chicago and Washington in 1919 had left deep scars on our ancestors, who were in no mood for any form of integration. In 1933, Ohio State University barred blacks from on-campus housing and restaurants. When the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the university’s right to deny housing to a black coed, the school president, George Rightmire, said, “Knowing the feelings in Ohio, can the administration take the burden of establishing this relationship – colored and white girls living in this more or less family way?”
(William Baker.Jesse Owens: An American Life. New York: Free Press. 1986.)
On July 16, 1942, a letter from General Eisenhower’s adjutant general went to the Red Cross in London directing that black and white army personnel be segregated as much as possible. It said, “It is believed that to avoid friction between white and Negro soldiers, care should be taken so that men of the two races are not needlessly intermingled in the same dormitory or at the same table in dining halls.”
(Harry Butcher. Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower, 1942 to 1945. London: Heinemann, 1946.)
In My Eyes
In our sports or in our daily lives, our pursuit of virtuous behavior may be greatly influenced by the times in which we live; however, the individual path we choose in those times must not lead us to prejudicial behaviors, no matter how widely accepted they are. Wouldn't you agree?
Most of us Whites grew up in a social environment that insulated us from minorities – we were influenced by our friends and families – groups that had a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement. In the top position in the hierarchy of a purely human construct called “race,” we were not willing to stand against racial stereotypes and inequality to become anti-racist activists, believing instead that speaking out against racial injustice was “just not our job” or standing up for Blacks was “not good for our own image.” We preferred to see our lives in “black or white” and overwhelming we accepted the false narrative that white = good, and black = bad.
We didn't condemn what we knew was wrong for fear of conflict. It was much easier to listen passively to racist jokes, be indifferent to prejudiced behaviors, and feel as if all of the real and hateful prejudice was the “work of other radicals.” In short, we were perpetuating racism while excusing our own ingrained racist behaviors.
A recent study (2020) by Steven O. Roberts and Michael Rizzo in American Psychologist cites seven factors that contribute to American racism:
(a) Categories, which organize people into distinct groups by promoting essentialist (believing that the inward, or essential, nature of most things is invariable) and normative reasoning;
(b) Factions, which trigger ingroup loyalty and intergroup competition and threat;
(c) Segregation, which hardens racist perceptions, preferences, and beliefs through the denial of intergroup contact;
(d) Hierarchy, which emboldens people to think, feel, and behave in racist ways;
(e) Power, which legislates racism on both micro and macro levels;
(f) Media, which legitimize over-represented and idealized representations of White Americans while marginalizing and minimizing people of color; and
(g) Passivism, such that overlooking or denying the existence of racism obscures this reality, encouraging others to do the same and allowing racism to fester and persis
The study concludes that of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism. This includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.
Discussions about passivism are particularly relevant now, Roberts said, as thousands take to the streets to protest against racism. “If people advantaged by the hierarchy remain passive, it is no surprise that those at the bottom cry out to be heard,” he added. “People have been crying for centuries.”
(Steven O. Roberts and Michael Rizzo. “The Psychology of American Racism.”American Psychological Association. American Psychologist. Vol. 76, No. 3, 475-487. 2021.)
Branch Rickey did not choose to remain passive. He chose a daring, active path. His moral commitment to equality began a revolution in Major League Baseball and contributed largely to the American Civil Rights Movement. He had more at stake than the game of baseball; he was committed to what he knew was righteous and true.
In closing, Andy McCue, an award-winner member of the Society For American Baseball Research writes …
“Branch Rickey was a vastly complicated man – an innovator, an intellectual in a visceral game, a moralist who knew how to navigate the gray areas of life and baseball’s rules. One of those gray areas was the sport’s attitude toward allowing African-American players into Organized Baseball. Commissioners, such as Kenesaw M. Landis, said it was very possible. The reality was that it did not happen until Rickey’s moral streak and his desire to find the best players and win came together.”
(Andy McCue. “Jackie Robinson and Baseball Owners. Society For American Baseball Research. https://sabr.org/journal/article/jackie-robinson-and-baseball-owners/.)
Therefore, a revelation may be understood: it was not Major League Baseball at Rickey's finest hour that was the shame of the nation, reactionary, and behind the times in race relations. Instead, thanks to a dedicated few fighters for justice like Rickey and Robinson, baseball led the nation by integrating ten months before Harry Truman became the first president to send a civil-rights message to Congress. So, the real blame for perpetuation of our original American sin must be placed on the vast segment of the American populace itself … our very own lingeringly fragile White majority.
Remember the brave. Remember the true. And, most of all, understand that the words Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 still apply …
“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.”
Mr. Roosevelt Regrets (Detroit Riot, 1943)
By Pauli Murray
Upon reading PM newspaper’s account of Mr. Roosevelt’s statement on the recent race clashes: “I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of violence in widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every true American regrets this.”
What’d you get, black boy,
When they knocked you down in the
gutter,
And they kicked your teeth out,
And they broke your skull with clubs
And they bashed your stomach in?
What’d you get when the police shot
you in the back,
And they chained you to the beds
While they wiped the blood off?
What’d you get when you cried out to
the Top Man?
When you called on the man next to
God, so you thought,
And asked him to speak out to save
you?
What’d the Top Man say, black boy?
“Mr. Roosevelt regrets. . . . . . .”
“Mr. Roosevelt Regrets (Detroit Riot, 1943).” Copyright 1943 by the Pauli Murray Foundation, from Dark Testament and Other Poems by Pauli Murray. Used by permission of the Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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