Piling on at Fenway

As Confederate era statues were falling — or being toppled — about the nation, Red Sox principal owner John Henry decided the time was right to vent about being “haunted” by the legacy he was handed on Yawkey Way.

Nothing wrong with a little soul searching. And Henry’s disclosure to Herald sports writer Michael Silverman that he would like Yawkey Way renamed has spurred a good deal of discussion about a bygone era at Fenway that likely some, but not all of today’s Sox fans are familiar with.

Baseball buffs know that under the ownership of Tom Yawkey (1933-1976) the Sox became the last major league team to integrate, adding Pumpsie Green to the lineup in 1959 — yes, a full 12 years after Jackie Robinson was signed by the Dodgers. How much of that was Yawkey himself and how much was it Yawkey listening to and trusting a bigoted management crew is today anybody’s guess.

And was the Tom Yawkey who bought the team and owned it during those admittedly sorry years the same guy with the same values who presided over the far more racially diverse teams fielded in subsequent decades? Surely you cannot disparage the former and not give credit to the latter. To erase Yawkey’s name from the street that is Fenway’s official address (and we might add closed to the public on game days) is also, of course, to erase the name of his widow Jean Yawkey, who presided over the team after his death.

It has also been duly noted in columns on these pages and elsewhere that the Yawkey name graces buildings at several major medical facilities around this city — all following large donations from the Yawkey Foundation, which continues to fund charitable efforts in this community.

So, yes, the Yawkey legacy — like most that span nearly a century — is a mixed bag.

But the effort by John Henry to take advantage of the nation’s current racial divide to erase Yawkey’s name from a city street (and likely the MBTA Commuter Rail Station named for it too) is just, well, cheap — a grandstanding move that does nothing to advance racial understanding.