Baseball’s stain of racial injustice
At long last, on Wednesday, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that the Grays, and the rest of the segregated Negro Leagues, were “Major,” too. As a result, the records of Black teams and players will finally become part of baseball’s official story. The step comes a century after the creation of the first organized Black baseball league.
Those who say this came much too late are absolutely correct. So are those who take delight in the moment’s arrival. Bob Kendrick, director of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, nods to both assessments when he says: “In the minds of baseball fans worldwide, this serves as historical validation for those who had been shunned from the Major Leagues and had the foresight and courage to create their own league that helped change the game, and the country, too.”
For people who wonder why Americans still talk about racial justice long after Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the long road to this validation is worth consideration. White supremacy and Black oppression were deliberate choices in America – stringently enforced and difficult to unwind, let alone repair. After Reconstruction, when the nation set a course against racial equality, baseball’s most influential player-manager, an Iowa native named Adrian “Cap” Anson, refused to play on the same field with Black athletes. Anson’s color line effectively ended the career of catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker and thwarted Black athletes for some 60 years.
The line was never a question of talent or skill. Here’s Honus Wagner, one of the five original members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, talking about the slugging speedster Oscar Charleston: “I’ve seen all the great players in the many years I’ve been around and have yet to see one any greater than Charleston.” Baseball genius Casey Stengel said Bullet Joe Rogan may have been “one of the best, if not the best, pitcher that ever pitched.” Among the many fans who saw both men swing a bat, there was a lively debate whether it was more apt to say that Josh Gibson was “the Black Babe Ruth” or that Ruth was “the White Josh Gibson.”
The integration of baseball in 1947 came too late for Charleston and Gibson, and too late for hundreds of others good enough to play (and in some cases to star) in the White major leagues. Almost another quarter-century passed before baseball – prodded by the superstar Ted Williams – appointed a special committee to bring Gibson, Charleston, Satchel Paige and a few others into the Hall of Fame.
In a way, this project only highlighted how little was known about the Negro Leagues. Excavating the history fell to largely unsung sleuths, including Larry Lester, co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and author John Holway. They scoured old newspapers for box scores, coaxed families to part with scrapbooks and memorabilia and collected oral histories from aged veterans. Their work gradually added members to the Hall, culminating in a second committee to add a batch of worthies in 2006.
It’s of little use to the forgotten journeymen of Black baseball that, more than 70 years after Robinson first took the field in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, officialdom has acknowledged that they played at the highest levels. But it’s not too late for us. We can use this occasion and others to examine how deeply structures of racism have been anchored, how deliberately they have been enforced, how invisible they made those they oppressed, and how very, terribly difficult it is to render anything like justice.