Powerful people sometimes end up losing
It’s been 70 years since the wealthy men who controlled a famous enterprise voted overwhelmingly to keep their business segregated.
Now they’re mostly forgotten, a footnote in the record books, because one turning point in the civil rights movement didn’t require a majority.
The men owned the 16 teams that in 1947 constituted baseball’s major leagues. Fifteen of the owners, all of them white, voted against allowing Jackie Robinson to play in the big leagues. Robinson was black, and most big-league owners expected him to stay in his place, which meant far away from them, in the Negro Leagues.
Major league team owners were not alone in regarding black people, even wondrous athletes like Robinson, as inferior and dispensable. Six months before the owners’ voted against Robinson, a mob in Georgia had lynched two black married couples who worked as sharecroppers.
U.S. armed forces, as well as many of the country’s schools, restrooms, buses, lunch counters and drinking fountains were segregated in 1947. So it was no surprise that bigleague baseball had not employed a black player in the 20th century.
As far as the white owners were concerned, fabulous talents such as Robinson, Josh Gibson, Roy Campanella and Satchel Paige didn’t belong in the major leagues. Skin color, unimportant in whether a player could hit or pitch, was all important to the owners. They were comfortable in a seg-
regated society, and they were afraid that white customers would stay away from ballparks if big-league teams hired black players.
Only one owner dissented in the historic vote.
Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had recruited Robinson and assigned him to the organization’s top farm team in Montreal, voted to end apartheid in big-league baseball.
After the other owners ganged up against Robinson, Rickey still forged ahead with his plan. He promoted Robinson from the Montreal team to the Dodgers. Baseball Commissioner Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, raised in Kentucky, was courageous enough to approve Robinson’s contract in defiance of most of his bosses.
Moments that change the course of history don’t necessarily start with a flourish or a victory. Robinson’s incredible run to glory was one of them. Still, there were obstacles everywhere.
Rickey sent the Dodgers to spring training in Cuba so that Robinson wouldn’t have to contend with laws in Florida barring blacks from mixing with whites. It was a smart move, but it didn’t lessen the pressure on Robinson. At least a half-dozen of his teammates signed a petition against him. Leo Durocher, the Dodgers manager, quashed the rebellion. Nobody could stop racism in its tracks, though.
The Klan picketed the ballpark in Cincinnati when Robinson arrived with the Dodgers. Hotels wouldn’t serve him. Ben Chapman, an Alabaman who managed the Philadelphia Phillies, called Robinson vile names during games and many of his players were inspired to do the same.
Robinson was perhaps the greatest allaround athlete of his era, having starred in four sports at UCLA. But he wasn’t the best baseball player in the Negro Leagues. He carried the weight of his race on his shoulders, knowing the owners would reject other black ballplayers if he failed.
With all that pressure, Robinson was Rookie of the Year in the big leagues in 1947 and the Dodgers won the National League pennant. The rest of the team owners, ever so slowly, began signing black players. The last holdout, the Boston Red Sox, finally desegregated in 1959.
By then, Robinson was a legend. He and the Dodgers had desegregated baseball years before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott and the bloody march in Selma. What many considered Robinson’s small step for civil rights and human decency helped inspire people, many of whom took part in the momentous events that followed.
All of it must have stunned the white team owners who tried to keep Robinson off the field. It’s not often that powerful people who stack the deck against an underdog end up losing. Seventy years later, it’s one more reason to marvel at what Robinson accomplished.
Ringside Seat is a column about New Mexico’s people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at 505-986-3080 or msimonich@sfnewmexican.com.