Room in lineup for No. 42
In my memory, I’m playing baseball in the big park across from the old Belltown School in Stamford. We were always playing baseball there, throughout the 1960s. Stamford was baseball-mad back then and the various playing areas in the park were the touchstones of growing up.
Until around second grade, we’d play in a tiny corner up against the tennis courts, away from the big kids. From third grade until sixth, we’d pitch, catch and hit in a bigger part of the park, but still away from the regulation field used when we finally became teens and joined the Babe Ruth League.
In my memory, I’m 11 years old, at bat in the summer of 1965. A station wagon drives slowly past the park, then stops, and the driver is watching us. It’s Jackie Robinson behind the wheel and there’s a carload of kids, and I want to get a base hit for Stamford’s most-famous resident.
That year Mr. Robinson was seven years from his premature death at 52. But the man who broke the color barrier in baseball, who became a civil rights icon for rising so high above racism that people were left looking within at their misplaced hate, was everyone’s famous neighbor in Stamford, even if we never met him.
Now, I think Jackie Robinson, the modern pioneer, is the perfect next person to be shaped in marble and placed up there with Gov. Ella Grasso and the few mostly forgotten, some quite dubious dead white men, along the third-floor exterior facade of the State Capitol.
Dead white men such as Jonathan Trumbull (17101785), the state’s 16th governor, whose name lives on in a Bridgeport suburb. Trumbull owned slaves, and at age 48, ordered three slaves to be whipped in public for appearing after nightfall without written permission.
Another one, John Davenport (1597-1670), who founded New Haven and the private Hopkins School there, owned slaves.
John Winthrop, Jr. (16061676), an early governor of the Connecticut Colony, had Pequot servants and approved John Mason’s infamous massacre of Eastern Pequots in Mystic.
Mason is another statue on the Capitol’s facade that has been the subject of recent controversy for leading the aforementioned raid, with help from the Mohegan tribe.
Theophilus Eaton (15901658), first governor of the New Haven Colony, engineered a treaty with the Quinnipiac tribe to give up land in exchange for protection from the Mohawk and Mohegan tribes. He owned slaves.
Oliver Wolcott (17261797), the state’s 19th governor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a major general under George Washington, owned slaves.
Many of these characters stand proudly above the north steps of the Capitol, presiding in marble over University of Connecticut basketball celebrations, minimum-wage rallies and, lately, Black Lives Matter congregations that have attracted thousands of people.
If you’re looking for the first few steps toward symbolic equality, Jackie Robinson is the man.
Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz likes the idea of a celebrated free Black abolitionist family, the Bemans, from her hometown of Middletown.
“We should be recognizing people of color,” Bysiewicz said the other day, after her staff researched the checkered pasts of the dead white guys I used here. “Sadly there were a lot of people besides Mason up there,” she said. “We should have a robust discussion on who should be up on the Capitol.
Sure, it’s symbolism, to hoist historical Black figures up on the Capitol with the dead white men and Gov. Grasso, whose statue in 1987 cost $65,000, which is about $150,000 now. Thousands of dollars for another statue isn’t chump change, at a time when the coronavirus has devastated public and private budgets.
But if not in this age of Black Lives Matter, when? On Sunday, July 19, Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, turns 98 years old.
I asked Gov. Ned Lamont if he had any good ideas for whom to honor in the eight empty niches circling the Capitol with Ella and the dead white guys.
“No, but I think we’re going to put together a group, a commission,” Lamont said. “I’ll talk with the legislators and talk to the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, and find some interesting suggestions.”
Without boring the governor with memories of my inability to hit the breaking ball, or much of anything else in the National Babe Ruth League in Stamford, circa 1967-69, I suggested the city’s international icon, who lived and died there.
“I love that idea,” Lamont said when I suggested Mr. Robinson get placed next to Grasso, another Connecticut hero. “Let’s do it. I love that idea.”
If you’re looking for the first few steps toward symbolic equality, Jackie Robinson is the man.