Breaking the Travelers’ color line

In April 1963, Richard Anthony “Dick” Allen became the first Black man to play for the Arkansas Travelers. He was 21 years old, barely four years out of Pennsylvania’s smallest high school, in a town called Wampum. Allen’s family didn’t live in Wampum proper but in Chewtown, an unincorporated community where they had no running water.

It did have a Depression-era baseball field built by Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration.

Figures vary from source to source — $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 — but there’s no doubt the Philadelphia Phillies paid Allen what was, at the time, the largest signing bonus ever paid a Black athlete. John Ogden, the 66-yearold Quaker who signed him, noted in the scouting report the young man was a “can’t miss” prospect in terms of talent “and character.”

Allen’s play during the previous three seasons in the low minor leagues did nothing to dampen the organization’s enthusiasm for him.

There was talk of bringing him up to the major league club in 1963, but the Phillies’ outfield was crowded, with veterans Johnny Callison, Tony Gonzalez and Wes Covington all playing at a high level. Maybe Allen sealed his fate by asking for a token $50 raise as a reward for his stellar season. Phillies’ general manager John Quinn turned him down, telling him he should be grateful to have a job.

Allen believed Quinn sent him to Little Rock — a segregated city just a few years removed from the notorious Central High imbroglio — as punishment for that raise request. He pleaded with Quinn not to send him South.

We should add some context here.

The Phillies had not been progressive. They jeered and cussed Jackie Robinson. They were the last National League team to integrate. Their first Black player, former Birmingham Black Barons shortstop John Kennedy, never had a chance. He played in five games and had only two at-bats in 1957. (He did score a run when he was inserted into a game as a pinch runner.)

Since then, the Phillies had employed a handful of other Black players. Covington became their first Black player of significance when he was acquired from the Kansas City Athletics in 1961.

But Quinn — whose 1957 Braves had won the World Series with Hank Aaron and Covington playing major roles — understood the Phillies needed to sign and develop Black players to compete. When Quinn arrived in 1958, there were only three Black players in Philly’s farm system; by the time Allen was signed there were 38, about 20% of the team’s minor leaguers.

The Travelers had just become affiliated with the Phillies; they were the team’s top farm club. Quinn knew he had to break the color line in Arkansas.

Unfortunately, Allen was illequipped for the job. Having grown up in a relatively color-blind if poor community (he was one of five Black students in his high school), he dreaded going south. In his autobiography “Crash,” he writes:

“Maybe if the Phillies had called me in, man to man, like the Dodgers had done with Jackie Robinson, and said ‘Dick, this is what we have in mind. It’s going to be very difficult but we’re with you’ — at least I would have been prepared. I’m not saying I would have liked it. But I would have known what to expect. Instead I was on my own.”

So Allen — dubbed Richie, a diminutive he always resented, by the Phillies to link him to Richie Ashburn, one of the team’s most beloved stars — showed up in Little Rock to find signs outside Ray Winder Field telling him in abusive terms to go home.

In the opening night crowd of 7,000 there were placards reading “Let’s not NEGRO-ize our baseball.” Governor Orval Faubus threw out the first pitch. The game’s first batter lifted a soft fly ball to Allen in left field. Nervous and scared, he dropped it.

But Allen singled in his first atbat. Jess Matthews, the Little Rock Central High principal during the integration crisis of 1957, was at the game. He later told the Pittsburgh Post that the crowd grumbled when Allen first came to bat, but after he got that first hit, the crowd coalesced behind him.

Allen remembered it differently.

“[After the game] I wanted to be alone,” he writes. “I needed to sort it all out. I waited until the clubhouse cleared out before walking to the parking lot. When

I got to my car, I found a note on the windshield. It said, ‘Don’t come back again, nigger.’ I felt scared and alone, and, what’s worse, my car was the last one in the parking lot. There might be something more terrifying than being Black and holding a note that says nigger in an empty parking lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1963. But if there is, it hasn’t crossed my path yet.”

Allen persisted; after a slow start, he had a good year. His teammates voted him the Travelers’ MVP. In September he was called up to the big club, and started the next year in the majors. He would be the National League Rookie of the Year. He’d go on to have a Hall of Fame-worthy career. Someday he’ll get in.

In April 1964, Sports Illustrated published a story about Allen by William Leggett called “The Rookie From Wampum.” Legendary Arkansas Gazette sportswriter Orville Henry provided Leggett with a “backgrounder” on Allen’s time in Arkansas. Henry reported that fans embraced Allen as an “all-time favorite” Traveler. What problems he had experienced in Little Rock, Henry said, were due to the young man’s anxiety at being far away from home and his natural shyness. Racism had nothing to do with it.

I think Henry probably believed that; for I’ve heard well-meaning people say similarly wishful things in good faith all my life. Dick Allen died last week. I know his reputation as a bad teammate, a head case and a difficult human being to be around. But I don’t believe he was anything but gifted and proud and possessed of the sort of dignity that recognizes the futility of worrying about the sort of impression you might make on the envious and ignorant.

He was one of my favorites. He was a big stick.