Retro Post: On Remembering Jackie Robinson and Baseball Integration

From time to time I will provide a "retro post," pieces I have posted elsewhere before starting this blog. Here is a piece on the commemoration of Jackie Robinson Day and how baseball's other integration pioneers who followed in his stead are given short shrift.

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On April 15, Major League Baseball (MLB) again celebrated its integration pioneer Jackie Robinson by allowing players to wear his retired jersey number in honor of his legacy. All the black players donning 42 spurred lamentations in the media about the decline numbers of African Americans in baseball.

As African American numbers have declined, Latino numbers have skyrocketed, with many darker-skinned players from Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Venezuela owing thanks to Jackie's door-opening achievement. Little is said about why darker-skinned Latinos aren't so inclined to don 42, because so little is understood about how they relate to baseball's integration story.

The truth is, a major piece of the Robinson legacy is missing and MLB is blowing an opportunity to educate the American public about integration's full scope.

Latinos were drastically affected by segregation. While a select number of Latinos (just over 50) performed in the Majors before Robinson, over 230 played in the Negro Leagues, just as Robinson did before organized baseball's color line was dismantled.

The process wherein the overwhelming majority of Latinos were designated racially unacceptable for organized baseball remains one of baseball's lesser known stories. As I argue in my book Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (University of California Press, 2007), Major League team officials masterfully manipulated racial understandings throughout the time its color line stood in place to broker access for a few Latinos. Over time the Latinos officials ushered into organized baseball became increasingly racially ambiguous. "He's not black," they explained, "He's Cuban." Thus the Washington Senators, Cincinnati Reds, New York Giants, and a handful of other organizations plucked players from the Spanish-speaking Americas. They so successfully muddled racial perception that it necessitated an unambiguously black player to destroy any semblance of ambiguity, enter Jackie Robinson.

It is extremely troubling that this history continues to be conveniently elided in the Robinson commemorations and the more recently instituted Civil Rights Game. For this year's game MLB convened a panel of seven African Americans and Mets GM Omar Minaya as the lone Latino to discuss baseball, race, and civil rights. The lineup of luminaries gathered reveals that MLB does not acknowledge Latino participation in the struggle to overturn segregation or their stake in the past, present, and future of baseball.

That this continues to occur at the moment when Latinos are nearing forty percent of Major Leaguers is shameful and contributes to the popular perception of Latinos as a people without a (long) history in America's game--although the first Latino played in the National League in 1882.

The way MLB (mis-)remembers Jackie and baseball integration also diminishes the legacy of the Negro Leagues and of the integrated Latin American leagues.

On the other side of organized baseball's racial divide African Americans and Latinos collaborated in the establishment of a circuit that for decades refined the ball-playing skills of the excluded. In Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan, Mexico City, and Caracas, among other Latin American cities, African American players like Rube Foster, John Henry "Pop" Lloyd, and Willie Wells were welcomed in racially integrated leagues. Drawing on his own experience, Foster's vision for the Negro Leagues from his various failed start-ups until he successfully launched the Negro National League in 1920 always included Latinos.

Jackie Robinson was a product of the circuit they built. And let's not forget that it was in this circuit the multitalented athlete honed his skills in what was arguably his fourth best sport. And it was here where Branch Rickey and his men first scouted pioneering black players Robinson, Monte Irvin, Roy Campanella, and Orestes "Minnie" Minoso, among others.

For all the recent talk about engaging in a national conversation on race, we are constantly revisiting a narrative of race relations of black-white, whether inside or outside of baseball. That circumscribed narrative about race fails us all.

2009 will mark the 60th anniversary of Minnie Minoso's debut as the first black Latino to perform in the Majors. His pioneering achievement in overcoming a doubly complex set of racial and cultural challenges as a black Latino to develop into a major league star ought to be the centerpiece of a year-long series of events that portrays baseball's integration saga in its full multicultural splendor. Only then will we truly remember the full impact of Jackie's achievement and honor the entire roster of those who contributed to the overthrow of baseball's Jim Crow system.

Posted: April 18, 2008, http://www.baseballmusings.com/archives/025991.php

"Playing America's Game" talk on Book TV

Book TV (C-SPAN2) will re-air on Saturday, July 12, 8 am (est) the book lecture I delivered at the National Archives as part of their Hispanic Heritage Month event last September. Tune in and let me know what you think.

http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=8681&SectionName=History&PlayMedia=No

Tribute to Jules Tygiel

For many of us who study race and baseball, Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment remains one of the most sophisticated treatments of baseball’s integration and its impact on U.S. society. It is one of the most widely read books on Jackie Robinson and baseball integration, and justly so.

Tygiel approached the integration of baseball as more than just a story of the Major Leagues. He interviewed dozens of Negro League players and researched white mainstream and black newspapers to craft a narrative that allowed readers to understand the profound impact that segregation had on the US national pastime and the complicated terrain that integration pioneers traversed as they participated in the process of desegregating organized baseball.

I first read Baseball’s Great Experiment as an undergraduate at Vassar College working on a senior’s thesis on baseball’s introduction to the Caribbean. Reading the stories he wrote on how racial perceptions in communities throughout the United States affected Latinos such as Vic Power, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, and Minnie Miñoso as organized baseball underwent its transformation inspired me to chart a new path of research: To study Latinos, baseball, and race as a way to better comprehend the impact of baseball’s color line and gain a fuller appreciation of the story of race in American life.

I first met Jules Tygiel at an annual meeting of the North American Society of Sport Historians where he was to deliver a keynote address. I was a young graduate student at the University of Michigan and extremely excited to meet the man who had crafted such a compelling narrative about baseball integration.

I approached his table with trepidation, hoping to just say hello and thank him for the inspiration. He insisted I sit and that we talk. There began a collegial relationship that evolved into an intellectual collaboration. Indeed, not all senior scholars are eager to entertain young scholars seeking to address what some may perceive as a ‘gap’ in their scholarship.

Jules Tygiel was more than a historian, to me and many other young historians working inside and outside of academe, whether writing on baseball, urban history, or politics. Yes, he was an exemplar as a baseball historian who set a standard for writing baseball history in a scholarly manner yet also accessible to a popular audience. But, he was also very giving of his time, willing to share his wealth of knowledge and information, and offer advice and encouragement.

A number of years ago, when the University of California Press asked me for names of potential reviewers of my book manuscript, his name came immediately to mind—who better to entrust the years of work I invested in this project than the individual who helped inspired it. In the end, Jules read my book manuscript several times and gave thorough and thoughtful criticism. Whatever success my book Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line has enjoyed since its release is a credit to his wonderful, giving spirit and his gracefulness as a senior scholar committed to mentoring the next generation.

Last year’s All-Star Game Week festivities in San Francisco gave me the opportunity to meet Jules again in person. I was in town to do a book signing at the Mission Bay Borders Bookstore across from the Giants ballpark, conduct some interviews, and catch up with a few friends. It was also the first chance I had to personally thank him for his inspiration, guidance, and encouragement through the years after the publication of my book the previous month.

The highlight of my time in San Francisco was talking baseball, history, and about life in academe with Jules, and being given a tour of his beloved San Francisco—a Brooklyn transplant, Jules had long come to grips with rooting for the Giants.

I was hoping to catch up again next month in San Francisco when I attend a friend’s wedding and a Dodgers-Giants game. But the cancer that had been in remission had made an unwelcome comeback.

He will be missed, but his impact will continue through the scholars and historians he mentored and the scholarship they produce.

posted on Counterpunch.com on July 11, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/burgos07112008.html