Also Read:
The Real
HR Rankings - Includes Japanese & Negro
Leagues.400 and
the Negro Leagues
233 under
.200
For what is history
but a myth agreed
upon?
By John B Holway
The history of baseball
integration was not a simple moralistic tale of two heroic, saintly men.
It was a tale of many men, of greed and generosity, timidity and courage.
__________________________________________________________
John B Holway is author of
The
Complete Book of the Negro
Leagues.
Rickey was not the game’s Abe Lincoln;
he was its Jesse James.
The next nickle
Rickey pays for Jackie Robinson, Roy
Campanella, Don
Newcombe, Joe Black, and Junior Gilliam will be
the first. These ex-Negro Leaguers led
“It’s like coming into a man’s
store and stealing the goods right off the shelves,” muttered
Rickey did
pay a pittance, reportedly $3,000, for pitcher Dan Bankhead.
However, when he tried to steal Monte
Irvin from the Newark Eagles, their glamorous owner,
Effa Manley, threatened to sue. Branch recoiled
and dropped Monte like a hot foul tip. It never occurred to him to pay her
a fair price for
him.
The whites called
the black owners racketeers. Many of them were gambling kings; it
was one of the few ways a black man could raise enough capital to buy a team
- without gamblers there would have been no Negro Leagues and no Robinson.
But Jackie’s owner, J.L. Wilkinson, was not a gambler. Neither was
Posey.
When Rickey stole
their players, he himself became a bigger racketeer than any black owner
had
been.
Branch made a show
of his Christianity. He never entt a game on Sunday;
however, this didn't prevent him from depositing the Dodgers’ Sunday
gate receipts in the bank every Monday
morning.
There are several
ways to live a Christian life. One is not to play ball on Sunday. The other
is to treat others as you would like them to treat you. Branch Rickey passed
the first test. He flunked the
second.
He was not a revered
Methodist saint. He was a pious Methodist hypocrite.
Rickey had been
general manager of the St Louis Cardinals in 1939 and ’42, when there
was excitement in the press about possibly signing black players to the
Pittsburgh Pirates, Washington Senators, Philadelphia
Phils, and other teams. Rickey’s voice was
notably
silent.
Not until the death
of hard-line Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis
in 1944 did Rickey feel it was safe to speak
up.
There were many others, both villains
and saints, in baseball’s integration
drama.
Happy
But
Bill
Veeck. The flamboyant owner of the Cleveland Indians followed Rickey into
the market, buying Larry Doby from Manley for $10,000.
She was grateful to get it, though she said, “You know you would have
paid more if he had been a white boy.”
What of the players
who never got a shot to make the big leagues? “They say Jackie paved
the way,” said his Monarchs teammate, Joe Greene. “He didn't pave
the way, we did.”
Cool Papa
Cool Papa also scouted
the Cubs’ Ernie Banks and the Yankees’
Elston Howard. He was paid with a basket of fruit
and ended his days as a janitor.
Jackie
Robinson
never
thanked
the old-timers who
helped him
enter the promised land while they stayed
on Mt Pisgah, cheering him
on.
One of his first acts as a big leaguer
was to sneer at the Negro Leagues for traveling by bus all night and staying
in second-rate black hotels. He said he was glad to be out of them, and it
wasn't said in sympathy. (“It wasn't our fault,”
Manley retorted.)
Nor did Jackie thank
the owners who had kept the black leagues alive through the Depression, giving
him the showcase that sent him to the majors.
Willie
Mays was different. “You were the
pioneers,” he told a reunion of old-timers, “you made it possible
for us.”
This is strange
law. Every American, public or private, has to obey the Constitution, including
the Hall of
Fame.
Yet Kuhn’s
bluff worked. Glasser snapped his brief case shut
and left. I never heard from him
again.
Ted
Williams.
Foul-mouthed womanizer he may have been, but Ted had the humanity to
say what nobody else in baseball would: It was time to open the doors of
Cooperstown.
“I'm
proud of that,” he boomed – Ted didn't say things,
he boomed them. “As I look back on my career,” he told a lunch
in his honor at black Howard university, “I often wonder what I would
have done if I couldn't play baseball. A chill goes down my back when I think
I could have been denied all this if I'd been black.”
J.L.
Wilkinson,
the white owner of the Monarchs, was no racketeer. For 30 years
Wilkie traveled with his players, shared their
hardships, and mortgaged his home to meet his payroll.
Just as the end
of World War II brought promise of an economic boom, Rickey grabbed Robinson
from
him.
Wilkinson’s
partner urged him to sue, but Wilkie refused. “I
won't stand in the way of a man who has a chance to better himself,”
he said quietly.
If Robinson ever
thanked him, I am not aware of
it.
Just suppose: If
Willkie had done what Manley did and threatened to sue, would Rickey have
dropped the whole idea? That might have set integration back a decade.
In all, Wilkinson
lost over 30 men to the white majors and got almost nothing for them. He
would die, blind and infirm, in a nursing home at the age of 90, greatly
mourned by all his old players.
If we are searching
for a saint, Rickey is not it. The real saint, the man who made baseball
integration happen, was James L Wilkinson. The story of
Wilkie and
Writing
About Jackie Robinson: An Experience at Once Moving, Poignant,
Inspirational by Harvey
Frommer
