Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training

2. Jim Crow Baseball Must End

Jim Crow Baseball Must End 12345678910 25 n February 5, 1933, the grand ballroom of New York City’s Commodore Hotel crackled with laughter during an evening of songs, skits, and speeches at the tenth annual New York Baseball Writers Association dinner. Sportswriters took turns spoofing everyone from the guest of honor, retired New York Giants manager John McGraw, to the New York Yankees, who had defeated the Chicago Cubs in the World Series the previous October. In addition, the journalists performed their annual minstrel show in front of the all-white crowd of six hundred owners, managers, players, journalists, other dignitaries,and guests.According to New York Times sportswriter John Drebinger, the minstrel show was the most entertaining part of the evening.1 The Sporting News reported how judges,financiers,industrialists,and men of less lofty position joined with owners, ballplayers, and writers “in the glorification of baseball.” In its February 16 issue, Sporting News correspondent Dan Daniel, the chapter president of the Baseball Writers Association, reported that a humbled McGraw waxed sentimental about his long career. Other speakers included Branch Rickey, the vice president of the St. Louis Cardinals; toastmaster Bugsy Baer; Philadelphia comic Joe Cunningham; and New York World-Telegram sportswriter Heywood Broun, author of the popular column “It Seems to Me.”2 In his speech, the outspoken Broun responded to a recent editorial in the New York Daily News, headlined “What’s Wrong with Baseball,” that bemoaned the fact that good black players were not eligible for the national pastime.3 Broun asked his audience why there were no blacks in baseball, though they were allowed in college athletics and professional football: “I can see no reason why Negroes should not come into the National and American Leagues.”4 If former Rutgers University star Paul Robeson was good enough to be named to the team of the greatest college football players ever and Eddie Tolan could represent America at the 1932 Olympic Games, Broun said, then blacks were good enough for the big leagues.5 When Broun was told that baseball had no rule or policy prohibiting blacks, he told the story of how McGraw had once tried to sign O Jim Crow Baseball Must End 26 Charlie Grant.6 A few days before the 1901 season, McGraw, who was then managing Baltimore, tried to finesse his way around baseball’s color line by disguising light-skinned second baseman Charlie Grant as a Cherokee Indian by the name of Chief Tokohama. Before Grant could play his first game, however, Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey objected.“I’m not going to stand for McGraw bringing in an Indian on the Baltimore team,” he said, calling the ballplayer a “Negro . . . fixed up with war paint and a bunch of feathers.” Once exposed, McGraw dropped the idea, and though he kept a list of blacks that he wanted to sign for the Giants, he never pushed the issue again.7 During the 1870s and 1880s, a few dozen blacks played in organized baseball. Among them were Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother, Welday, both of whom played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association, which was briefly considered one of baseball’s major leagues. In the mid-1880s, the baseball establishment came to a so-called gentlemen’s agreement to forbid the signing of further black players, thus creating the color line. Segregation in baseball coincided with the implementation of segregation in America.8 Jim Crow turned segregation’s frustration into unrestrained fury, dismantling Reconstruction reforms and leaving southern blacks vulnerable to mobs and Klan justice. By the end of the century, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld legal segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. After Broun’s speech, Daily News columnist Jimmy Powers asked several league and team officials if they objected to blacks in baseball. National League president John Heydler, New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, Philadelphia Phillies president Gary Nugent, and ballplayers such as Lou Gehrig, Herb Pennock, and Frankie Frisch all told him they did not. Only McGraw objected on the record.9 On February 8,1933, Powers wrote that he was pleased by the response to his query, calling it a sign of progress in race relations. It contrasted markedly with the prejudice of ballplayers of the past, he said, who wandered into the ballparks straight from southern swamplands. “The bulk of the players then...