Uppity: My Untold Story about the Games People Play (review)

The reader can tell from the title and subtitle that a Dale Carnegie–like motivation to win friends and influence people is not the reason Bill White wrote this hard-hitting book. Out of the limelight since his retirement as National League president shortly before the cataclysmic 1994 baseball strike, White, a 1964 World Series–winning first baseman with the Cardinals and longtime New York Yankees broadcaster, had long been rumored to be penning a memoir. He obviously waited until he found a sympathetic collaborator, African American journalist Gordon Dillow, who the book jacket informs us was a sergeant in Vietnam and one of the first embedded reporters during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Uppity is a valuable contribution to the histories of baseball, broadcasting, and civil rights. It is dedicated to White’s late mother and grandmother who raised him, an only child, in Warren, Ohio, after his birth in 1934 in Paxton, Florida. Neither woman approved of his choosing baseball as his profession. “Maybe it would have been different if instead of people saying that you played baseball or played football, they said that you worked at baseball or studied football,” White suggests (19, italics in original).

With their reluctant approval, White left Ohio’s highly respected Hiram College after his sophomore year to work his way up the New York Giants farm system. As the lone black man on several Giants farm teams, he didn’t have it easy. “Oh, they’re serving them in here now?” White remembers a comment from a customer in a burger joint in Wichita, Kansas, in the summer of 1954, coincidently just a few weeks after the Supreme Court’s decision was handed down in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case (2).

White’s skin was tough enough to overcome racist taunts, and he joined the New York Giants in May 1956, homering in his first at bat. Willie Mays, a teammate and White’s lifelong friend, has written the foreword to Uppity. “Jackie [Robinson] was not the greatest baseball player ever but he was a great man. Willie Mays was both,” White declares (55).

White didn’t play long in New York because he was inducted in the Army and missed all of the 1957 and most of the 1958 seasons. “[Back] then, when your country called, you answered—whether you really wanted to or not,” he notes pointedly (56). When he returned from military service the Giants were in San Francisco and first base was occupied by Orlando Cepeda, with Willie McCovey on the way. Showing his characteristic directness (quite rare in a player with limited service time, let alone an African American player), White basically demanded a trade and was obliged when the Giants traded him to St. Louis before the start of the 1959 season.

He became a solid contributor to the Cardinals and anchored first base for the 1964 team that won the World Series over the Yankees in seven games. (The book could have used a page on White’s career statistics.) He became a team leader, making such an issue of the continuing segregation of black players during spring training that Cardinals owner August “Gussie” Busch ultimately bought a hotel in which all Cardinals could live. Accepting a dare early in his career from broadcaster Harry Caray to try his hand in front of the mike, White started doing short interviews in St. Louis and realized it was not as easy as it looked.

When his playing career ended in the late 1960s, White had a leg up as broadcasting offers came his way. When Michael Burke, Yankees president after the disastrous CBS ownership and before George Steinbrenner, offered White a position with the Yankees, he accepted. But in another example of the author’s pride in wanting to be recognized for his abilities and not just for the color of his skin, White...