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 Jackie Robinson and the Rhetoric of the Black Press One theme that persists in the contemporary retelling of Curt Flood’s story is that sportswriters working for major U.S. newspapers in the early 1970s pandered to baseball owners and helped codify the claim that abolition of the reserve clause would destroy baseball.After having seen what was written in newspapers such as the Sporting News and the St.Louis Post Dispatch, Flood worried in The Way It Is about what the public would think about his contract for the following year with the Washington Senators: “Many fans would surely suppose that I had sold out or,at the very least,had been pressured into abandoning the fight,” he reasoned.“In 1970 I had called myself a $90,000-a-year slave and now I would be playing quietly for $110,000. This would tend to affirm public belief in the invincible power of the baseball establishment. Worse, it would encourage cynicism about the durability of principles—not only mine but everyone else’s. . . . Too bad. Too bad for me. Too bad for those who might misunderstand or misrepresent me.”1 Confirming Flood’s apprehension about the national sports media almost forty years later, Brad Snyder points out,“During the 1960s and early 1970s, members of the press were firmly on the side of management.”2 Perhaps the national sports press could be expected to impose an uncritical frame, but black newspapers, it might be hoped, would tell a different story. After all, they once held tremendous influence in baseball. Black newspapers were instrumental in providing Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey with the public infrastructure necessary to execute his “secret plan” to sign a black ballplayer. Gene Roberts and Hank HanKlibanoff observe that around 1945, Rickey “had quietly begin making preparations. Looking for studies that might make the desegregation of his team easier, he had read widely in sociology, history, and race relations, including [Gunnar Myrdal’s] An American Dilemma. . . . The Negro press was making Rickey’s secret plan more plausible.”3 In this account, the successful integration of baseball depended on the serendipitous accumulation 3  . . . jackie robinson and the rhetoric of the black press of a variety of factors, including the enlightened attention of a liberal white bureaucrat,the shifting social terrain,and the publicity given to baseball on the pages of the black press. The essence of this argument is that Robinson worked as a prototype for formulating the social justice claims that black newspapers would advance in the following decades. Over the next fifty years or so,baseball would acquire its status as a perpetual referent for both guiding and measuring national movement on the question of race. By the time that Flood was having it out in public with baseball owners, black newspapers knew well how to fight the good fight. In 1957, Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier published Black Bourgeoisie,a controversial and confrontational text that nevertheless established its author as “the most capable black sociologist in America.”4 Frazier advanced the thesis that the emergent black middle class faced an identity crisis. Caught between a deliberate, self-loathing rejection of black folk culture on one side and racist exclusion from white society on the other,the black middle class created a“mythological”world for the purpose of providing a safe self-definition, Frazier said: “In escaping from identification with the masses,the black bourgeoisie has attempted to identify with the white propertied classes. Since this has been impossible, except in their minds, because of the racial barriers those identified with this class have attempted to act out their role in a world of make-believe.” Frazier argued that black newspapers constituted the public space in which the “world of make-believe” found expression. In a scathing analysis replete with critical cues, Frazier explained the function of the“Negro press”: It is the chief medium of communication which creates and perpetuates the world of make-believe for the black bourgeoisie.Although the Negro press declares itself to be the spokesman for the Negro group as a whole, it represents essentially the interests and outlook of the black bourgeoisie. Its demand for equality for the Negro in American life is concerned primarily with opportunities which will benefit the black bourgeoisie economically and enhance the social status of the Negro. The Negro press reveals the inferiority complex of the black bourgeoisie and provides a documentation of the...

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