"Get Those Niggers off the Field!": Racial Integration and the Real Curse in the History of the Boston Red Sox

Facing the risk of being banned in Boston, not to mention from NINE, we thought it might be worthwhile to say a word or two up front about our choice of title for these thoughts you are about to read. Given the subject matter, our choice was driven by nothing more than the impact of language, much like Mark Twain was when he sat down to write Huckleberry Finn, which turned the American novel inside out and upside down well over a century ago. In that vein, then, we ask that you not be offended by either the title or the inclusion in our text of the word "nigger," which, by the way, appears always in quoted citation. In our view, the quotation in our title speaks more strongly than anything we ever could have contrived to characterize the shameful record of racism concerning not only the Red Sox but the city of Boston as well. Besides, we thought a Cooperesque, or pre-Twain title like "Get Those Gentlemen of Dark Color off the Field," not only silly and insipid but condescending and vapid.

In 1918 the Boston Red Sox won the American League championship and the World Series. Babe Ruth was the acknowledged star of the team, pitching shutouts and swatting home runs almost at will. In fact he was the most exciting player of his generation. But he was also disruptive. An increasingly exasperated Red Sox owner, theatrical impresario Harry Frazee, sold Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919 for $100,000.¹ Ruth, of course, realized a career in New York that would make his name legendary in America's most popular pastime. In the eyes of many of the Red Sox faithful, that inane act of selling the Babe forever placed a curse on the unfortunate Sox and their eternal dreams of winning another World Series championship.

Boston's 2004 championship was its first World Series victory since 1918. All over the world, Red Sox Nation celebrated, thinking, of course, that the "Curse of the Babe" had finally been eradicated. Critical to the long awaited triumph was the presence in the lineup of a prominent trio of players of color: Dominicans David "Big Papi" Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, and Manny Ramirez. That observation leads us to the hypothesis that it never was the "Curse of the Babe," nor anyone else, that continually cast a hex on the Red Sox's World Series championship aspirations. Rather the team was hampered by a pronounced strain of racism invoked by ownership and management as well as by the city, whose liberal credo toward freedom and equality of opportunity for all races throughout most of the nineteenth century became badly eroded.

As is well known, the Boston Red Sox were the last Major League ball club to embrace what Jules Tygiel has called "Baseball's Great Experiment."² In effect, the Red Sox refrained from showcasing an African American in its lineup until 1959, a dozen years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line by commencing his historic career with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Why, then, did the segregation of baseball persist in a city that had historically been recognized, for very good reasons, as the "Athens of the West," the "Cradle of American Liberty," a national leader in educational and social rights for the physically and mentally afflicted, and, indeed, a hotbed of pre–Civil War sentiment for the abolition of slavery and enhancement of the lives of black Americans?

The answer to the question is embedded in the character of Red Sox leadership at the time of baseball's immediate pre- and postintegration—that is, in the mentality and dispositions of owner Tom Yawkey; general managers Eddie Collins and Joe Cronin; and field manager George "Pinky" Higgins, a redneck from Texas. Each was a critically important component in dictating the culture of the ball club during the formative years of baseball's integration. The evidence suggests that each was endowed with a measure of personal...