Carrying Jackie's Torch

As a kid playing baseball with my older brothers and their friends, I could not hit, could not throw, could not catch a ball, but I sure could run. After one at bat Jackie nicknamed me Slugger. I gripped the bat, determined to hit a high fly out to left field (we were literally playing in a weedy field) heard the sweet sound of the ball connecting with the bat and swung with all my might. The ball dribbled a few feet from home plate and I made my very first base hit. That was the beginning and end of me and baseball. I would sit in the grass to watch the guys and my best girlfriend, JC, play and Jackie would yell over "Hey Slugger aren't you playing today?" causing everyone to laugh and me to scowl. This article is not about carrying my classmate and brother's friend, Jackie's torch.

This is about the book, "Carrying Jackie's Torch", subtitled "The Players Who Integrated Baseball---and America" written by Steve Jacobson. Jackie is Jackie Robinson. Like Jackie, the players who followed were not allowed to play with their teams in Southern USA states, even in Spring Training games. This book is their story.

Although I lost interest in baseball, I was surrounded by it. JC would drag me up the corner to play games with my brother's gang~they would not let her play unless she was with me~and she would prattle on about Major League baseball. Her mother was a Yankee fanatic and the game was always playing on the radio as we helped her cook dinner. Mrs. C was as noisy as my mom was quiet and she would suddenly be screaming and prancing around the kitchen when a homerun scored. I was paying about as much attention to the radio announcer as I did when I sat in the living room at home with my dad and brothers watching WPIX Yankee baseball telecasts on the tiny black and white screen.

I did like looking through the brothers' baseball card collections and lord help me if I put one back in the wrong place. At that age I did not know anything about segregation and integrated baseball. Ernie Bank's trading card was right there with Elston Howard and Whitey Ford. No one mentioned that Jackie Robinson was the first Negro to play Major League baseball. Reading "Carrying Jackie's Torch" is a sad look at conditions these ballplayers had to endure just to play the game. Many of the players said they wanted to quit rather than suffer through the humiliations. Larry Doby is quoted as saying, "I understood what Jackie went through. Do you think it was any easier 11 weeks later?". Doby was the second black man to be accepted into the Major Leagues.

Being peppered with racial slurs from the stands was the least of the guys' troubles. Teammates would not talk to them. Travel by bus with the team meant they had to sit in the back of the bus. Being the lone black player on a busload of teammates that ignores you can be disheartening. Once off the bus they were not allowed to take cabs. They could not sleep in the same hotels as their teammates. When the bus stopped at a roadside restaurant for a meal someone had to fetch it for them to sit alone and eat on the bus. They were also not allowed to use restrooms. They were not allowed to enter stadiums or Greyhound bus stations through the front door. It was especially hard for players from Northern states when they went to Florida for Spring Training. They knew racism, but not like the kind under Jim Crow law in the south.

Some of the players regret that were busy playing baseball and keeping their mouths shut rather than being a part of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior's Civil Rights protests. Baseball is considered "the Great American pastime"; they may be underestimating their contributions to the fight to be treated as human beings. As managers of the teams starting refusing to do business with establishments that would not let all the players in the doors, the businesses started allowing the black players inside along with their white teammates. White players that befriended their black teammates, as well as owners or managers who went to bat for them were also subjected to criticism and often called N-lovers.

It took 8 seasons after Jackie suited up for his first major league game before the NYY owner would allow integration on his team. Elston Howard's wife recalls in "Carrying Jackie's Torch" how she expected things to be different in the big City coming from segregated St. Louis, Missouri. She mentions bigotry in finding housing and racial slurs scribbled on the house being built for them across the river in Teaneck New Jersey and her husbands steaming anger when he arrived home after ballgames. It took 18 years before the Majors hired a black man, Emmett Ashford as a umpire. His story is my favorite chapter in the book titled: Forever Is Not Too Long to Wait. He was a rookie at age 55 when most umpires were already looking to retire from the game

His first assignment was in El Paso Texas. The book continues:

"There were two cops on the field before the game began and eight more were summed before the first inning was over. And one fan~a black fan at that~yelled, 'We don't need you around here doing a white man's job'."

Emmett said: "Sir, if you go home and put your brains, manners, and shoes on and come back, I'll discuss it with you."

Ashford somehow managed to retain his dignity and sense of humor, despite the hardships. No one likes umpires. Umpiring for a team that begrudgingly hired Howard 11 years earlier yet still had lingering animosity among some white players added to the stress. If he called a black player safe he was accused of bias; if he called a white player safe, he was accused of sucking up to whitey. Charlie Murray was one black player that could not subdue his anger and quit, saying, "I'm no Jackie Robinson." When Elston told Jackie how much he admired him, Jackie told him "I had Branch Rickey behind me, the whole club behind me. You didn't even have your club behind you. They didn't want black players in there."

Because I still do not like baseball, I was not much interested in the players accomplishments on the field. Imagine getting off a train and trying to join the team taking the waiting taxis, only to arrive late to the game, because a cop makes you leave the cab and gives you a ticket for breaking the law of riding in a Whites Only Cab, as happened to Chuck Harmon and Nino Escalera. Puerto Ricans faced the same kind of challenges in those early years of integrating Major League baseball. Imagine, too, arriving in town on the team bus. The Traveling Secretary hands out hotel assignments to everyone, then says "I don't know where you are going to stay" and walks away. Then picture yourself, walking around town with the manager at 3AM in the black section of town knocking on doors until a family agrees to let you sleep on a cot on their back porch, having Oreo cookies and milk for breakfast and playing a good game of ball the next day.

Many black families refused to house the players because they resented them, thinking they were making a lot more money than they could ever hope to achieve. White people who opened their doors had their homes burned down. Then there were the lynchings. One player's father was born a slave. Another's family was so poor he picked cotton as a child, along with his siblings and parents. Most all of them, even from the state of Washington, knew a black boy that was lynched, castrated or tied to railroad tracks to die. Younger players that joined the leagues called the older players Uncle Tom's for not speaking out about the injustices. They overlook the strength of character it took to bear the iindignities and still end a career with 586 homeruns as Frank Robinson did. The players who integrated baseball had to be extremely strong men to play Major League baseball in America.

"Carrying Jackie's Torch" is worth reading. Jacobson gives special thanks to his copyeditor, Bob Sales, "who made sense out of my original text." The text could have used a little more work to make for easier reading. Published in 2007 by Lawrence Hill Books, the book is 249 pages. There is also a Bibliography and Index. It is an excellent look at what it was like to be a black man in the United States of America 50 years ago. I lose patience today when people say "If they want equal rights they should not demand special treatment". The people that say that, are much like those that made life so hard for the "Players Who Integrated Baseball~and America".

Authors Note: For those that know me, if you read this book, you will understand why I am adamant that the white boys in Jena should have been severely punished for hanging nooses on a "Whites Only" tree on school property, simply because a star football player sat under it on a hot August day in 2006.

Additional Reading: :Willie Lynch Syndrome Thrives in Jena by Milton Jordan