Strike 3: Negro Leagues, Fake Nostalgia, and White Fragility

Originally published in Word In Black by Joseph Williams and Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier

When he was playing, baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was a great hitter in high-pressure situations. He was especially clutch in the World Series, so much so that sportswriters nicknamed him “Mr. October.”

Last week, nearly 40 years after his retirement from the sport, Jackson found himself in trouble again — this time for history, truth and black people — at Major League Baseball’s “Tribute to the Negro Leagues” game in Birmingham, Alabama.

The event, meant to honor the teams and players that Jim Crow kept out of the major leagues, featured the largest gathering of surviving Negro League players ever. It culminated in the first regular-season major league game ever played in Alabama, between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals at Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field, the former home of the Birmingham Black Barons. And it was a perfect opportunity to honor the late Wille Mays, an MLB legend who hailed from Birmingham, played for the Black Barons and spent 21 seasons with the Giants.

During a pregame broadcast, however, Jackson — who played for the Birmingham A’s, the Oakland A’s farm team en route to the majors in 1967 — kept it real. Asked on the nationally televised pregame show what the spectacle meant to him, he spoke painful truths that no one wanted to talk about.

“Coming back is not easy,” he said, before recounting the year he spent in the predominantly white AA Southern League, a dangerous time in a dangerous city.

“I would walk into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The n— can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they would say, ‘The n— can’t stay here,'” Jackson said, as the Fox Sports broadcast team — announcer Kevin Burkhardt, fellow Hall of Famer David Ortiz and former superstar Alex Rodgriuez — sat in awkward silence. When no one would rent to him, Jackson said, he slept on the couch with white teammates “three, four nights a week for about a month and a half” until racists threatened to burn down their apartment building if he didn’t leave.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

In about five minutes of airtime, Jackson inadvertently exposed the irony of baseball’s decision to honor the black players it had expelled from the whites-only league 77 years ago. He lashed out at Birmingham, a city so hostile to the civil rights movement that it was known as “Bombingham.” And he showed why right-wing politicians, white school boards and white supremacists want to bury black history: to protect white people from the sense of white guilt.

“The year before I came here, the Klan murdered four black girls — children — in a church here, and they were never charged,” Jackson said, recalling the infamous bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in 1963. “Life magazine wrote a story about (the suspects) as if they were being honored.”

Without his white teammates, “I never would have made it,” said Jackson, whose father played in the Negro Leagues. “I was ready to fight physically. I would have been killed here for punching someone’s ass and you would have seen me in an oak tree somewhere.”

Burkhardt, who is white, searched for an appropriate response. “Reggie, I — I can’t even imagine. It’s horrible that you had to go through that,” he said. “But, you know, I appreciate you sharing the rawness and the honesty of it with our audience.”

But most black people can Imagine this: We have parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who went through the same thing that Jackson did. Talking about it is painful — six decades later, you can still see it in Jackson’s eyes, hear it in his voice — but passing it on to the next generation keeps the history of what really happened in America alive.

That’s exactly why elected officials in states like Texas and Florida are trying to kill it with anti-diversity laws, book bans and regulations that limit the teaching of race in America. Alabama, host of the Tribute to the Negro Leagues game, is following suit: The state legislature is considering a bill that would allow the firing of teachers or state employees who teach “divisive concepts” in the classroom or office.

Banning discussions of racism and discrimination, however, does not make it go away. Instead, it turns into inequality in American schools, the widening gap between blacks and whites, and the virtual resegregation of Major League baseball.

In 1967, when Mays played, 13.6 percent of the league was made up of American-born black MLB players. This year, by Opening Day, that number had nearly halved. In the 2022 World Series, between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros, neither team had a single American-born black player.

The last time this happened was in 1950.

Sure, MLB did the right thing by honoring the legacies of both Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues. But Jackson did the right thing, too, by reminding us how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

Related