JACKIE ROBINSON AND THE “NEW” BOSTON RED SOX

By Frederick A. Hurst

Until new owners purchased the Boston Red Sox, it would have been highly unlikely that a Red Sox plan to arrange the awarding of the highest Congressional award to the late and great Jackie Robinson would have come to fruition. But the new owners arrived on the scene with a new attitude and they hired managers who share their enlightened point of view. They deliberately reached out to the Black community and made it clear that they welcomed its members as fans and were willing to demonstrate their sincerity in concrete ways.

One way was through the financing of a very successful church baseball league in Boston, which was organized by the team’s Black Special Advisor, Frank Jordan, whose longstanding relationship with the new owners began in his home town of San Diego before the Red Sox purchase. Frank also took the young church team members on a retreat to the Black-owned Ron Burton Training Village where retired football great, Jim Brown, whose organization has been so successful in intervening in gang violence in many parts of the country, was the featured guest. Frank is also working through State Representative Benjamin Swan to study the possibility of expanding the programs to Springfield.

But probably the most significant testimony to the Red Sox’s sincerity has been its successful efforts to bring national honor to the late Jackie Robinson, who, after being so ungraciously spurned in his early career by the old Red Sox team, went on to become the first Black player to play in the Major League and one of the greatest all-around baseball players of all time.

I was blessed with the opportunity to attend the Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in honor of Jackie Robinson that was held in the Capital Rotunda. Blessed because the Rotunda is relatively small and could not accommodate many who would have otherwise attended. The five to seven hundred who did attend were feted with a ceremony of dignity and power seldom seen. A bipartisan powerhouse of elected officials sat on the dais including President George W. Bush, Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Massachusetts’ Democratic Senator John Kerry, Representative Melvin R. Watt, Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Senator Ted Stevens, Pro Tempore of the Senate, who led in the presentation of the Congressional Gold Medal, and our own Democratic Congressman Richard Neal, whose office did an excellent job of coordinating and executing the diverse event. Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s dignified and elegant wife, and Reverend Jessie Jackson also sat on the dais. The event drew media coverage from around the world and was featured over and over again on CNN. I had no hint of the magnitude of the honor this nation was preparing to pay to Jackie Robinson until I witnessed the ceremony that the Boston Red Sox worked for two years to make happen.

After the ceremony, Frank Jordan introduced me and City Councilor Bud Williams to Tom Werner, Red Sox Board Chairman, Larry Lucchino, Red Sox President and Chief Executive Officer, and Dr. Charles Steinberg, Red Sox Vice President for Public Affairs. The Red Sox had a full contingent of important managers at the ceremony. They were distinguished by their low key non-intrusive presence. They were clearly delighted to be there to see their idea come to fruition and to honor Jackie Robinson, but they were careful not to co-opt the Congressional forum for team self-promotion.

The new owners stood in sharp contrast to previous owners and managers. To give you a sense of how bad things were, Boston Red Sox manager Mike “Pinky” Higgins is reported to have said, “There will never be any “niggers” on this team if I have anything to say about it.” And when Jackie Robinson tried out for the Red Sox team in 1945, the owner, Tom Yawkey, is reported to have yelled down from the stands, “Get those niggers off the field.” Major league baseball had opened the doors to 100 Black players, who were playing on every other Major League team, before Yawkey hired a Black player. And Black people have never quite felt welcomed in Fenway Park until the new owners took over from Yawkey two years ago. (Studies show that 85% of people of color in Boston never stepped foot in Fenway Park.)

The Red Sox selection of Jackie Robinson is no accident. As Dr. Steinberg said on a Boston radio talk show, “We knew there was a lot of work to do…Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, the eve of Black History Month…we need to teach children what they should know about (him)…He was a pioneering spirit of civil rights…we owe it to Jackie Robinson to celebrate his life…the Boston Red Sox owe it for these reasons times 10.”

I was impressed by the candor of the speeches at the Medal of Honor ceremony. Nobody tried to soft-sell the indignities to which Robinson was subjected by the Old Red Sox and by White fans as he courageously laid the future foundation for other Black players to join the Majors by becoming a silent hero on the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was a sorry and sordid period in American sports history and not a single speaker, from the President on down, tried to hide it. But they also reminded us that there were some seeds of decency in the history, most in evidence when the White Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager, Branch Rickie, went out on a professional limb to challenge bigotry in baseball by hiring Jackie Robinson.

There was at least a seed of decency in Red Sox history. The press didn’t make a big deal of it at the time, but in 1966, one year after passage of the Voting Rights Act, as part of his induction speech, Ted Williams publicly lobbied for Black players to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. One of the greatest misperceptions to emerge from Red Sox racial history was that Ted Williams was anti-Black. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Because he was such a great player, Williams became the symbol of the Boston Red Sox, whose management rejected Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays simply because they were Black. Most Black people assumed that Ted Williams must have held the same racial attitudes as Sox management. He did not. In fact, at the last all-star game that wheelchair-bound Ted Williams attended before his death, his good friend, Tony Glenn, a Black player for the San Diego Padres and one of the best hitters in baseball, pushed him onto the playing field to be honored.

According to Frank Jordan, who researched the above information on Ted Williams, it is the seed of Ted Williams that the new Red Sox owners and managers want to nourish and grow. He said, “When the new owners bought the Red Sox, they made a commitment to all fans and supporters to put a winning product on the field of play and to be corporate leaders in the community, promoting opportunity, diversity and community pride.”

Well, Frank, you can tell the Red Sox management that they’ve gotten off to a helluva good start. n