copyright National Baseball Hall of Fame

 

The swell of attention surrounding the Seattle Mariners’ outfielder, Ichiro Suzuki, has earned him the nickname Elvis back home in Japan. Great play in the field, sizzle on the base paths, and leadoff hitting brilliance throughout the 2001 campaign established him as one of baseball’s luminaries. Suzuki’s excellence has gone a long way to legitimize the quality of Japanese baseball, and Japanese baseball as a source of major league talent. The fact that he is of another race, one that was singled out in the United States out for detainment during World War II, even in Suzuki’s new home, the Pacific Northwest, is rarely mentioned. It is not an issue. It was not always this way.

Elvis owes deep and honorable bow, or at least a tip of the cap, to the black players who broke into lily-white baseball a half-century prior to his immigration in 2001, and to those who labored behind the scenes to make equal opportunity on the playing field a reality. Desegregation was not a moment in time, though Jackie Robinson’s signing is often considered just that moment, and it is a process that isn’t yet complete. The process has required long-suffering and a brand of patience not seen since Moses’ 400-year tour through the desert. Baseball’s decision, forced by such men as Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Bill Veeck, and Larry Doby, preceded by seven years the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public education. Baseball led the way for the nation. Ever since, baseball’s positions on race have drawn a great deal of attention. Consider the books, articles, and essays, the major motion pictures, Broadway musicals, and art exhibits. Jackie Robinson’s story has become a staple of juvenile literature and of formal social studies curricula. As the first 20^th century black to play major league baseball, Robinson rightly has been the magnet for much of the attention. His journey from Negro League baseball to the Brooklyn Dodgers via the Montreal Royals has been analyzed from seemingly every possible angle and perspective. Historian William Simons called the Dodgers’ signing of Robinson the “most widely commented on episode in American race relations of its time” (“Jackie Robinson and the American Mind,” 40).

Most popular accounts of baseball’s desegregation, though, pay scant attention to the pivotal role played by the black press. Chief among these overlooked ranks was black sportswriter Wendell Smith, at the time of Robinson’s signing and for ten years prior the sports editor at The Pittsburgh Courier, the leading black newspaper of its day (Wiggins, 5). It was Smith who recommended the former UCLA standout to Dodger president and general manager Branch Rickey during a private meeting in Rickey’s office in April 1945 (Smith, undated private papers, 6). It was Smith who relentlessly campaigned for Robinson’s matriculation to the big leagues. It was Smith who arranged a tryout for Robinson and two other players with Boston, also in April 1945. And for more than ten years it was Smith in the pages of the Courier campaigning for big league baseball’s re-integration (Lamb and Bleske, 48).

If Smith, the first black sportswriter to enter Baseball’s Hall of Fame, has been overlooked as the link between Robinson and Rickey, he has been almost completely ignored in examinations of the desegregation of baseball’s six weeks of spring training, a topic that in general has received little attention in scholarship. The complex, economically driven process of integrating Florida’s hotels and the reaction to Smith’s crusade to bring the black players’ plight into the national consciousness, particularly the reaction by the black players themselves, reveals much about the values and assumptions of the era. The drama underlines how much things have changed, and of how much they remain the same.

Smith’s campaign in the pages of the Chicago American shared much with the tactics and tenets of, among others, novelist and activist James Baldwin and civil rights champion Martin Luther King, Jr., both contemporaries of Smith. Like Baldwin and King, Smith was right for his time, a mostly genteel period that ended with the increasingly violent clashes between civil rights protesters and local authorities in the early and mid-1960s. Sit-ins swept through as many as 70 Southern cities as part of a protest movement started in part by four North Carolina A&T University students protesting at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in February 1960 (Chafe). As early as the fall of 1960, just prior to Smith’s campaign, Martin Luther King was jailed for a sit-in protest in Georgia, one of the first of several such confrontations with police (Houk and Creamer, 37). In May 1963, white and black liberals in Alabama who had loosely organized to test and force integration were attacked and beaten by white citizens in Anniston and Birmingham, where riots made national headlines (Grun, 550). And the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the end of Camelot, marked for many the end of an American idealism writers like Smith commonly evoked when calling for change, an idealism symbolized by the relentless series of marches on Selma, Alabama, in March 1965. Emblematic of the transition in the civil rights struggle, in late November 1963, Jackie Robinson found himself the subject of a series of verbal attacks by Malcolm X (Tygiel, “The Great Experiment Fifty Years Later,” 262). It signaled an end to the era in which Robinson’s vision of an inclusive, egalitarian America had resonance with blacks and whites, alike. Malcolm X was part of a new generation of black nationalists, militant protesters, and radicals.

Like Robinson and King, Smith was a citizen of a pre-Malcolm X era who espoused in action if not explicitly in writing what social critic Gunnar Myrdal called a shared “American Creed,” a vision of a nation “older and wider than America itself” (Myrdal, 25). This vision is articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Preamble of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and many state constitutions. It is the highest law of the land, upholding “the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity” (Myrdal, 4). This understanding of American democracy led Robinson and Smith to petition for and eventually demand equal opportunity based on ability and not color. In 1956, after only a decade of integrated baseball and no more than 40 black players in major league uniforms, The Sporting News celebrated baseball’s “gradual, voluntary, and peaceful advance toward the complete fulfillment of its code that a player should not be judged on the basis of creed, connections or color, but on the basis of ability alone” (Riley, 137). Complete fulfillment? Slow to eliminate quotas on the number of black players on rosters, big league clubs were glacial in moving toward racial inclusiveness within management and in the front office. Another two decades passed before baseball had a black field manager – Frank Robinson in 1975. Three decades later blacks held 17, or less than 2%, of the 880 top administrative jobs in baseball (Tygiel, “The Great Experiment Fifty Years Later,”264). And it would require four more full decades before a black would occupy the office of general manager – Bob Watson with the New York Yankees.

In Smith’s day, however, upholding shared concepts of equality, liberty, opportunity, and nationhood – concepts embedded in the Creed – proved an effective method of winning social change. Smith’s campaign waged throughout 1961 in the Chicago American, resting as it did on a foundation of more than a decade of socially activist writing with the Courier, served to hold the national pastime accountable for these shared ideals, all within the context of “working together” (Smith, “Negro Ball Players Want Rights in South,” A1). His year-long effort began in the January 23, 1961, edition of the Chicago American with a front-page article that pierced the perception of pro baseball’s racial tranquility, a perception black players, too, cooperated to encourage (Briley, 138). In the article, headlined, “Spring Training Woes,” Smith revealed to the nation the “growing feeling of resentment” among black players who continued to suffer “embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities” each spring. Future Hall-of-Famers such as Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Ernie Banks were segregated from their white teammates and were forced to sleep, eat, and recreate in separate and largely inferior facilities. White players enjoyed some of south Florida’s finest hotels, including St. Petersburg’s Soreno (Yankees) and Vinoy Park (Cardinals), and the Sarasota Terrace in Sarasota (White Sox).

As Smith well knew, by 1961 black ball players, like a growing number of citizenry throughout the South, had had enough. Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, segregation policies were being tested throughout society. In spring training’s primary home, for example, in Florida, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People encouraged blacks to visit the state’s segregated beaches in defiance of local policy (Davis, 151). St. Petersburg, base camp each spring for the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals, was host to a series of swim-ins at segregated swimming pools. It was in this context that Smith continued his quarter-century, career-long fight against racial discrimination by giving black players and their grievances a voice. Three years before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to abolish legal segregation, Smith’s Chicago American crusade called on baseball to end hypocrisy, uphold the Creed, and erase the barriers of segregation in Florida’s and Arizona’s baseball communities. In so doing, Smith wrote, baseball could again lead the way toward a more racially integrated, more just society. He pointed to baseball’s success integrating hotels during Robinson’s first few years with the Dodgers in Chicago, Philadelphia, and, finally, in 1954, in St. Louis (Smith, “Negro Ball Players Want Rights in South,” 18). He reminded readers that he, too, was shut out of those same hotels along with Dodger greats Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe (Smith, “Negro Players Gain in Equality Bid,” 16).

Writing with authority and using sophisticated, almost legal brief-style arguments, Smith blended subtle threat with paternal reassurances, much as James Baldwin successfully did during Robinson’s breakthrough days (Polsgrove, 178). Smith acknowledged baseball’s supposed desire for fair play, thereby identifying for everyone the Creed as the goal. He paired these allowances with calls to action. In a February 6, 1961, article, Smith reported on the “many constructive steps (that) have been taken to remedy what everybody agrees is an intolerable situation” (16). The steps included mostly public assurances that team owners and baseball executives were “fighting to eliminate segregation in spring training” and statements, such as that from Commissioner Ford Frick, expressing sympathy “with the players and their problems.” Later in the Feb. 6 article, however, Smith flatly states that “much more must be accomplished before the problem is resolved satisfactorily” (16). At about the same time, Baldwin, who had just appeared on the cover of Time, was quoted in Life in an article headlined, “At a Crucial Time a Negro Talks Tough,” that “there’s a bill due that has to be paid” (Polsgrove, 179). The climate for social change was heating up.

In 1961, only the Dodgers had desegregated their spring training facilities. To keep Robinson, Newcombe, and Campanella together with their white teammates, Brooklyn left Daytona Beach, Fla., leasing a former naval station in nearby Vero Beach and building its own training facility and living quarters (Tygiel, “Baseball’s great experiment, Jackie Robinson and his legacy,” 317). Dodgers were the only big league players who could room together, eat together, and train together without running up against local authorities and, as Smith and Robinson earlier discovered in Sanford, Fla., facing eviction from the town (Smith, “Negro Players Gain in Equality Bid,” 16). One player told the Baltimore Afro-American that the only segregation in Dodgertown was that based on ability – Smith’s and Robinson’s vision for all of America, and certainly for all of baseball.

Violent protests, militancy, and radicalism were not yet part of the civil rights struggle, so black players for the most part were not yet protesting Jim Crow practices in the South. Not surprisingly, then, big league clubs did little. As Red Barber pointed out in his memoirs, racism and segregation were so difficult to fight because they weren’t explicit policies, yet “all men in baseball understood the code” (51). Many black players were content merely to be in the major leagues and, therefore, were reticent to become the resented baseball family member who raises the issue of racial dysfunction. The Giants’ Monte Irvin, for example, told historian Jules Tygiel that black players “wanted to play so badly, that (segregation during spring) didn’t bother us that much” (“Baseball’s great experiment, Jackie Robinson and his legacy,” 318). Player culture discouraged disputes with management for fear of leading to expulsion from baseball. Ballplayer Chuck Harmon told Tygiel, “Anytime you dispute with the management, whether you’re white or black, or indifferent, you’re gone” (318). Also contributing to the silence was the fact that some southern players had grown accustomed to segregation and, therefore, didn’t challenge it, at least not directly. One of the earliest and most vocal critics of spring training’s Jim Crowism, Bill White, said that because most of the players on his St. Louis Cardinals team were from the South, “the hotel situation in Florida wasn’t a big issue with black players in the fifties” (Aaron, 153-4).

What Smith understood was the inextricable linkage between social change and economic reality. Force social change by transforming the economic reality was the approach Smith was articulating on behalf of the black players. It would prove a powerful strategy, as it proved to be for Rickey and the Dodgers 25 years prior. (Soon after Robinson broke in with the Dodgers, Smith poked fun at the economic windfall Brooklyn’s belated integration had generated, writing, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jackie makes the turnstiles click,” in Deardorff, 14). In 1959, the year Boston became the last team in the majors to integrate, Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves articulated this critical linkage vis-à-vis spring training (Behn, 22). Complaining to Braves management about segregated housing in Bradenton, Fla., baseball’s future all-time home run king pointed to the hotel cartel as perhaps the chief barrier to progress. Segregation in the state’s hotels, he said, is “the hardest thing to break down” because “they stick together,” much as the big league clubs closed ranks regarding racial discrimination prior to Rickey and Robinson (Aaron, 153). Hotel and resort owners knew that if one yielded, it would be very difficult for the other hotels to tow the line. Aaron’s complaints were heard, but at a cost to the entire team. Rather than tolerate segregated housing in Bradenton during the spring of 1959, the entire team moved to nearby Palmetto for a “two-bit” motel with inferior food (Shoulder). The economic pressure to force change lay in the millions ball clubs spent in Florida each spring and the tourist money their presence and play attracted.

In an interview with the Courier re-run by The Sporting News and reacted to by many both inside and outside of baseball, Robinson suggested that if Miami or Miami Beach first desegregated its hotels, the others in Florida’s baseball communities would soon have to follow. When racial discrimination is “broken down,” Robinson told the Courier, “Miami will be one of the leaders in the field” (Robinson, “Jackie Tells What He Likes and Dislikes About South,” 9). The entire hotel “set-up” was wrong, he said. “We are all part of a team and should be treated that way.” The next year, in leading the NAACP’s Freedom Fund drive, a retired Robinson told a Chicago audience that blacks had simply run out of patience. “It is time for Negroes to ask for all of the rights which are theirs,” he said (Falkner, 253). Robinson repeated and elaborated on his charges in his controversial 1963 book, Baseball Has Done It, in which he argued that baseball’s dollar would speak with more force than anything else.

Emphasizing the economic linkage was one prong of Smith’s strategy in the American. Similar to Martin Luther King’s approach in his oratory, Smith’s approach as a writer was one of conciliation, give-and-take, and, above all, dialogue. Smith carefully prodded baseball’s owners, proposing humble first steps, such as appointing for each team a player spokesman on the issue. The black players “realize, of course, that the owners are not responsible for their plight.” The players were going about their struggle “in their own quiet way” and not enlisting the aid of the NAACP “or any other such group” (Smith, “Negro Ball Players Want Rights in South,”18). This conciliatory tone was praised by the players Smith claimed to speak for, including hometown hero Ernie Banks. “We all are particularly pleased with the sane and dignified way (the black players’ position) has been presented,” said the Cubs’ shortstop. “There has been nothing inflammatory about the stories, and for that we are especially grateful” (“Negro Players Gain in Equality Bid,” 16).

Smith claimed to speak for all black players, something few writers could have credibly done. Two months into the American campaign, in March 1961, he was denied housing along with the White Sox players of color reporting to Sarasota, Florida, for spring training. He could document firsthand the conditions the players faced in a way only a handful of black press reporters could have. When the Sarasota Terrace Hotel refused accommodations both to the players and to Smith, hotel management cited economic reasons for refusing blacks (Smith, “Negro Stars Find Themselves Caged”). Management was afraid of losing its affluent, white clientele. So Smith and Chicago’s black players together faced the lack of recreational options and restricted public eating places, bowling alleys, and taxis. Special permission was required even to visit the Sarasota Terrace, where their white teammates were housed. In the Tampa area, home to seven ball clubs, hotels held to their segregationist policies to avoid losing business, according to a Feb. 19, 1961, article in the New York Times. “If we opened our dining rooms and other facilities to just any one, you can see what would happen,” the newspaper quoted one hotel manager, who asked not to be identified. A few hotels admitted to the Times they were taking cues from the Soreno, the Yankees’ spring home, behaving as Aaron had predicted.

From a journalistic perspective, it is worth noting that Smith relied exclusively on unattributed sources when breaking his campaign in January, presumably to avoid putting the players in jeopardy with their respective clubs. This decision inferred a high level of cooperation and confidentiality with the players, an intimacy no longer possible and, perhaps, no longer desired by media practitioners. Further underlining his own unique credentials for such a journalistic campaign, Smith used first-hand experience to add credence to his calls. In particular, he referenced his successful alliance with Robinson in breaking the color barrier and the road they together traveled before and after. “I cannot forget that March day in 1945,” he wrote, when the two were asked to leave Sanford “by sundown. We got out of town . . . but neither of us has ever forgotten” (“Negro Players Gain in Equality Bid,” 16).

Following the Jan. 23 salvo, change was relatively swift. The White Sox began negotiating with the Sarasota Terrace hotel to win accommodations for its six black players. According to Smith, Sox owner Bill Veeck also moved team reservations from Miami’s McAllister Hotel to the more open-minded Biscayne Terrace hotel for a pair of exhibition games in April against Baltimore. The Chicago Cubs decided to house the entire team in Mesa, Arizona, at the Maricopa Inn, and not to play exhibition games in cities where black players would be forced to sleep in separate quarters. Baltimore’s general manager, Lee MacPhail, reported to Smith that he, too, was working to keep his team together at a Miami hotel. And New York Yankees president Dan Topping told Smith he wanted all Yankee players training in St. Petersburg to “live under one roof,” including the club’s only black player, catcher Elston Howard (“Negro Players Gain in Equality Bid,” 16).

The issue of economics would prove decisive. As both Smith and the New York Times reported, the Yankees’ St. Petersburg home, the Hotel Soreno, and the Cardinals spring home, St. Pete’s Vinoy Park Hotel, had no intention of changing their policies, advising the Yanks and Cards to “look for other hotels” (Smith, “Negro Players Gain in Equality Bid,” 16, and New York Times). The two hotels were owned by the same Kansas City-based company. The Yankees immediately took the advice and moved to Fort Lauderdale, abruptly ending 36 years of training in St. Petersburg and stunning both the Soreno and the greater St. Pete community. Pressure shifted to the Vinoy Park to keep the Cards in St. Pete.

In July of ’61, as Maris and Mantle were chasing the Babe, the Cardinals, Yankees, Braves, and Orioles each announced they had secured integrated spring training housing, albeit under different circumstances. Levying economic pressure, the Cardinals benefited from the Yankees’ decision to vacate St. Petersburg. Neither the town nor hotel ownership wanted to lose another big league club. The Cards were given permission to keep the team together at the Vinoy Park (Smith, “Players Take Up Color Bar Issue,”15). The Braves moved their living quarters from Bradenton to nearby Palmetto in order to stay together. MacPhail’s Orioles, meanwhile, came to terms with Miami’s McAllister.

Smith’s hometown Sox negotiated with the Sarasota Terrace for much of the season. In November, Veeck announced the team was simply buying the hotel outright “so that all of their players can live under the same roof during their training season” (Smith, “American’s Campaign Succeeding in Florida,” 31). By Smith’s description, it was an “extreme step (and) a direct result of the campaign waged thru [sic] last season by Chicago’s American.” In response to the hotel purchase, the city of Sarasota agreed to chip in three baseball fields and clubhouse accommodations. The tide had turned.

There still were teams with segregated spring training, including Washington (Pompano Beach, Fla.), Minnesota (Orlando), Detroit (Lakeland), and Kansas City (West Palm Beach), but each team was “taking measures” to end segregation, according to Smith. Full integration throughout spring training in Florida would require just two more years (Meyer, D1), far less than the dozen needed following Robinson’s signing by the Dodgers to see a player on every major league roster. Upon Smith’s death in 1972, the Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, wrote that the journalist had articulated “a vision of an American society, where ability, skill and character are the sole measures of a man and not the color of his skin. He pursued that idealism . . . not with the militancy of the new breed of black spokesman, rather with the calm and patient logic of a wise man whose vision was sharp enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. He has made his contribution. History will not pass him by” (Reisler, 34). Smith’s idealism, shared by Robinson, King, Baldwin, and wide swaths of the American population, belonged to his time, and it helped bring down the formal barriers, the traditional Jim Crow strictures and structures that prevented blacks full participation. The economic legacy of slavery and of segregation, however, is incompatible with and has outlived the shared vision . America’s inner cities are evidence of the fundamental inequities in opportunity that remain. While Smith would no doubt be heartened to see Colin Powell as our Secretary of State and Clarence Thomas as a United States Supreme Court justice, the vitality of racial profiling among police departments from Los Angeles to New Jersey and the ever-widening income gaps along racial lines are harsh reminders of how much of the vision has gone unfulfilled.

Smith, who died in November 1972, just four months after the passing of Robinson, would find much to celebrate in baseball, as well. Ichiro, as he is known in Seattle, demonstrates to a large extent how color- and race-blind baseball has become, and how close to the “based purely on ability” ideal the sport has progressed. Opportunities as field managers have opened up to men of color, as well. But the executive suite still is largely off limits, the exclusive domain of upper-class, white males. Black team ownership is nonexistent. It will likely continue to be with ownership stakes increasingly held by corporations and not individuals, a trend pointed to by the economics of team and stadium ownership. A Japanese Elvis is a good thing – culturally, socially, and as a signpost to a truly egalitarian sports world. African Americans in front-office management positions and with ownership stakes, signifying as they would fundamental change in economic opportunity, would be an even better thing and a more robust fulfillment of Robinson’s and Smith’s vision of what America should be and could become.

 

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