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REGGIE JACKSON SPEAKS THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT BASEBALL’S PAST  
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Dave Zirin
June 24, 2024
The Nation
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_ Baseball legend Reggie Jackson tells the Fox Sports audience the
truth about playing baseball in the 1960s in the South. “I
wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” He then spoke for several minutes
about being treated like something less than human. _

The Yankees’ Reggie Jackson hits one of three home runs against the
Los Angeles Dodgers in a 1977 World Series game. (Photo: Walter Iooss
Jr./Sports Illustrated // The Nation),

 

Major League Baseball and its partners at Fox were trying to turn a
celebration of the Negro Leagues into a Disneyfied narrative of
triumph in the face of “adversity,” which was left vague and
undefined. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and the geniuses he employs
thought that staging a feel-good game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham,
Alabama, with little historical context was the best way to
commemorate the Black baseball experience. Fortunately, legendary
78-year-old Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was having none of it. One of
many Black American baseball veterans in attendance, Jackson was
brought onto the _MLB on Fox_ set to talk about his memories as a
minor-league prospect for the Birmingham A’s. Instead of playing
nice, Jackson swung for the fences.
 

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When asked what it was like to play in Alabama in 1967, Jackson said
bluntly, “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” He then spoke for
several minutes about being treated like something less than human.
“I would never want to do it again,” he said, “I walked into
restaurants, and they would point at me and say, ‘That n——
can’t eat here.’”

He recalled his allies on the team. “Fortunately I had a manager,
Johnny McNamara. If I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody would eat….
If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to the next hotel and
find a place where I could stay,” he said. “Had it not been for
Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi, I
slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a
half. Finally, they were threatened that they would burn our apartment
complex down unless I got out.”

He then supplied some context for what it meant to be a young Black
man in Birmingham for the Fox audience. “The year I came here, Bull
Connor was the sheriff the year before.” He said how just a few
years earlier, in 1963 and not far from Rickwood Stadium, the KKK
bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four girls: Addie Mae
Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.

“At the same time,” Reggie said, “had it not been for my white
friends, had it not been for a white manager, and Rudi, Fingers, and
Duncan and Lee Meyers, I would have never made it.”

He also said that as a young man in 1967, he was not ready to turn the
other cheek: “I was too physically violent. I was ready to
physically fight somebody. I would have got killed here, because I
would have beat someone’s ass, and you would’ve saw me [hanging
from] an oak tree somewhere.”

Jackson’s breakdown of this history, as the Fox studio hosts stared
at him, their jaws agape, matters amid the battle to preserve the
history of the Black American ballplayer, not merely the gauzy,
palatable one served to us by Manfred. Recognizing Negro League
records
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a welcome start, but it cannot be the end. Currently the numbers of
Black Americans playing Major League Baseball is at a historic low
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Manfred seems to think he can solve this crisis in part by presenting
a history of triumph and excellence against all odds while ignoring
the toll it took on generations of Black American players.

Luke Epplin, author of the brilliant book _Our Team_
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Cleveland Indians of the late 1940s, a squad that included Negro
League legend Satchel Paige and trailblazer Larry Doby, said it well:
“I just keep thinking about what Reggie Jackson said last night and
how important it was. It cuts against the narrative formed by MLB,
which focuses exclusively on Jackie Robinson and makes it seem that he
shouldered the burden and then opened the doors [in 1947]. Jackson
undercuts that. His amazing impromptu speech positioned racism as
ongoing into the late ’60s for Black ballplayers, long beyond the
integration era. It wasn’t a problem to be solved but a structural
reality that plagued players for decades afterward.”

It is important to hear for reasons far greater than baseball. There
is a rising Black Republican star, Representative Byron Donalds, who
is rewriting history when he waxes nostalgic about the Jim Crow era to
please his white benefactors and curry favor with Donald Trump.
Hearing Jackson’s lived experiences safeguards what we can quaintly
call “the facts.” The facts are that Jim Crow was terrorism;
terrorism that in myriad ways shortened the lives of generations of
Black families. Byron Donalds is just 45 years old and would do well
to listen to some elders about the reality of Jim Crow—elders like
the great Reggie Jackson. The tragedy is that it benefits Donalds to
close his ears, sneer, and turn away.

But people like Donalds look extremely small when stacked up against
Jackson’s testimony of truth. Jackson should be commended for his
bravery, telling moving truths the audience was not expecting to hear.
After Jackson’s words and after the Fox Crew caught their breath,
you could almost hear that chant of the 1970s in the thick, humid
Alabama air: “Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE!”

_[DAVE ZIRIN is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of
11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and
writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and
Politics of the NFL [[link removed]].]_

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_ Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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* baseball
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* sports
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* segregation
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* jim crow
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* South
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* Racism
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* African Americans
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* 1960s
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* Birmingham
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* Alabama
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* Reggie Jackson
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