Free Rickey & Robinson by Roger Kahn Page A

they don’t want us, but we still keep giving them our money. Keep on going to their ballgames and shouting until we are blue in the face. Oh, we’re optimistic, faithful, prideless—we pitiful black folk.
    Yes sir—we black folk are a strange tribe!
    Presidents from William Howard Taft to Franklin Delano Roosevelt had appeared for cameras on Opening Day, dutifully throwing out a first ball and turning a blind eye toward segregation. The mainstream press accepted segregated baseball quite matter-of-factly. The Establishment press practiced segregation itself, informally but no less rigidly. Nor was this just the policy of the wealthy elitists who published, say, the
New York Times
. In 1939, when Wendell Smith applied for membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a group consisting of and run by working sports reporters, he was turned down.
    Major-league baseball was integrated for 15 years before mainstream newspapers generally began hiring black sportswriters. During that time, writers from such prominent black newspapers as New York’s
Amsterdam News
were required to sit in the back rows of press boxes, as if they were riding buses on rural blacktops in Alabama.
    A prominent newspaperman named Tom Swope, sports editor of the
Cincinnati Post
, filled the press box air with racist slurs. WhenJackie Robinson came to bat, Swope liked to crow, “The jig is up.” When I told him to bridle his tongue, Swope said, “What’s the matter? Can’t I call a spade a spade?” Then Swope laughed. In 1956 Bob Teague became the first black sportswriter to work for a white-owned New York newspaper. He was employed by the
New York Times
. Some time after that, he engaged me in an intense discussion. Teague said he hoped that the
Times
had hired him because he was good, not just because he was black. We never found out how good a sportswriter Teague might have become, because a few years later he jumped to TV news.
    The tide was running against the bigots, and it had been for some time.
    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
    AS THE DECADE OF the 1930s arrived, and with it the Great Depression, calls for change (and cries for help) rumbled through America. As a third of the nation scrambled for food and shelter, as college graduates sold apples from street carts, people collectively began to realize that the dream of a “more perfect union” had not yet arrived. In 1933 the American unemployment rate reached 24.9 percent. Put differently, 11,385,000 Americans were out of work. Millions more were grossly underpaid or had to pursue pathetic make-work occupations. I remember walking with my father on St. Mark’s Avenue in Brooklyn one pleasant May afternoon when a stranger approached us holding several boxes of yellow pencils. He had a thin, intelligent face, but his clothes were shabby.
    “Pencils?” he said to my father. “Three for a dime.”
    My father fumbled a bit and found a dollar bill. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ll pick up the pencils another time.”
    After we moved on, I asked, “Why didn’t you take the pencils, Dad?”
    “Because now he can sell them to somebody else.”
    Beyond the cities, hundreds of thousands of farmers were losing their land, their herds, their homes. Foreclosures swept across the Great Plains. The nation had never experienced anything like this before and the American people and the American Establishment were shaken clear down to their ganglia.
    Woody Guthrie, from Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, gave voice to the people—mostly people of the left—when he sang:
    Oh, I don’t want your millions, mister
.
    I don’t want your diamond ring
.
    All I want is the right to live, mister
.
    Give me back my job again
.
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
    We worked to build this country, mister
,
    While you enjoyed a life of ease
.
    You’ve stolen all that we’ve built, mister
,
    Now our children starve and freeze
.
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
    Think me dumb if you wish,