Fair and Foul in Remembering Integration

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the date on which Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers, thereby breaking the race barrier in major league baseball that had existed since the 1880s. Over the years since the event occurred, particularly after the first decade or so after it happened, the integration of Major League Baseball in 1947 has tended to be celebrated by Major League Baseball and many others as a unquestionably progressive act. That kind of portrayal of the integration of major league baseball as a unilaterally progressive event stems from a number of sources and types of arguments. While I do not think that Jules Tygiel means to make so broad a claim, his argument in Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy that the integration of major league baseball significantly affected the Civil Rights Movement certainly helps fuel that kind of celebration. Meanwhile, such broad claims are offered by the likes of David Horowitz, who has used the integration of major league baseball as an excuse to argue that a free market system always does the right thing in the end.

The problem with Horowitz’s view and with the celebration of integration as so unilaterally progressive is that the way that major league baseball integrated is not without significant elements of exclusion and marginalization. While this critique is part of my own work, both in my dissertation a few years ago and as part of my argument in a forthcoming article in Journal of Communication Studies, my arguments owe debt for their framing to other works in which various elements of the critique can be found, including, among other places, in passing in Harry Edwards’ The Revolt of the Black Athlete and more fully in William C. Rhoden’s Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete and in Brad Snyder’s Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball. As one part of the critique goes, the integration of major league baseball consolidated control of professional baseball into white hands. At the time that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, the Negro Leagues, which offered black ballplayers the opportunity to play, also offered black men and women very viable business opportunities in the forms of the professional baseball teams that they owned and ran. Within fifteen years of the integration of major league baseball, the Negro Leagues were defunct and, to this day, major league baseball remains largely a white-owned enterprise, with one Latino owner (Arte Moreno/Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim), one team owned by an American subsidiary of a Japanese company (Nintendo of America/Seattle Mariners), and no African American owners. In other words, while integration did allow for black ballplayers to play major league baseball, it did so at the expense of black ownership and management of teams. It could have been done differently. For instance, Major League Baseball could have invited some of the Negro League teams to join the National League and the American League as new teams. After all, within that same fifteen years after integration that saw the evaporation of the Negro Leagues, both the National League and the American League added new teams as Major League Baseball expanded. By expanding in a way to include black ownership, integration could have been done on at least a little more equitable of a basis. In this manner, integration of the major leagues echoed other types of integration. The same kind of consolidation under white control occurred within media organizations, like newspapers. It also happened in education after the famous Brown v. Board of Education case overturned segregation. The result? In the newspapers industry, while a few black journalists got jobs, many black reporters, editors and managers were now without work and owners of black newspapers saw their businesses go under. In education, black students now went to school with white students, but integration took place in white schools, leaving black schools to close and black teachers, administrators, and staff members jobless, despite years of experience and educational background. To this day, these inequities remain far from being overcome. The same holds for Major League Baseball.

So, while there certainly may be positives associated with the 1947 integration of Major League Baseball, it is not the unilaterally progressive event that it tends to be characterized as having been. Rather, it was a step toward a particular path toward democracy—a step in one direction among a number of choices for direction and a step that needs to be followed by other steps that work toward further progress. For years, Major League Baseball has used April 15 to pat itself on the back, celebrating the event of integration and suggesting how this shows the usefulness and importance of Major League Baseball to United States society. Today, though, as I looked at how the 1947 integration was being characterized on Major League Baseball’s official website, I was happy to see what I think is improvement along these lines. The attention was focused much more on the person of Robinson and the struggle that he endured as the one who integrated the major leagues. This included recognition of various programs that have been developed to work toward equality and progress involving issues of race. Perhaps Major League Baseball is listening to some of the voices who have been offering critiques of how integration has been remembered. I’d like to hope so and it is nice to see what appears to be a more progressive take on the ways to remember integration. Still, it does continue to be situated in a form of paternalism, as giving scholarships and developing programs continue a kind of noblesse oblige tradition, whereby those in power offer some opportunities to the less-empowered—i.e., “give back to the community”—yet do so in ways that reinforce their own standing as the empowered, that attempt not to disrupt the status quo too much and, thus, that don’t really do a lot in terms of altering the deeper structural inequities of society. Major League Baseball is taking up the “there’s-still-a-long-way-to-go” kind of message, yet it must recognize that its own structures do continue to be part of the problem. While certainly just a step and not a cure-all, I think that making significant moves to ensure African American ownership of at least a couple of teams in the near future would be a step in the right direction along those lines. The likes of Horowitz would cry “foul” at this as the kind of affirmative action type of policy that he and other conservatives rail against, associating it with concepts like “reverse racism” and suggesting that it is “special treatment” of minorities that takes us away from really treating people as equals. I’d argue that it’s only “fair” to compensate for the special treatment that white-owned teams received in 1947 when the major leagues integrated, as well as the special treatment in 1961, 1962, 1969, 1977, 1993, and 1998, when white owners received newly created expansion teams.