IN THE GAME
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IN THE GAME Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Amy Bass
IN THE GAME
Copyright © Amy Bass, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6570–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data In the game: race, identity, and sports in the twentieth century/ edited by Amy Bass. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6570–6 1. Racism in sports—History—20th century. 2. Discrimination in sports— History—20th century. 3. Sports—Social aspects—History—20th century. 4. Ethnic relations—History—20th century. I. Bass, Amy. GV706.32.I62 2005 796’.089—dc22 2004060108 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: August 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction: “No Compromise with Slavery! No Union with Slaveholders,” or “Who was the Last Team to Integrate?” Amy Bass
1
Part I: Heroes 1.
2.
“Richie” Allen, Whitey’s Ways, and Me: A Political Education in the 1960s Matthew Frye Jacobson
19
In Sports the Best Man Wins: How Joe Louis Whupped Jim Crow Theresa E. Runstedtler
47
Part II: Fans 3.
Race and Silence in Argentine Football Grant Farred
4.
Reading and Rereading the Game: Reflections on West Indies Cricket Michael Arthur and Jennifer Scanlon
5.
Wa a o, wa ba ski na me ska ta!: “Indian” Mascots and the Pathology of Anti-Indigenous Racism David Anthony Tyeeme Clark
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137
Part III: Aesthetics 6.
Backfield in Motion: The Transformation of the NFL by Black Culture Joel Dinerstein
169
7.
The Harmonizing Nation: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics Eric Zolov
191
Part IV: Futures 8.
9.
Courtside: Race and Basketball in the Works of John Edgar Wideman Tracie Church Guzzio
221
The Stepping Stone: Larry Holmes, Gerry Cooney, and Rocky Carlo Rotella
237
Contributors Index
265 267
IN THE GAME
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introduction “No Compromise with Slavery! No Union with Slaveholders,” or “Who was the Last Team to Integrate?”
Amy Bass
The student, as I remember, had what could only be described as a wry smile on his face when he asked the question. He already knew the answer. “Professor Bass, who was the last team to integrate?” A good question? Well, not for discussion purposes. Not if you want your class to interact with the texts and each other. Too cut and dried for any kind of real pedagogical use, I surmised. Who was the last team to integrate? A good question? Well, its answer, I have to admit, does have a substantial context in terms of civil rights, immigration, integration, busing, basketball and, yes, the 1918 World Series. Who was the last team to integrate? I answer the question, failing to mention that it technically should be what was the last team to integrate. My answer, as always, is accompanied by the fact that they actually gave Jackie Robinson a tryout before Branch Rickey ever did. Who was the last team to integrate? The Boston Red Sox. Some twelve years after Robinson stepped up to the major league plate. But. . . .
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There is always a “but” to the answer to the question that is always asked during my lecture about Jackie Robinson’s historic breaking of a color line that had existed in major league baseball for well over half a century. That lecture, which uses Jules Tygiel’s exceedingly readable and immensely teachable Baseball’s Great Experiment as its main source, is not part of the upper-division seminar that I occasionally offer entitled “Race, Sport, and Society.” Rather, it is part of my post–World War II lecture in the U.S. Survey (Reconstruction to Present) that I teach on a fairly regular rotation. I find that Robinson’s debut and Branch Rickey’s push to make the Brooklyn Dodgers the team that would transform baseball’s color line are among the best ways to teach the visible rise of civil rights movements in the immediate postwar period, and the role of culture in it. It is not sports history. It’s history. There are many, many (many) burdens—well-known burdens—that come along with being a Red Sox fan (and, for clarification, I am not from Boston, but rather Richmond, Massachusetts, a small town outside of Pittsfield that has recently taken ownership of inventing the game from Cooperstown—and no, I am not being defensive). But as a cultural historian who has spent a lot of time writing about race and sports and civil rights, the drain of being a fan can be almost unbearable. The first time the question was posed in my class—Who was the last team to integrate?—the student knew why the question would plague me. During office hours, he had seen the 1986 World Series banner that I boldly displayed in my graduate student space at a large university on, yes, Long Island, not too far from Shea Stadium (but far enough for me), and not that much farther from that place in the Bronx where rumors have it that a local team plays baseball rather well. So, with his Yankees hat turned into “rally” position, he eagerly awaited my anguish, not necessarily knowing the degree to which it stirred my own memories of sitting in Fenway during Game 3, 1986, and watching Oil Can Boyd futilely try to change history. Who was the last team to integrate? The answer is complex. While the Boston Red Sox did not bring Elijah “Pumpsie” Green on board until 1959, technically they tried (well, “tried” is likely not the right word—I used to say “tried” but then Howard Bryant’s wonderful book, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, changed my mind on employing that particular verb to describe the Red Sox’s integration efforts) to integrate before anyone else. In 1945, Red Sox General Manager Eddie Collins came under fire from Boston city councilor Isadore Muchnick, who wanted Collins to take the lead in the push to integrate baseball. Collins pleaded innocence to charges that Boston had prevented black players from trying out in the past, claiming that for the duration of his tenure with the team, he had “never had a
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single request for a tryout by a colored applicant.”1 However, Muchnick continued his quest, at one point threatening Collins that if an integrated tryout did not occur in Boston, he would block the required unanimous City Council vote for the team to play on Sundays. Further weight landed on Collins’ shoulders when Boston Record columnist Dave Egan, reiterating the charge that black columnists such as Wendell Smith and Sam Lacy had been leading in the black press, began a campaign urging both of Boston’s baseball teams—the Red Sox and the (now Atlanta) Braves—to consider Boston’s historical responsibility to equality and to do the right thing. Between Muchnick’s unyielding pressure and Egan’s hype, the Red Sox agreed to be the first major league baseball team in the twentieth century to hold an integrated tryout.2 On April 14, 1945, Marvin Williams, Sam Jethroe, and, indeed, Jackie Robinson arrived at Fenway Park for their tryout, only to find it delayed for two days because of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the tryout finally took place, few are sure what exactly happened. Many versions of what went down that day still circle history, largely because few folks deemed it worthy of their attention. According to Bryant, the relatively confirmed course of events include the fact that the team itself was not there. Manager (and former Red Sox great) Joe Cronin had given the players the day off because the season was beginning the next day in New York. Former Red Sox outfielder Hugh Duffy oversaw the tryout, while Cronin sat and watched. The Boston Record reported that Robinson did well and impressed Cronin, while others claimed that Cronin barely looked at the field. At the conclusion of the tryout, Collins told the trio they would hear from him soon. None did.3 Much more, of course, has been whispered about what occurred in Fenway Park that day. While Robinson, for one, generally refused to discuss it, Boston Globe reporter Clif Keane lent the tryout what Bryant calls “its historical significance.” Keane claims that he heard someone shout from the stands, “Get those niggers off the field.”4 While many have been credited with the affront, most conclusions point toward Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey (of Yawkey’s Way, the street outside of Fenway where I have purchased countless hats, shirts, beers, and so on). As we know, and as Tygiel details, as a member of the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team, Jackie Robinson enjoyed a stunning summer season in 1946, making a name for himself in the small venues of America’s favorite pastime. He went on to his major league debut in 1947, and was named Rookie of the Year. Sam Jethroe went to the Boston Braves in 1950, integrating Boston baseball, but not the Red Sox, and replicated Robinson’s feat by taking the Rookie of the Year title. Having declined to sign either player, Red Sox management went back to work against integration. Tom
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Yawkey, for example, served on a committee formed by baseball owners to study integration. On August 27, 1946, the committee submitted its notorious conclusions, which were apparently so distasteful that readers were asked to destroy their copies when finished. The tried and tired reasons were presented up front: baseball was being used by activists, Negro Leagues players did not have the skills to be competitive in the majors and did not know the game well enough, the contractual obligations players had to the Negro Leagues had to be observed. The real reason, of course, was made more subtly: Major league baseball profited from segregation. Integration meant, for example, that the Negro Leagues would no longer rent their parks from the majors. And it meant that more African Americans would come to major league games, isolating white fans and thus lowering the value of teams in major urban areas. Who was the last team to integrate? The Boston Red Sox. And not only did they decline to sign Robinson, in 1949 they shunned the advice of the general manager of their AA team in Alabama, the Birmingham Barons, that a star on the Birmingham Black Barons could be acquired for a mere $5,000. The team’s scout, Larry Woodall—a Texan—could not fit the kid into his schedule. “I’m not going to waste my time,” he said, “waiting on a bunch of niggers.”5 Thus, just as the Red Sox passed on Jackie Robinson, the team missed out on Willie Mays. Say hey, indeed. By the time the Red Sox called up Pumpsie Green from the minors in 1959, some 128 years after William Lloyd Garrison (who declared my title quote) opened the Liberator offices in what is now Government Center in Boston, Mays was a standout on the Giants, Robinson was retired, stars such as Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Frank Robinson were shining for their teams, and journalists Lacy and Smith had confirmed in the black press that the Red Sox were a racist club. Rosters changed dramatically in terms of who played the game in the decades that followed World War II, and while the battle for racial integration moved toward center stage in the United States for a variety of reasons, it was perhaps most dramatically imagined in its initial stages on baseball diamonds. The Red Sox, however, kept their eyes closed to the cornucopia of talent that descended from the legacy of the Negro Leagues. Rather than consider the impact that the refusal to integrate has had on the team’s record, in Boston it was the “Curse of the Bambino” that had allegedly plagued Fenway Park, preventing the ultimate victory from ever gracing the likes of some of the game’s greatest individual players—Ted Williams, Jimmy Collins, Duffy Lewis, Tris Speaker, Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk, Jimmie Foxx, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and so on. Of course, the history of the Curse is completely convoluted. The short
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story? In 1920, less than two years after a World Series victory, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee needed cash to finance his girlfriend’s play, so he sold Babe Ruth’s contract to the Yankees. The real-er story? According to Yankees chronicler Glenn Stout, the “tidy package known as ‘the Curse of the Bambino’” is grossly misrepresented, piling undue blame on Frazee, who was actually an astute businessman, and removing it from the “shenanigans elsewhere in the American League” that actually cost Boston the Babe.6 Regardless, the conclusion of the legend of the Curse is that the Yankees have gone on to an unmentionable number of championship seasons and the Red Sox—well, it took a while. But the legend of the Curse, which dutifully followed the Red Sox into the twenty-first century (it is apparently, as one insightful—ugh—Yankee fan in the stands pointed out on a poster in 1999, Y2K compliant), serves as a sort of Boston sports fan’s version of claiming that the Confederate flag stands for “states rights,” largely masking the impact that history might have had on the team. Few sports fans claim to have a better understanding of history than those in Boston. Yet Red Sox fans, as Howard Bryant summarizes, are “often frustrated by history but rarely by the people . . . who made the history.”7 We know, but do not often discuss, that many black stars over the course of the past several decades have ensured, contractually, that they never have to play for the home team in Boston. And those who sit in the visitors’ dugout at Fenway Park claim a special satisfaction in victory. “I used to love to play the Red Sox, just to beat them,” admitted former Yankee Willie Randolph. “ . . . As a black player, the Red Sox brought out that little something in all of us.”8 As Bryant succinctly understands, “the Red Sox more than other franchises have always found themselves linked with the larger Boston story of abolition, opportunity, politics, and clannish insularity.”9 Bottom line? It ain’t easy being a Red Sox fan. Yet hope springs eternal, and one now has hope that under the watchful eye of Robinson’s retired #42, which resides next to the retired numbers of great Red Sox players on the right field façade in Fenway, things are different. In February 2002, a new ownership group took over the Red Sox, and with it what president and CEO Larry Lucchino calls the team’s “undeniable legacy of racial intolerance.” For the first time, the team directly confronted its history, beginning a series of outreach programs into black Boston. The team started, equipped, and sponsors, for example, a 16-team Boston church league that fields 500 teenage players. According to principal owner John Henry, the effort has been a deliberate and terribly self-conscious one: “I think we have to make a statement not just in baseball but in our community that diversity is an issue that hasn’t been fully addressed in the past and certainly has to be fully addressed,” he says. “I think it’s important what your actions are. That will
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really define the franchise going forward.”10 In a conversation with Henry, Howard Bryant found his perspective to be a refreshing one. “What John Henry wanted to know wasn’t if the Red Sox live in racism’s shadow, for he knows his new franchise most certainly does,” Bryant recalls. “With that recognition, he stood already quantum leaps ahead of his predecessors, who often seemed to believe that forceful, impassioned denial could somehow alter the facts.”11 The Red Sox that I fell in love with from my home in the far western reaches of Massachusetts was the same team that Bryant, who grew up in Dorchester, cheered for: Jim Rice, Freddy Lynn, Dewey Evans, El Tiante, Yaz, the Spaceman. I have never left them, loving Marty Barrett as a teenager (I was a girl and he was, like, so cute), and thinking that Mo Vaughan, Tom Gordon, Oil Can Boyd, and Nomar Garciaparra held keys to modern salvation, or at least could bring home a World Series ring. And now that time has arrived: the coveted championship flag was raised in Boston on Opening Day of the 2005 season—the first time Boston had seen it in 86 years. Did Henry’s efforts have an effect? Did the Curse end, as New York and Boston newspapers alike determined, when the Red Sox came back from a 0–3 deficit—the only team ever to do so in baseball history—to win the 2004 pennant, defeating the Yankees in the House that Ruth Built in Game 7? Did it happen, as many believe, on August 31, 2004, when Manny Ramirez pounded a foul ball past the Pesky Pole in Fenway and hit 16-year-old Lee Gavin, who lives with his family in Babe Ruth’s former house in Sudbury, in the mouth and knocked out two of his teeth, making him THE KID WHO BROKE THE CURSE in his high school? Did it happen, as my friend Sarah speculated, when Alex Rodriguez slapped the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s hand in a feeble attempt to make it to first base in Game 6? Or did we have to wait until 11:38 pm on October 27, 2004, in St. Louis, when Keith Foulke gently tossed the ball to Doug Mientkiewicz and, well, it was done? As the Red Sox Nation, as we now call ourselves in an interesting construction of inclusiveness that maintains age-old regional borders while acknowledging the global diaspora of fandom, assembled at Fenway Park for the first game of the 2004 World Series, fan paraphernalia—posters, banners, buttons, and shirts—emblazoned with the phrase “WE BELIEVE” solidified how being a Red Sox fan is, indeed, a faith-based occupation. It is one that even goes beyond life on earth, evidenced by those in Boston who placed balloons and pennants on the graves of their grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, telling them what had happened—that it had finally happened. But perhaps more important to consider when wondering when the Curse went away are the cheers of “PAPI-PAPI-PAPI” that filled the stadium
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of the faithful of this mismatched band of, in the words of hirsute outfielder Johnny Damon, “idiots.” Throughout the Series, it was clear to the country: David “Papi” Ortiz, named Most Valuable Player of the American League Championship Series, was loved in Boston. Ramirez, named Most Valuable Player of the World Series, was loved in Boston. And with those chants, and with fond memories of George Scott, it is possible that the Curse lifted in a way that members of the Nation were not even aware of.
It can be a problem when our personal and professional lives collide. Liking a movie with characters derived from the minstrel stage. Liking a Mel Gibson movie. Being a Red Sox fan when you have just told your undergraduates that they were the last team to desegregate and you know why Mo Vaughan or Jim Rice often hated playing there. Those of us who think about the power structures and cultural legacies of ideas of race know well the personal liabilities of such knowledge. It magnifies things in your daily routine that many people do not deal with, whether when admitting that “your” team has a history more racist than most or when watching the African American actor in the “buddy” role die first and realizing that you still like the movie. Discussing sports can, in particular, be a liability, but that is what those who signed onto this project agreed to do. It is territory where many have tried and failed—or perhaps flailed—from a variety of different perspectives. Marge Schott. Jimmy the Greek. Sir Roger Bannister. Al Campanis. Rush Limbaugh. Ahhhh, Rush. What a week it was. When ESPN announced in July 2003 that Limbaugh would join its NFL Countdown show as “the voice of the fan and to spark debate on the show,” I do not think I was alone in thinking which fan is that? ESPN, for its part, seemed pleased with its choice. “Rush is a great communicator and a fan’s fan,” said ESPN executive vice president Mark Shapiro. “His acute sense of what’s on the minds of his listeners combined with his ability to entertain and serve as a lightning rod for lively discussion makes him the perfect fit for this new role.” Limbaugh, too, appeared enthusiastic about his transition to television— especially sports television. “I am a big fan of the NFL and now I get to do what every football fan would love to do,” he stated at the press conference that announced his new role. “I get to take my observations from the living room couch to the ESPN studios and talk football with the best journalists and players in the business.”12 He lasted, as we all know, approximately one month because of those revered observations. “RUSH SACKS SELF,” screamed the New York Post
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on October 2, 2003, in its announcement that Limbaugh “resigned” from his post at ESPN after accusations of racism. Those charges emerged, of course, in regard to his on-air comments about Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb: During the network’s “Sunday NFL Countdown” show before an Eagles/Bills game, Limbaugh said, “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit . . . that he didn’t deserve.”13 The uproar that followed was expected by everyone except Limbaugh. “My comments this past Sunday were directed at the media and were not racially motivated,” he stated in his own defense. “ . . . I love ‘NFL Sunday Countdown’ and do not want to be a distraction to the great work done by all who work on it.”14 Limbaugh’s defense, then, read as a sacrifice for the good of the show, rather than an apology for an unquestionably racist analysis of football. McNabb, for one, understood this, disregarding any kind of statement from Limbaugh. “An apology would do no good because he obviously thought about it before he said it,” McNabb pointed out. “It’s somewhat shocking to hear that on national TV from him. It’s not something that I can sit here and say won’t bother me.”15 Conversely, the statement itself, it seems, did not bother Limbaugh, who felt that the entire episode was “a mountain out of a molehill.”16 And in a way, he was right: Why was there so much of an uproar that Rush Limbaugh had made racist remarks in a national forum? Who, we must ask, was surprised that he could be perceived as racist? Certainly not those who felt compelled to create a petition to boycott ESPN “due to hiring of Rush Limbaugh.” Those who signed the online document—before, mind you, Limbaugh waxed poetic on McNabb—committed to “refrain from watching, listening to, logging on to, reading, or gaining any information directly from ESPN, ESPN Radio, ESPN.com, ESPN Magazine, and all other ESPN affiliates (including ABC Sports) until ESPN terminates the contract of Rush Limbaugh. . . .” And why, pray tell, did the undersigned feel the need for such a petition? Because, in the words of the petition, they understood that
Mr. Limbaugh continues to discharge venomous, vindictive, inaccurate, and erroneous statements daily against anything and everything that he has a dislike for. Giving a man such as him an additional forum unrelated to his purported expertise only serves to further insult and anger millions of football fans, and undermines the legitimate professionals in this field, all of whom are more qualified. . . . Most of all, the mere selection of such a controversial political figure for a sports show indicates that ESPN does not value its audience, or at least highly underestimates the intelligence of much of its audience. As a commercial enterprise, ESPN stands to lose significant amounts of money for such a bizarre hiring that alienates half of its consumers. While
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this one move does reflect badly on the whole organization of ESPN, the company can still salvage some respect and integrity by releasing Mr. Limbaugh of his Sunday Night Countdown duties immediately.17
Limbaugh’s resignation from ESPN was followed by accusations that he illegally used prescription painkillers. This latter episode made famous OxyContin and Wilma Cline—Limbaugh’s maid and alleged drug supplier—and thus overshadowed the McNabb/ESPN debacle, destining his words to join the many of what are considered anomalous misfires regarding race in the sports world. However, Rush’s “Jimmy the Greek” moment held a particularly disturbing vein that we should not let vanish from public record: his defense that he had been forced to resign for speaking truth. As the clamor regarding his McNabb remarks began to grow, Limbaugh’s explanation for the uproar became more disturbing than the initial comment itself. “There’s no racism here; there’s no racist intent whatsoever,” Limbaugh insisted. “This has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something. If I wasn’t right, there wouldn’t be this cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sportswriter community.”18 According to this line of reasoning, any dialogue regarding issues of race within the sports world is, first, to be commended as brave and, second, must yield truth as measured by the reaction/attention to it. Is that why sports remains a rarely touched realm within the broad and brave field of cultural studies? It is not that no one writes about sports in a meaningful way. Some of the best contemporary writers on race, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, and Gerald Early, have devoted essays in this manner, making obvious the bountiful intellectual fodder to be found in sports topics. In 1997, an issue of Social Text devoted itself to sports, producing a wide variety of smart pieces that probed pertinent issues—particularly, perhaps, race—into which sports provides windows. Edited by Toby Miller, author of the compelling Sportsex,19 the issue determined that what could be called “the politics of sport” created “a key component of nationalism and discrimination, as well as an integral part of everyday oppositional culture.”20 This issue of Social Text, while not completely unique, represents a rare attempt by a diverse collection of scholars to pull so-called sports history out of its relatively isolated intellectual location, understanding the way in which this mass cultural format—which sport categorically is— provides an incredibly fertile ground to examine the always complex nature of racial operations, as well as demonstrating how the relationship between sports and race work as an umbrella over other critical themes of cultural projects, particularly—but not limited to—gender, sexuality, transnationalism, postcolonialism, and national identity.21
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As always, the roots of such an examination lie with C. L. R. James. In his decisive analysis of cricket, Beyond a Boundary, which I have used elsewhere in a similar manner, James illustrates how sport subsists as a fundamental model for other forms of social existence.22 His oft-cited query—“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”— demonstrates the need to take sports away from those who best know it— and perhaps only it—and hand it over to those who ask different questions with an alternative charge. It is an attempt, in part, to push forward a paradigmatic shift in a cultural study of sport, impart an interdisciplinary gaze in an accessible manner, and probe the cardinal questions deeply embedded in cultural studies, in general, and on race, often most broadly defined, in particular. As well, this charge seeks to examine the historical, ideological, and cultural imperatives contained within sport, firmly situating it as a significant, if not commanding, element of studies that engage with ideas of racial identity, hopefully embodying a pioneering way of looking not only at sports and popular culture, but the examination of race and ethnicity writ large. With James’ worthy influence clearly in sight, then, the following essays attempt to encompass a new arena of study for those who focus their work on ideas of race, ethnicity, and nation, incorporating not only the more standard scholarly research articles, but also more reflective pieces that encompass intellectual insight, observation, and personal memoir. Together, these essays demonstrate the increasingly transnational reach of sports culture, allowing thought-provoking perspectives on race to be considered without cordoning off ideas of culture, gender, nation, globality, class, and so on, possibly serving as a springboard that will connect studies of the ever-important subject of sports with those who have serious concern about and interest in ideas of race and identity. Again, these writers plunge into waters in which many—whether Jimmy or Al or Rush—have drowned before. They also acknowledge that there are few who do not think about race and sports in terms of being fans of some sort. But these essays are not merely about people’s hobbies, which has often been the case when academics who do not normally write about sports take the time to do so. These are not professors who box in their spare time. Rather, those whose work follows took frameworks that they excel in—immigration history, postcolonialism, African American aesthetics, gender constructions—and applied them to sports, stretching their own intellectual centers of attention to an arena that saturates our daily lives, whether fans or not. In the first section, entitled “Heroes,” we begin with Matthew Frye Jacobson. Jacobson’s innovations in immigration history have contributed greatly to the study of race, nation, and ethnicity, and one of his greatest skills throughout his previous works has been his ability to find where race
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exists in our cultural worlds and reveal just how powerful that existence is. Jacobson has demonstrated throughout his scholarship the multitude of lines that are crossed at all levels and in all aspects of American society in terms of race and ethnicity, thoughtfully and persuasively revealing how race works as both a social and cultural construction, and the numerous— and very real—consequences that follow. Here, he has applied his abilities to baseball, with a particularly personal focus on Dick “Richie” Allen, the focal point for his boyhood love of the game. In “‘Richie’ Allen, Whitey’s Ways, and Me: A Political Education in the 1960s,” Jacobson shows how the athlete battles—literally—against those who watch the game, own the game, and play the game. His soul-baring take on how Allen’s career has been constructed demonstrates how—in similar fashion to C. L. R. James— what goes on in baseball quite often has nothing to do with baseball, and reveals much about the impact racialized perception can have on sport, nation, and a kid watching in Colorado. Like Jacobson, Theresa Runstedtler also focuses on an individual, Joe Louis, not only challenging the popular mythos surrounding Louis, but also investigating his iconography to explore larger questions about the relationships among race, gender, and resistance. Rather than engage in the familiar scenario of Louis as the savior of American democracy, in “In Sports the Best Man Wins: How Joe Louis Whupped Jim Crow,” Runstedtler considers Louis in the role of “Race Man.” Examining the public commentary regarding Louis’s successes, both in and out of the ring, in a variety of sources—from blues songs to political cartoons—Runstedtler locates Louis within the 1930s context of the “New Negro,” a trend of engendering blackness—dignity, strength, defiance, nationalism, and so on—as a particularly male construction. Her analysis of the “Brown Bomber,” which she offers with great detail regarding some of Louis’s most important bouts, demonstrates how, as African Americans from all walks of economic life critiqued a lack of social justice by using discursive strategies that promoted black male ascendancy, broadly conceived popular ideas of racial progress became increasingly intertwined with the redemption of patriarchal black manhood. This engendering of blackness, then, is another reason why sporting men have become icons of the black community. The next section moves from the figure of the athlete to the ideas that envelop those who watch the game—“Fans.” Grant Farred, a scholar of postcolonialism, and especially of James, leads off, pondering ideas of how the athlete is received by the nation. When asked to join this project, Farred’s immediate response was to write about soccer (which he insists, despite living in Durham, North Carolina, on calling “football”) and, more specifically, soccer in Argentina, because he finds it to be the most significant and public roundtable for any conversation about race and identity. In
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his piece “Race and Silence in Argentine Football,” Farred focuses on soccer star Juan Sebastian Veron, not as a sports hero in the manner of Jacobson and Runstedler, but rather as a way to explore the manner in which Argentina has manipulated racial perceptions of the self. According to Farred, Argentina has, indeed, denied the existence of blackness, while simultaneously elevating a decidedly black athlete, in order to put on its most modern (read: European) face, creating a stage that formally denies color while its people, conversely, push it toward a postcolonial state more in line with both its neighbors and Europe. As such, it is with a soccer star— Veron—that Argentina begins to understand the demand for acknowledging color, regardless of its self-identity that refuses to do so. Jen Scanlon and Michael Arthur approach cricket in a similar style, from the perspectives of both ardent fan and scholar, investigating what they consider to be the stark reality of contemporary West Indian cricket, a sport that once provided colonial subjects with hope of liberation through their dexterity on the pitch. Their examination forces the question of what it means to be Caribbean or West Indian in the postcolonial moment, and what role cricket plays within such struggle of identity. Theirs, then, is a call for what they consider to be a new cricket, one that considers the particulars of a historical moment that is not cultivated by ideas of national identity or anti-British attitudes, but rather speaks to a broader understanding of island life in postcolonial society and maintains its necessity in creating a sense of belonging for people of the Caribbean as a whole. For Tony Clark, the idea of belonging is central to his article about the use of “Indian” mascots by teams and fans, and their perpetuation by mainstream media. Clark situates the use of these so-called Indian representations as definitively racist, a seemingly easy argument to make, but goes further to explore how these active symbols stifle the creation of useful or respectful narratives regarding Indigenous Peoples in American society. Via the various media channels that reproduce them, mascots, whether an Atlanta Brave or Chief Wahoo, come to speak for the people they allegedly represent, removing any kind of voice from the people themselves. With this, the ability of American Indians to engage in society as United States citizens is suppressed, as well as any kind of autonomy they might have as sovereign nations within an empire, removing the actual people for the sake of the image created by athletic teams and their fans. Beginning the section entitled “Aesthetics,” Joel Dinerstein’s take on 1970s football culture, “Backfield in Motion: The Transformation of the NFL by Black Culture,” extends his own broader work on black aesthetics and movement. Dinerstein, whose award-winning book Swinging the Machine focused on how music and dance in the interwar “machine age” aided an increasingly urban and technologically advanced society deal with
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modernity, examines the black aesthetic in the academically oft-neglected world of football. While basketball has consumed the public’s attention for the past few decades regarding the dominance of black style and substance, Dinerstein, focusing on the 1970s, demonstrates how black culture transformed football, providing what he considers to be paradigms of “aesthetic excellence.” Locating these innovations in the style and performance of football in this era, Dinerstein does more than merely demonstrate that black cultural traditions find their way into a mainstream and decidedly American culture: He begins to unpack how this path is forged, by whom, and to what consequence for those that created the style, those that imitated it, and those that co-opted it into a global flow. In a different vein, Latin American historian Eric Zolov focuses on the Mexico City Olympic Games in 1968, paying particular attention to how the host country celebrated its own alleged transcendence of racial and political conflicts in order to fully embrace its role as the first “developing” nation to serve as host. To do so, Zolov examines what we would now call “the look of the Games.” At the Athens Olympics in 2004, the look was defined by Barcelona architect Santiago Calatrava, mixing ideas of antiquity and modernity in stark white architecture and red clay grounds. In Sydney in 2000, it meant the melding of an aboriginal past with a metropolitan future, symbolized most dramatically by Cathy Freeman’s emotional lighting of the Olympic cauldron. For his part, Zolov examines the generally overlooked “Cultural Olympics” that accompanies the sporting program of each Olympic Games as well as the colors, pageantry, and imagery that Mexico put forth during its two-week stint as global host. In 1968, the Mexican Olympic Organizing Committee utilized a program of colors, pageantry, art, and imagery designed to erase Mexico’s tired stereotype of being “lazy,” as well as to mask the domestic contradictions of a repressive authoritarian regime—whose harshness became public with the massacre of student protesters of the eve of the Opening Ceremony. With the cultural agenda of the Olympics in 1968, two contradictory versions of Mexico were to come together—one that portrayed the nation as one of folk culture and tradition, and another that portrayed Mexico as a bastion of modernity, a nation with a future. Zolov uses this dualistic sensibility to explore the problematics of channeling domestic criticism, on one hand, and managing national reputations on a global stage, on the other, making clear the limitations of strategies of aesthetic containment in silencing civil struggle and reshaping foreign opinion. While both Dinerstein and Zolov deal with ideas of modernity and aesthetics in sports, in the last section, “Futures,” Tracie Church Guzzio demonstrates where a viable window lies into the postmodern, postindustrial moment of basketball. Using the oeuvre of novelist John Edgar Wideman,
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Guzzio investigates the long-standing representations of black masculinity and physicality, focusing specifically on Wideman’s autobiographical work Hoop Roots. In Hoop Roots, Wideman argues that sports can be viewed as a form of resistant expression, one that both addresses and contests black male stereotypes and reveals the instability of such cultural constructions, as well as a critical African American source of unity and celebration. As such, according to Guzzio, Wideman, a writer, professor, Rhodes scholar, and basketball player, argues for a different image of the black male via basketball, one that contests and re-creates commonly accepted views of black masculinity while maintaining connections to the racial past and providing space for a contemporary moment in which negative imagery can be deconstructed, but never forgotten. Carlo Rotella, however, leads in a bit of a different direction. According to Rotella, whose celebrated work has ranged from surveys of urban literature to afternoons with heavyweight boxer Larry Holmes, an eagerness to make sports be “about race” constrains our access to the full range of what sports can mean. Academics and many journalists often treat boxing, in particular, as racial drama. The examples are obvious, whether one begins with Johnson versus Jeffries or Louis versus Schmeling. But Rotella provocatively argues that portraying boxing in this manner is a reductionist effort, one that throttles other meanings made available by the complex theater of the ring. To make his point, Rotella recasts the last great blackwhite heavyweight title bout of the twentieth century: Larry Holmes versus Gerry Cooney, 1982, a fight that brought together two very different fighting styles at cultural center stage within a context orchestrated by master showmen (including Don King) and media organs enthralled with the bout’s many parallels to Rocky. With his examination of this fight and its historical moment, Rotella leaves us with perhaps the next step in a critical examination of this thing we call sports.
To have writers of this caliber assemble in one place makes working on such a project an absolute pleasure, so a great deal of thanks goes to each and every one of them for their attention to the project, their timeliness in facing some serious deadlines, and their generosity in their advice and support to me. Many of these contributors have served as mentors to me in the past, and to have them as colleagues on such a project has been an absolute delight. As well, thanks to Rachel Buff and Michel Willard, who provided critical feedback at a very early stage, and Brendan O’Malley, whose support, detailed and constructive criticism, and shared devotion to
INTRODUCTION
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the Boston Red Sox enabled this project to flourish. From a personal angle, thanks to my family for their constant counsel, especially my mother for her fine editorial eye, my father for his enthusiasm, my sister for her humor, and my brother for his ACLS tickets. Most important, thanks to Evan, who willingly relinquished the remote control and his Metrocard so that I could experience baseball from a variety of seats during the historic 2004 postseason.
Notes 1. Quoted in Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (New York: Routledge, 2002), 29. 2. Bryant, 24–28. 3. Bryant, 30–31. 4. Bryant, 32. 5. Quoted in Bryant, 1. 6. Glenn Stout, “When the Yankees Nearly Moved to Boston,” ESPN.com, July 18, 2002, accessed on July 6, 2004. For a detailed explanation as to how Babe Ruth ended up in New York, see Stout, Yankees Century: 100 Years of New York Yankees Baseball (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). For the impact of the Curse through the decades in Boston, see Dan Shaughnessy, The Curse of the Bambino (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). 7. Bryant, 23. 8. Quoted in Bryant, xii. 9. Bryant, xi. 10. Juan Williams, “The Boston Red Sox and Racism,” Morning Addition, National Public Radio, October 11, 2002, accessed at http://www.npr.org/programs.morning/features/2002/oct/redsox/, April 17, 2004. 11. Bryant, xiii. 12. ESPN.com, July 14, 2003; accessed October 3, 2003. 13. Quoted in Todd Venezia, “Rush Sacks Self,” The New York Post, October 2, 2003, 17. 14. Venezia, “Rush Sacks Self.” 15. Quoted in Venezia, “Rush Sacks Self.” 16. Quoted in Venzia, “Rush Sacks Self.” 17. http://www.petitiononline.com/no2espn/petition.html, accessed October 3, 2003. The petition was written by David August and hosted by PetitionOnline, which provides petitions for public advocacy free of charge. At the time it was accessed, the signatures on August’s petition totaled 3,220, most with extensive commentary. 18. Quoted in Venzia, “Rush Sacks Self,” emphasis mine. 19. See Toby Miller, Sportsex (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 20. “The Politics of Sport,” Social Text 50 (Spring 1997).
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21. Another collection in this vein is John Bloom and Michael Willard, Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 22. See Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
PART I: HEROES
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ONE “Richie” Allen, Whitey’s Ways, and Me: A Political Education in the 1960s
Matthew Frye Jacobson
I wouldn’t say that I hate Whitey, but deep down in my heart, I just can’t stand Whitey’s ways, man. —Dick Allen, Ebony, 1970
“Disrespect” would be a euphemism. Dick Allen was unanimously renamed “Richie” in 1960 by a white press wholly indifferent to the young ballplayer’s protestations that everyone from his mother on down had always called him “Dick.” Later, when Allen finally did insist upon his rightful name after several years of patiently accepting what he thought a vaguely racist diminutive, the press variously ignored his request, spitefully granted it (“Dick ‘Don’t Call Me Richie’ Allen”), or—worse—depicted the “name-change” as an emblem of Allen’s unstable character (as in: “in midcareer he became, adamantly, ‘Dick.’” Sports Illustrated referred to this as Allen’s “first name sensitivity.”)1 Fans in Philadelphia delighted in throwing objects at Allen—pennies, chicken bones, batteries, bolts, half pints— and when he took to wearing a batting helmet in the field, the press
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intimated that he needed the protection because he was bad with a glove. Allen twice appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated: once in 1970 under the heading “Baseball in Turmoil” (a reference to Curt Flood’s challenge to baseball’s reserve clause, but Allen was the sport’s better poster boy for “turmoil”), and once in 1972, smoking what remains the only cigarette in the history of SI covers. Nor has Allen’s treatment mellowed over the years. The current entry for Allen on BaseballLibrary.com (“The Stories behind the Stats”) begins this way: “Talented, controversial, charming, and abusive, Allen put in 15 major league seasons, hitting prodigious homers and paying prodigious fines. He was praised as a money player and condemned as a loafer.” The site does duly note Allen’s Rookie of the Year season in 1964 and his MVP season in 1972; but its overall flavor tends fairly decisively toward “loafer” rather than “money player.” (The account of his stellar rookie season opens on the odd—but for Allen, familiar—note, “He made 41 errors at third base. . . .”)2 Total Baseball, the baseball encyclopedia, ranks Allen as the eighty-eighth best player of all time in an entry that begins, “Dick Allen feuded with writers, fans, managers, and teammates, earned many suspensions and behaved and fielded erratically.”3 In American political life, the phrase “Black Power” will always bring to mind Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party, and other black radicals who came to prominence in the latter half of the 1960s. In the too-clever parlance of ’60s- and ’70sera baseball writing, however, its appropriation conjured figures like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Frank Robinson, and Richie Allen— the 1.5 generation of baseball’s integration after Jackie Robinson had broken the color bar, black sluggers whose speed and playing style and might were transforming the national pastime. (Absent its black stars, Hank Aaron points out, the National League’s stand-out player of the 1960s would have been Ron Santo.)4 But the two meanings of “black power” were not unrelated, as Dick Allen’s career demonstrates perhaps better than most. The social drama of the Civil Rights movement constituted the inescapable context within which black ballplayers of this generation were understood and measured in the white media—most often, if tacitly, located along an imagined political spectrum of “good” and “bad” Negroes (Willie Mays at one end of the spectrum, Richie Allen, Bob Gibson, and Dock Ellis at the other). “If [Allen] had been white,” writes Gibson, “he would have been considered merely a free spirit. As a black man who did as he pleased and guarded his privacy, he was instead regarded as a trouble-maker.”5 It is only in the context of the wider political and social world of the 1960s, not of the club-
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house and diamond, that one can comprehend Allen’s becoming “a dartboard for the press,” in Pirate outfielder Willie Stargell’s phrase.6 Thus the sports page served as a site of oblique but significant social commentary on the racial questions of the day (indeed it was in relation to the sports page that whites seem to have first acknowledged and accepted that there might even be such a thing as a “white press”). It is not just that the world of Orval Faubus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Strom Thurmond, and Malcolm X supplied the cues for writing about a figure like Richie Allen, but also, contrariwise, that commentary on the likes of Allen—or Muhammad Ali or Cookie Gilchrist or Lew Alcindor—was by its very nature a genre of political writing whose significations reached beyond the diamond, the ring, or the gridiron, to the roiling racial world of a nation in unrest. By the time Allen’s autobiography appeared in 1989, vernacular political discourse was better equipped to deal with the experience of someone “enormously talented and black in a game run by white owners, executives, and managers,” as one reviewer put it.7 Across the arc of his career in Philadelphia, however, from 1964 to 1969, the political truths of the sports world were grasped and analyzed chiefly by athletes and writers on the black side of the color line, and only very occasionally by a white commentator like Robert Lipsyte or Jack Olsen. Most often, black analyses of how race mattered—along with black protestations that race did matter— were simply folded into white power’s already-scripted tale of the “bad Negro,” as when Cookie Gilchrist mounted a boycott of the AFL’s 1964 All-Star Game in Jim Crow New Orleans, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists on the dais in Mexico City in 1968, or when Dick Allen or Frank Robinson raised the issue of Major League Baseball’s racist hiring practices. Bad boys all. By suggesting that race had anything to do with his image as “the bad boy of baseball,” in other words, a figure like Allen could only prove himself the “bad boy of baseball.” This essay is not primarily about Dick Allen, but—quite deliberately— about Richie Allen, a creation of the white press, a negative icon of the Civil Rights era, “just about the premier bad boy in sports.”8 It is also about Richie Allen as a persona who—against the odds, one has to conclude—became a positive icon to me, a white kid growing up in the suburban setting of Boulder, Colorado. The sports pages of this era constituted my political education. I was six years old and just beginning to pay attention to baseball during Allen’s phenomenal rookie year. If “black power” signified anything to me at age nine, around the time when the term entered political parlance, it signified Allen’s towering home run to straightaway center in the All-Star Game in Anaheim. But by age ten, always hungry for another story, another AP wire photo, another stat on Allen, I could not help but notice that most of what I found was some brand of vilification.
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My fourth-grade teacher Miss Harms could lecture on Reverend King and the freedom struggle; but what I learned about the injustices and the slanders of racism, I learned mostly by following Richie Allen in the Denver Post, waiting in vain for someone to write something good. (“Richie played with fire in his eyes, always,” says Orlando Cepeda. “Never read that in no newspaper.”9) Reflecting on the odd oasis of adulation that his own fame provided him amid a wider, uglier world of racism, harassment, and danger, Bob Gibson once told baseball writer Roger Angell, “It’s nice to get attention and favors . . . but I can never forget the fact that if I were an ordinary black person I’d be in the shithouse, like millions of others.”10 Allen never did quite get out, even despite his talent and his fame and the awed respect he earned inside the lines. Here, in what stands as both a historical and a personal reflection, I seek to discover what that might say about politics and sport in the 1960s, and also to recover what it did mean to one white fan, thousands of miles and many worlds away from the Philadelphia shithouse called Connie Mack Stadium.
1. Philadelphia “No baseball season in my fifteen-year career had the highs and lows of ’64,” wrote Allen in his autobiography, Crash. “The Temps said it best baby, I was a ball of confusion.”11 Allen was the National League Rookie of the Year, hitting .318 with 201 hits, 29 home runs, and 91 RBIs. He also had 38 doubles and 13 triples, a single-season combination that the likes of Mays, Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Pete Rose never matched. Or Jackie Robinson, for that matter. (Joe DiMaggio bested it back in 1936, with 44 doubles and 15 triples). But Phillies fans found ways to sour on him nonetheless, many blaming him for the team’s spectacular September freefall that cost them what had seemed a sure pennant. Fans’ merciless booing became so common at Connie Mack Stadium in ensuing years that by the end of his tenure in Philadelphia, Allen had taken to scratching messages during the game—such as the word “boo”—in the infield dirt with his spikes.12 Jackie Robinson and the magical date of 1947 seem to have long passed by the time Allen cracked the majors, but the key to his bitter experience in the 1960s lies precisely in how little had happened in the intervening years. When one thinks of baseball’s falling racial barriers, the players who come to mind in addition to Robinson are people like Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin, a generation born in the teens and twenties, who came of age in the forties and played in the Negro
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Leagues before entering the newly integrated majors directly on the heels of Branch Rickey’s “great experiment” in Brooklyn. The intervening glory years make it hard enough to recall that Willie Mays and Hank Aaron played their first pro ball in the Negro Leagues (Mays with the Birmingham Black Barons, Aaron with the Indianapolis Clowns); but even the players slightly younger than they—players with no Negro League experience at all—spent the early part of their careers in a baseball environment no less white and no less hostile than Jackie Robinson’s Ebbets Field. Hank Aaron himself refers to them as “second generation black players,” though 1.5 generation would be more accurate—Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Bill White, Orlando Cepeda, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Lou Brock. Though associated with the 1960s and a baseball era far removed from the Jackie Robinson moment, “most of them came through the minor leagues in the 1950s, and almost all of them had their own horror stories.”13 In October 1964, David Halberstam writes of this generation, If they were not the black players of the pioneer generation, they had come up right behind them: most had grown up in ghettos, and their way into the big leagues had been difficult, often through a still-segregated minor-league system. This obstacle course remained the foundation of big-league baseball, and it was rife with prejudice. Playing on minor-league teams in tiny Southern towns meant the crowds—even the home crowds—were usually hostile. Worse, most of their fellow players were rural country white boys, who, more often than not, seemed to accept the local mores.14
“I didn’t know anything about racism or bigotry until I went into professional baseball in 1953,” writes Frank Robinson, who grew up in West Oakland and whose initiation in the taunts of “Nigger, go back to Africa” came in Sally League towns like Augusta, Macon, and Savannah.15 As Dock Ellis—ten years younger still than Robinson—put it, “You learn more than baseball in the minor leagues.” For his own part, Ellis recalls going into the stands in a game against the Geneva Senators, swinging a leaded bat at a fan who had called him Stepin Fetchit, or standing defiantly on the mound, middle finger extended to a hostile crowd, after striking out the last batter in a game in Wilson, North Carolina.16 Such incidents—Aaron’s racial “horror stories”—punctuate the biographies of virtually every player of the 1.5 generation. Bill White spent 1953 as the only black player in the Class-B Carolina League, serving, in Halberstam’s words, as “a kind of beacon to local rednecks, who would come out to the ballpark and, for a tiny amount of money, yell at this one young black player, who symbolized to them a world beginning to change.” He sometimes carried a bat with him as he left the clubhouse, according to Bob
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Gibson, in order “to get through the hostile crowds that stood between him and the team bus.”17 Aaron and Wes Covington broke the color barrier up north in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (Aaron: “We didn’t exactly blend in”; Covington: “I felt like a sideshow freak”) before Aaron was sent to the Jacksonville Braves to break the color line in the Sally League.18 The president of the Sally League, Dick Butler, later claimed to have “followed Jacksonville and sat in the stands to keep a lookout. You were never sure what was going to happen. Those people had awfully strong feelings about what was going on.”19 John Roseboro endured taunts of “chocolate drop” in Sheboygan; Felipe Alou was barred from the Evangeline League because of Louisiana segregation statutes (and shipped instead to the more hospitable Cocoa Indians of the Florida State League, “a class D menagerie”).20 In Fayette, North Carolina, Curt Flood “heard spluttering gasps, ‘There’s a goddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with those white boys! I’m leaving’”; and in Greensboro, Leon Wagner faced an armed fan by the outfield fence, issuing a warning, “Nigger, I’m going to fill you with shot if you catch one ball out there.” “What kind of country is this?” Vic Power wanted to know, upon confronting racial mores so different from those that obtained in his native Puerto Rico.21 Even after they had safely reached the majors, far from the redneck sneers of the Sally League circuit, most of the 1.5 generation had to negotiate the southern racial climate and the segregated facilities of Florida sites like Bradenton, Vero Beach, Clearwater, or Tampa during the months of spring training. Most also had to deal with some element of segregation in their team’s travel, lodging, rooming, or eating arrangements in cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati during the regular season; many, like Reggie Smith, had epithets and more dangerous objects hurled at them at one time or another, even by the “fans” in their home ballparks. Some joined major league teams that were themselves deeply divided by race. Gibson and White broke into the majors playing for an overtly racist manager named Solly Hemus: “either he disliked us deeply or he genuinely believed that the only way to motivate us was with insults,” remembers Gibson. During one clubhouse meeting, in the presence of the full team, Hemus referred to an opposing pitcher as a “nigger.” Orlando Cepeda, for his part, attributes the perennial also-ran fortunes of the Giants during the early ’60s to the breakdown of team feeling along ethnoracial lines. (Among other things, though his lineup featured Cepeda, all three Alou brothers, Jose Pagan, and Juan Marichal, manager Alvin Dark tried to ban the Spanish language in the clubhouse. Dark— who, ironically, had grown up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the very town that barred Felipe Alou—also openly questioned the “mental alertness” of his “Negro and Spanish-speaking players.”)22
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Dick Allen drew a cruel hand, even by the standards of such a deck: after brief stints in Elmira (New York), Magic Valley (Utah), and Williamsport (Pennsylvania), in 1963 and at the age of only 20, Allen landed with the Arkansas Travelers, the Phillies’ AAA team whose home park was in Little Rock (of Central High fame) and whose lineup had, to that point, been white only. (As Lou Brock, who had been born there, liked to say, Arkansas was indeed “the land of opportunity”—at the very first opportunity he had gotten the hell out.23) “When I arrived at the park,” Allen recalls, “ . . . there were people marching around with signs. One said, DON’T NEGRO-IZE BASEBALL. Another, NIGGER GO HOME. . . . Here, in my mind, I thought Jackie Robinson had Negro-ized baseball sixteen years earlier.” As if to underscore the militant whiteness of this white world, the season’s festivities began with the ceremonial throwing out of the first pitch by Governor Orval Faubus. Afterward Allen found a note on the windshield of his car: “DON’T COME BACK AGAIN, NIGGER.” “There might be something more terrifying than being black and holding a note that says ‘Nigger’ in an empty parking lot in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1963,” Allen comments, “but if there is, it hasn’t crossed my path yet.” That AAA season was filled with this sort of menace and danger; and it was also exceptionally isolating, as off the field Allen was removed from the rest of the team by the maze of segregationist civic codes and social rituals of pre-Civil Rights Act Little Rock.24 This was perhaps the beginning of bad blood between Allen and both the Phillies’ white officialdom and Philadelphia’s white press. For one thing, Allen felt that he was ready for the majors already (his nine spring-training home runs in 1963 seemed to argue in his favor), and he saw himself as a sacrificial lamb to the organization’s imperative to desegregate its farm system. This might have been workable if, for another thing, the Phillies had handled Allen’s situation with some of the forethought and sensitivity that the Dodgers had shown Jackie Robinson. But the organization was quite calloused in its general disinterest in Allen’s Arkansas experience. As Ebony wryly noted in 1970, “During [the] 1963 season with Philadelphia’s minor league team in Little Rock, . . . he complained about racial injustice (Philly writers say they found no prejudice there).”25 Most telling, perhaps, was Arkansas manager Frank Lucchesi’s nonchalance toward the social burden that Allen was made to carry that season: “Richie was upset one night because one person said, ‘Come on, Chocolate Drop, hit one out. . . . That’s not in taste but the fan didn’t realize it. They say worse things to white ballplayers. Richie is sensitive and he is self-centered.”26 And so, one might have thought, the trip north to Philadelphia the following year would be an improvement. But Philadelphia baseball had a fairly spectacular history of racism of its own: though Connie Mack had
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tried to smuggle talented black players into Shibe Park as Italians or Indians earlier in the century, the Philadelphia stadium—like the Phillies lineup—remained the most stubbornly anti-integrationist in the National League. The black press of the 1940s reported that Mack himself was among the owners “most bitterly” opposed to integration; and according to historian Bruce Kuklick, when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, “the cruelest taunts he received at Ebbets Field came from the visiting Phillies. . . .” As for Brooklyn’s visits to Shibe Park, Phillies GM Herb Pennock pleaded with Branch Rickey not to bring Robinson at all: “Branch, you can’t bring the nigger here. Philadelphia’s not ready for that yet.” When Robinson did turn up in Philadelphia, pitchers threw at him, infielders purposely spiked him, and Phillies players once lined up on the dugout steps, pointing their bats at him and making gunshot sounds. By the mid-1950s, the Phillies were the only remaining all-white team in the National League; and even after the team finally did integrate, it remained among the last major league teams to end segregated housing during spring training.27 Over and above the racialized traditions of Philadelphia baseball, the city itself was entering a heated and dangerous period in black-white relations—it was a “racial tinderbox,” as the head of the city’s Urban League described it.28 In 1964 Allen arrived in a Philadelphia wracked by racial violence over issues of job discrimination, housing, school segregation, and police brutality, and in which an aggressive (and aggressively white) former beat cop named Frank Rizzo was rising rapidly through the ranks toward the commissioner’s office, which he attained in 1967.29 (Faubus and Rizzo: two-thirds of some weird, depressing hat trick. Later Allen worked for Al Campanis.) There had been violent clashes over the integration of Philadelphia construction in 1963; and in August 1964, during Allen’s rookie season, three days of rioting engulfed a 125-block area of Lower North Philadelphia, one boundary of which was marked by Connie Mack Stadium. Players had to pass through a “police state” to get to the ballpark during those days. One black resident lamented, “The only thing I regret about the riot . . . was that we didn’t burn down that goddamn stadium. They had it surrounded by cops, and we couldn’t get to it. I just wish we could’ve burned it down and wiped away its history that tells me I’m nothing but a nigger.” Two died and 339 were injured in the rioting.30 Although Philadelphia fans might indeed “boo the losers in an Easter egg hunt,” as Bob Uecker once quipped, and even white outfielder Johnny Callison had objects thrown at him, still these fans found a very special—vitriolic—place in their hearts for the new arrival from the Arkansas Travelers. Even his Rookie of the Year stats (.318, 29 HR, 91 RBI) were not enough to shield Allen from the tense, racial hatreds of
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mid-’60s Philadelphia.31 Fan animosity toward Allen seems a compound of garden variety racism; scapegoating for the Phillies’ 1964 tailspin; venting on the larger race questions facing the city; and a misapprehending response, as Sports Illustrated noted, to Allen’s expressionless playing style, which to many whites made him look “arrogant.” (Manager Gene Mauch’s more generous observation of Allen’s demeanor was that “He doesn’t get way up when things are going good, or way down when things are going bad. And that’s the best approach to any professional sport.”) All of which was further fueled by “some of the harshest press in the city’s sports history.”32 Allen was in fact booed for the first time in the fifth inning of the Phils’ home opener in 1964, and he was booed plenty as the Phillies squandered their six and a half game lead in the final 12 games of that season. But the mutual bitterness began in earnest the next season, in July 1965, when a pregame fight between Allen and Philadelphia favorite Frank Thomas resulted in Thomas’ departure from the Phillies.33 The fight, by most accounts, was itself “racial.” Thomas was already well-known among his teammates for his derisive comments toward Allen, Johnny Briggs, and other black players. One thing that particularly enraged Allen was when Thomas would approach a black player, pretending “to offer his hand in a soul shake,” and then “grab the player’s thumb and bend it back hard.”34 On the day of the fight, Johnny Callison was razzing Thomas for a failed bunt attempt the night before, but Thomas chose to answer Allen instead of Callison. He taunted Allen as “Muhammad Clay,” by some accounts, and “Richie X” by others—taunts that in either case Allen answered with a pop to the jaw before Thomas broke a cardinal baseball rule by swinging his bat at Allen and catching him on the shoulder.35 Teammates pried the two apart, but an ineluctable sequence had already been set in motion: Thomas was immediately sold off to Houston; Allen was forbidden from discussing the incident under penalty of a $2,000 fine; but Thomas, meanwhile, freely fed his (partisan, sanitized) version to the press. Manager Gene Mauch, too, made some rather coy remarks to the press that not only obscured the nature of the incident and Thomas’ part in it, but also left an impression that the Phillies had unfairly and quite knowingly scapegoated the white veteran in deference to Allen’s talent and youth. It was here, most significantly, that the press began to tag Allen as a “troublemaker”—an appellation that would provide a convenient media peg for the rest of his career. “Baseball should never forget the AllenThomas fiasco,” says Bill White. “ . . . When Dick Allen came to the big leagues, he was a kid in love with the game. Baseball was all that mattered. After the Thomas incident, the love was taken right out of him. There’s historical significance in how that was handled.”36
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The result was that Allen came out looking unjustly favored and vaguely militant—a ready-made script for many whites, given the city’s racial climate—and he was directly blamed for the departure of a popular (white) player. Banners announcing fans’ unambiguous preferences— such as “We Want Thomas”—bedecked Connie Mack Stadium; Daily News writer Larry Merchant embarked on an anti-Allen crusade in print; one fan “sucker punched” Allen; others at the park jeered him as “darkie” and “monkey” (when he wasn’t hitting game-winning home runs), and Allen recalls seeing one father pointing at him and teaching his little boy how to boo. It was soon after, too, that people started to throw things at Allen, to vandalize his home, and to harass his family. Across the balance of the 1960s, Allen was “booed mercilessly,” as Newsweek reported, and he received “hate mail . . . so brutal that he now refuses to open anything that looks like fan mail”; “people smeared paint on his car, threw rocks and shot BBs through his windows and booed his children on the street.”37 As the Daily News once reported in 1967, after Allen’s heroics had dispatched the Cubs, “He should have been grinning and content in the knowledge that his three-run homer in the twelfth inning won a game for the Phillies. But it is tough to grin when you come to the ballpark and there are letters calling you ‘Dirty, Black Nigger.’” It was after this particular game that Allen started speaking openly about wanting out of Philadelphia.38 The Thomas incident may have marked a turning point for Allen and the city, but it was scarcely the only factor in that souring relationship. As Don Malcolm suggests, the “Angry Negro Problem”—a thematic convention for writing about a certain kind of athlete, from Dick Allen to Gary Sheffield—derives not only from the fact that “white Americans still are manifestly uncomfortable with demonstrative black males,” but also, significantly, that they are “probably most uncomfortable with the ones who are making piles of dough.”39 (As for a bit of context on “angry Negroes”: five weeks after the Thomas incident, the Phillies landed in Los Angeles just in time to witness the flames of the Watts riot.40) Dick Allen, emphatically, was not utterly unappreciated by the baseball world, and this, paradoxically, may have fueled the animosity against him in some quarters. Philadelphia had signed him for a cool $70,000 bonus, the largest ever offered a black ballplayer. Later, Allen became the highestpaid player on the Phillies (and in 1973, upon signing with the White Sox for a quarter of a million dollars, he was to become the highest-paid player in Major League history to that point). “His salary has risen faster than anyone’s ever did before,” remarked Newsweek in 1968. “ . . . And his popularity has plummeted just as fast.”41 In the calculus of Philadelphia race relations—and of the nation’s—these two developments may have
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been intimately entwined. It is not just a case of a Negro’s earnings demolishing the white presumption of what would be fitting; it is also a matter of social demeanor—the white insistence upon “appropriate” black gratitude, which is to say a bit of the old-fashioned, hat-in-hand bowing and scraping. But as Sports Illustrated commented, on the contrary, Allen was “the first black man . . . to assert himself in baseball with something like the unaccommodating force of Muhammad Ali in boxing, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in basketball, and Jim Brown in football.”42 As the economics of the game shifted in the late 1960s, too, there was the volatile matter of the sheer power attaching to a player’s contract: many among the white press and white fandom were troubled that the Phillies organization found even Allen’s white managers (first Mauch, and then Bob Skinner) more readily expendable than this black star, impetuous though he was. As Jim Bouton had it in Ball Four, “There is a pecking order in the major leagues which goes like this: owner, general manager, superstar, manager, established player, coaches, traveling secretary, trainer, clubhouse man, marginal player.”43 Black superstar over white manager—this was a problem for many white fans in the 1960s. And while much discussion of race in baseball has focused on the suspicious paucity of black managers and team executives, the “problem” of the black super star—the tension between the racial hierarchy of the culture and the natural pecking order of the team—has been the cause of much devilment as well. Within this alchemic mingling of circumstance, ideology, personality, and history, the media developed an iron framework for reporting on Allen’s career both on and off the field: Allen was militant, a malcontent, a troublemaker, a black radical. Allen was not entirely blameless for the volume of available copy, it should be noted; but the “bad boy of baseball” label did create a media peg for stories that might have attracted no attention at all in the case of other players, black or white. (Indeed, the shock and scandal of a book like Bouton’s Ball Four in 1970—what Bowie Kuhn called Bouton’s “grave disservice” to the game—was precisely its demonstration that the game was made up pretty much exclusively of swearing, hard-drinking, tobacco-addicted, amphetamine-popping, bed-hopping, window-peeping bad boys.44) But for Allen and seemingly for Allen alone, a steady litany of well-publicized “transgressions” mounted throughout the ’60s: the Thomas incident in 1965; a freak, off-field hand injury in 1967, broadly but baselessly presumed to be the result of either a barroom knifefight or perhaps a run-in with a lover’s husband; an actual barroom brawl in 1968 (which, like the Thomas incident, began with a racial slur); and also in 1968 a few missed days of spring training, an instance of reporting late to the ballpark, and his benching by Mauch for being “unfit to play” (Allen’s trouble, Mauch said, was not with “the high fastball,” but rather
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“the fast highball”); and in 1969, income tax problems, a missed plane to St. Louis, and a missed double-header at Shea.45 Where silence on such matters was the journalistic norm in this cookies-and-milk era of sports coverage (Mickey Mantle was not averse to showing up at the park “unfit to play,” either, for instance, as we later learned and as the press corps had surely known at the time), Allen’s every move seemed to generate acres of copy. “You fellas have created an atmosphere where people who have never met me, hate me,” he told reporters. Later he commented, “Even if they gave me an opportunity to tell all of my side of the story, I wouldn’t take it because I just don’t trust the white press in general.”46 If Allen was a perpetual story, race and racism were never an acknowledged part of that story. But the “race neutral” language of the white press makes for some interesting reading: Allen “marches to a mournful tune that only he hears, moving with an insolent grace,” for example, according to the Philadelphia Daily News; though one might fairly ask whether it is even possible for a white man, in America’s media cosmos, to “move with insolent grace.” Further, Richie Allen is “a superstar with a built-in distaste for discipline” (New York Times); he is “a player of enormous talents and mercurial moods” who is “known less for his awesome batting power than for his drinking, horseplaying and habitual tardiness” (Newsweek); “a man who hits a baseball even harder than he hits the bottle,” a “wondrously gifted misanthrope,” the “chain-smoking, harddrinking, horseplaying, perpetually late bad boy of the 1960s” (Sports Illustrated).47 So infamous did Allen’s movements become, that at the AllStar Game in 1969 President Nixon sent a personal message through Allen’s teammate Grant Jackson: “You tell Richie Allen to get back on the job.” By that same year—his last in Philadelphia, as it turned out—Allen had begun to “wish they’d shut the gates . . . and let us play ball with no press and no fans.”48 The contrast with the black press could not have been starker. In 1968, at the height of his most controversial season and amid a thorough raking in the white media, for instance, a photo gallery in the Afro-American lovingly depicted Allen as a devoted family man (“$85,000 dad plays mom at Phils’ ballpark. Richie Allen baby-sits with son between Sunday pitches”).49 After the St. Louis trade in 1970, Ebony directly took up the matter of the white press’s racism, as “the questions continue[d]” regarding Allen: people ought to “question the questioners,” the black journal protested. To question Allen “presupposes that Richie is guilty of all the bad things written about him. . . . Most of the people who hate or love Richie do so on the basis of what they’ve heard or what they’ve read in the white press.” The whiteness of the press, in this equation, was as inescapably significant as the blackness of the ballplayer: “Richie Allen is black and he’s proud and
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he has the gumption to be a proud, black man in one of America’s most conservative sports. He sprouts a lush Afro that’s anchored with long and wide sideburns”—“his natural and long wide sideburns were targets of white criticism in Philly for six years.” After pointing out that Allen was known to read the Bible with some regularity, and that one of his infamous missed games had to do with his son’s illness, Ebony argued that “Richie’s stands on baseball’s controversial issues and the fact he’s black” were what marked him as a “radical.” “Basically, he’s just a ‘regular brother,’ hipped with all the jive-time routines of coolness, arrogance and a happy-go-lucky attitude.”50 His were, indeed, the Afro and the pork chop sideburns with which Sports Illustrated would choose to illustrate its cover story on “Baseball in Turmoil” in the spring of the Allen-Flood-McCarver trade. Although Allen did hold out for more money from St. Louis, it is true, the “turmoil” had mostly to do, not with him—“I’ll play anywhere: third, short, anywhere but Philadelphia”—but with Curt Flood, who had refused to report at all. The word “turmoil” itself, in fact, came from an exasperated Gussie Busch, the Cardinals owner: “I can’t understand Curt Flood . . . or the Allen case . . . we are going through a hell of a turmoil right now.” Though Busch was having his problems with the Steve Carlton contract, too, the turmoil seemed to him largely racial, apparently, and also connected to the broader social currents of 1960s America: “I can’t understand what’s happening here or on our campuses or in our great country.”51 Flood’s protest was, in fact, “racial,” even if it was Allen who more looked the part in SI’s estimation. For one thing, Flood was not eager to go to Philadelphia, “the nation’s northernmost southern city,” as he put it, “ . . . to succeed Richie Allen in the affections of that organization, its press and its catcalling missile-hurling audience.”52 And for another, as many have remarked over the years, given the bondage and emancipation motifs of the legalities involved, it was perhaps inevitable that a black ballplayer would be the first to challenge Major League Baseball’s reserve clause and seek free agency. Flood himself begins his autobiography, The Way It Is (1970), with an epigraph from his brother Carl: “Pharaoh, you better let them chillun go, honey.” Later, noting that “the word slavery has arisen in connection with my lawsuit” (and conceding sardonically that “the condition of the major-league baseball player is closer to peonage than to slavery”), Flood appeals to the language of a 1949 court decision in the case of the Giants’ Danny Gardella: “Only the totalitarian-minded will believe that high pay excuses virtual slavery.”53 The reserve clause/slavery analogy was neither casual nor incidental, in Flood’s view: “Frederick Douglass was a Maryland slave who taught himself to read. ‘If there is no struggle,’ he once said, ‘there is no progress. Those who profess
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to love freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.’” To see the Curt Flood case in that light is to see its entire meaning.54 Elsewhere, Bob Gibson quoted Flood as likening a franchise owner’s powers “to a plantation owner, allowing his players to play for him in the same way that the plantation owner allowed the sharecropper to work his land while at the same time keeping him deep in debt and constantly beholden.” The slavery analogy was also clearly among the things that Gibson had in mind when, during the spring of the Flood-Allen trade, in dark jest he hung a sign above his locker, “Another happy family sold.”55 Sportswriter Sandy Grady was tacitly acknowledging the racialized dimension of Allen’s experience—not with the reserve clause, necessarily, but with the hatreds and disparagements of “The City of Brotherly Love”— when he wrote of St. Louis GM Bing Devine’s having “emancipated” Allen. (In typical white press fashion, however, he also suggested that Devine had “emancipated” Philadelphia from Allen.)56 And Allen, for his part, drew from the same lexicon: “You don’t know how good it feels to get out of Philadelphia. They treat you like cattle. It was like a form of slavery. Once you step out of bounds they’ll do everything possible to destroy your soul.” “Skinner once said he could handle me,” Allen later remarked, “ . . . Well you don’t handle human beings, you treat them. You handle horses.”57 Curt Flood might have said that; so might Frederick Douglass. Allen headed into a slightly new era upon his departure from Philadelphia; fans never again vented the kind of hatred that Allen had seen in Connie Mack Stadium in the 1960s. Lee Vilensky’s beautiful “Ode to Dick Allen” vividly captures the death grip that Allen and the white racists of Philadelphia had on one another during those years. Recalling his first ever visit to Connie Mack Stadium as an eight-year-old in 1965, Vilensky writes of the “batteries, bottles, paperweights” that were hurled in Allen’s direction, and the “nigger, nigger, nigger” and “fuckin’ nigger, nigger” that swirled around the stands. I guess it was about the seventh inning when Richie came up for his third at bat. I don’t recall what he had done in his two previous at bats, but the chanting started anew. “Nigger.” “Big mouth nigger.” “Fuckin’ nigger.” “Go back to Africa, Nigger.” Yes, someone actually yelled that. . . . [S]uddenly there was a crack of the bat as Richie Allen crushed a line drive over our heads. I turned around just in time to watch the ball bounce off a little eave above the top of the grandstand, then go completely out of the stadium. A shot of more than five hundred feet in distance. Not a high, arcing, majestic
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home run, but a cold, vicious, angry drubbing of the ball. A loud slap. The power of it scared me. It made people quiet. Took all their air like a punch to the gut. As Richie touched home plate, the man next to me said to no one in particular: “Fuckin’ nigger can hit.”58
2. Boulder Dick Allen and biographer Tim Whitaker stand on the diamond where decades before the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro Leagues had played, directly across from the vacant lot where Allen’s boyhood home once stood. “Imaginary baseball,” says Allen. “It’s the purest version of the game.” Allen tugs at his shirt sleeves and pushes his cowboy hat down on top of his head, mimicking the same routine he went through whenever he stepped to the plate against major league pitching. He takes a few practice swings with his imaginary bat. Between his feet, Allen has formed a pile of stones with his boots. He picks up one of the stones, tosses it in the air, and takes a swing with his imaginary bat. “As a kid, I used to stand right here,” he tells me, “with a broomstick in my hands. When I played imaginary ball, I was always the Dodgers. I would bat stones and work my way through the Dodger lineup—Reese, Furillo, Snider, Hodges—waiting, just waiting, for his turn to come around.” Allen pauses dramatically, then cups his hands to his mouth. “Now battting,” he says, imitating the stadium echo of a public address announcer. “For the Brook-lyn Dod-gers . . . num-ber four-tee-two . . .” Dick Allen reaches down and picks up another pebble. “The Jackie Robinson stone,” he says, tossing the pebble in the air and catching it, “was always the one that broke a window.”59
When I was growing up there must have been millions of us who were right with Allen on this: that real players played real games in real stadiums was just a necessary evil so that the much purer game of imaginary baseball could take place, in lots and yards across North America, especially in the pregnant hours after dinner, as dusk edged into darkness. This scene describes much of my own childhood, though for me the Richie Allen stone was the window-breaker. (Well, our developing suburban neighborhood was still rural enough, the distances still great enough, that no windows were ever really in danger. Besides, I couldn’t hit that well. But one time when I was about nine, pretending to be Juan Marichal, pitching off the side of our brick garage and mowing down the hitters 1–2–3 through the
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innings—a real gem—in the top of the eighth I couldn’t resist giving up a home run to Richie Allen. Num-ber fiff-teeen. In my effort to recreate one of those awesome shots that cause opposing fielders immediately to slack their bodies and look skyward in resignation, I threw the ball too high against the wall, breaking the narrow pane of glass that ran the length of the garage just beneath the awning. Later, when my dad asked me if I knew anything about the broken window, I came this close to telling him Richie Allen did it.) Why Allen would have idolized Jackie Robinson is pretty obvious, but how did I come to idolize Allen? I had the 1965 Topps trading card of Allen—the Phillies flag in one corner, the little Rookie of the Year statuette in the other—but my real introduction to him was a hero-worshipping book for kids, Great Rookies of the Major Leagues by Jim Brosnan. The chapter on Allen was enough to make a huge impression on an eight-year-old, but it was not exactly calculated to do so: for example, it included Philadelphia owner Bob Carpenter’s judgment, “Allen was the worst-looking infielder I ever saw. I thought he’d be killed by a ground ball.” This piece of baseball hagiography also featured a four-panel sequence of photographs depicting Allen letting a grounder pass between his legs. (The caption reads, “Allen’s uncertain fielding sometimes offsets his great hitting. Here he reaches for a sharp grounder, searches for the ball and then turns to watch it roll into the outfield. A Braves runner . . . passes Allen to score on the play.”)60 When I was given the book as a gift (in 1966, I believe—the year of its publication), I adopted Allen as my hero at once. It may have been because I was enthralled by his appearance: the chapter itself goes into great detail on his powerful physique, and there is nothing in the photos of Roy Sievers, Herb Score, Frank Robinson, Tom Tresh, or Pete Rose that begins to compare with the pure poetry of form in some of the Allen photos—I see it this way even still. Or, it may have been because I identified with his muchdiscussed weakness as a fielder, and took special heart in the story of a player who was able to overcome his own limitations. If I were going to become a major leaguer (and who could doubt it?), my own path to glory would surely be strewn with similar obstacles, not to mention the qualms and denunciations of people like Bob Carpenter. Or it may have been that, as the fat kid with thick glasses whom everyone made fun of, I gravitated naturally toward the one figure in the book who was clearly being picked on. (“He . . . turns to watch it roll into the outfield.” It might have been a few more years before I could articulate this, but even at age eight I felt some version of hey, what the fuck, man?) Within two years—1968—when I was three seasons into my Richie Allen worship and Allen himself was getting more and more press for his off-field behavior, I understood exactly
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what it was that I was seeing. This was my education in U.S. race relations. In a 1970s routine about visiting Africa, Richard Pryor talks about meeting people who are “so black” that it makes you want to say—and here he drops his voice to an awed whisper—“BLACK.” My neighborhood growing up was a lot like that, except in white. It was not the militant whiteness of South Boston (or Connie Mack Stadium); it was not even the least bit self-conscious. On the contrary, the neighborhood was so white as to suggest and naturalize the idea that people of color did not exist at all. Which is just to say, whatever I learned about racialized relations before going away to college in 1977, I certainly did not learn by firsthand encounters. (Nearby Denver, ironically, was the AAA locale where the Minnesota Twins banished black players as punishment for dating white women.61) There is a longer-term history that is relevant here, because I did grow up in a liberal household in which civil rights sympathies were never in question. Since my father is a New York Jew, naturally we used to listen to Mahalia Jackson every year when we decorated the Christmas tree. He had grown up in the Bronx in the 1930s, and at age thirteen, the year he was not bar mitzvahed, he somehow discovered Harlem and jazz. Though his was probably not the kind of childhood that encouraged much fellow feeling with “the shvartzes” (to judge from my grandmother’s social outlook), from those early jam sessions onward, his glimpses of Harlem and his captivation by the black aesthetic of the jazz scene translated into a very particular social sensibility—a whole way of perceiving and understanding the human virtues and various political categories like “decency.” This he tried to pass on to us, along with an appreciation for Louis Armstrong. My mother, on the other hand, is a white Ohio Methodist, and her Tipp City upbringing could not have been much less white—or “WHITE”—than my own. But as theirs was what was called a “mixed marriage,” both of my parents had some experience with prejudice—their parents’, for example. And so, with the Civil Rights movement rumbling in the distance throughout my childhood, and my parents’ attention to questions of “difference” and justice remaining fairly salient, racial matters were not as far removed from my immediate experience as the demographics of my town would imply. I remember my father trying to explain the logic of King’s “passive resistance” to me at a time when, as a political philosopher, I was probably too young for anything beyond “impulsive vengeance.” My sisters and I got the liberal lecture on the stupidities of prejudice on the ride to Denver to see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. A bit later, it became a point of bedrock principle in our household that of course one would support the Broncos’ Marlin Briscoe in his bid to become the NFL’s first black
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quarterback. (“He’s not all that good,” my best friend’s father said, “he’s just all that black.” The opinion was offered up too gruffly not to be suspect, even to a ten-year-old.) But what strikes me in retrospect is how indirect my political education was, for the most part. Straight talk like the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner lecture was the exception, not the norm, as was my fourth-grade teacher Miss Harms’ very interesting prediction of racial retribution in the wake of the King assassination. When I think closely, I recognize that at the time I did not actually see much—or any—of the Civil Rights imagery that now occupies my “memory” of the era—Bull Connor’s German Shepherds and fire hoses, the flames at Ole Miss, even the “I Have a Dream” speech. The balcony of that Memphis hotel I think I did see for myself on TV in 1968; but most of the rest of it is later documentary footage, not actual memory. My teaching has been animated by Stuart Hall’s dictum that social subjects “are unable to speak, to act in one way or another, until they have been positioned by the work that culture does.” It is culture above all that outfits us to behave politically in certain ways and not in others—culture is politics by other means.62 But rarely have I asked the question: If I was just coming to consciousness during the Civil Rights years, what was I learning and how was I taking it in? America’s liberal culture was undoubtedly teaching a lot, though it may not always have been teaching liberality. The most potent message of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for instance, does not involve our common humanity across the color line, but rather a natural submission to the authority of the Great White Father (in this case Spencer Tracy): ultimately nobody can make a move without his approval. Shows like Love American Style and Barefoot in the Park taught that black is indeed beautiful—as long as it’s almost white. The affable Johnny Carson taught that candor is hip and that racist stereotypes can be funny—as when he joked that there could never be a black quarterback because there were not seven white guys who would turn their backs on him at the line of scrimmage, “especially during a night game.” On the other hand, anti-authoritarianism was occupying an increasingly significant place in the dominant culture—I think of Cat Ballou, Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, and a host of other films from my childhood in which bad guys were the good guys and good guys were the bad guys. Perhaps this strain in the culture outfitted me with a useful skepticism toward the media’s own claims regarding the badness of the black radical; perhaps it was this strain that equipped me to sympathize with a bad boy like Richie Allen, doing battle with “the man” in the white front office and the white press. How far is it from the unorthodox authoritarianism of The Mod Squad to the unorthodox anti-
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authoritarianism—consciously “raced” or not—of Richie Allen, Cookie Gilchrist, the Smothers Brothers, Jim Bouton? During these years—confusing enough even for many adults, I am sure— baseball addressed my childhood confusions in a pre-verbal but nonetheless poetic and incandescent language. (By “baseball,” I mean the whole cosmos—the games themselves, the lineups, the sports page, the fan reactions, the hypnotizing photographs, the piles of adoring books, the Topps cards, the on- and off-field lore in Sport, Sporting News, Sports Illustrated.) “I can’t say it was because of the bombs and the Bull Connors that black players tore up the National League in 1963,” writes Hank Aaron, “but I can’t say it wasn’t either.”63 On a particularly fierce streak in the summer of 1968, Bob Gibson, too, writes: “I really can’t say, in retrospect, whether Robert Kennedy’s assassination is what got me going or not. Without a doubt, it was an angry point in American history for black people—Dr. King’s killing had jolted me; Kennedy’s infuriated me—and without a doubt, I pitched better angry. I suspect that the control of my slider had more to do with it than anything, but I can’t completely dismiss the fact that nobody gave me any shit whatsoever for about two months after Bobby Kennedy died.”64 Aaron and Gibson might rightly have claimed the whole decade for black dominance, not just the isolated moments of 1963 and 1968. (Take the offensive statistic for total bases, the most dramatic instance: from 1960 to 1969 white players made it into the National League’s top three exactly once—Pete Rose was third in 1968. Aaron, Banks, Mays, Cepeda, Robinson, Pinson, Allen, Williams, Alou, Clemente, Brock, McCovey, and Perez account for the other twenty-nine top-three finishes.65) But in any case, from the suburban picture window of Boulder, Colorado, the ball field and The Movement read as being intimately connected. “Baseball was socially relevant,” wrote Curt Flood, “and so was my rebellion against it.”66 This is a lesson I imbibed fundamentally but wordlessly between 1966 and 1969. The hateful, swirling “nigger, nigger, nigger” that Lee Vilensky heard in Connie Mack Stadium, and Richie Allen’s cold, angry drubbing of the ball in response, was a social drama that was integral, if only implicitly so, to the game-within-the-game of 1960s baseball as I watched it on Game of the Week every Saturday. For one thing, while Gibson, Aaron, Allen, and others may have been playing “angry,” they looked to me, above all else, to be simply serious; and the regular access that baseball afforded to African American seriousness was no small thing. The seriousness of King and the historic moment came across in the chatter and hum of the adult world around me and in headlines to stories that I knew vaguely about but did not exactly read. People like Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll also made an impression. But baseball occupied my mind 162 days of the year; and unique among the major
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sports, baseball games unfolded at a contemplative pace that was well-suited to conveying the force of an athlete’s character—neither concealing it behind the armor of the NFL nor blurring it in the flying speed of the NBA. “Quiet dignity” is almost certainly a racist construction—or at least a racialized one—as the phrase never appears in connection with white people, I notice; and it probably dates from a period when “quiet,” from Negroes, was especially prized in U.S. culture. But nonetheless, something like “quiet dignity” is a part of what the 1.5 generation of black stars communicated to me, at once a contrast and an antidote to the vapid dronings-on of play-by-play announcers like Curt Gowdy and Joe Garagiola; and the “dignity” in the equation tended to keep their “quiet” from coming across as anything like accommodation. The intensity of concentration—the intensity of mind—evident in the expressions and small rituals of Gibson on the mound, Flood or Robinson at the plate, silently but decisively dismantled any facile cracker assertions about the brutish capacities of “the Negro.” That Solly Hemus or the white fans in various Sally League locations had either failed to acknowledge this, or, perhaps, had not allowed themselves to see it in the first place, just goes to show how desperate they were. But if baseball held the power to dislodge the slanders of racism, so did it have a tendency to generate some slanders of its own—the denigrating trope of the black athlete’s “natural gift” is only one among many. “Hanging around baseball, as I have been doing,” wrote Donald Hall in the 1970s, “I don’t see racism in management, in coaching, or in the front office. Reading the newspapers of Detroit and Chicago and Boston and New York, I see it every day.” The list of the “Most Unpopular Sports Figures, in the last decade or two,” he points out, “is largely black”—a younger Muhammad Ali, Duane Thomas, Dick Allen, Alex Johnson.67 This is where Allen was so significant to me, not just as a personal idol but as a social emblem: the dissonance between what I felt about Allen and what the press reported about him became so taut as to snap my youthful ingenuousness, because to me Allen was clearly a figure of dignity, too, no less than Gibson or Aaron or Brock or Clemente. I was too young by about one season to catch and appreciate the Frank Thomas incident and Allen’s initial falling-out with the press; but it was a stunning and deflating lesson to me when, in 1967, the media so openly questioned Allen’s “claim” to have injured his hand while pushing his car, and when in 1968 and 1969, they so openly denounced him—not just as an outlier (on the order, say, of Jay Johnstone)—but as someone uncontrolled and uncontrollable, a kind of pre-criminal, when he missed a plane to St. Louis or showed up late to Shea. In his paean to Allen, “Letters in the Dirt,” folksinger Chuck Brodsky—another white kid of almost exactly
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my vintage—reflects upon the racial dimension, as he saw it, in Allen’s treatment by the fans and by the press: “He stood a bit outside the lines which / made him fair game for those times / Richie Allen never kissed / a white man’s ass.”68 This is precisely the conclusion I came to myself, sometime around the age of ten. Hindsight, of course, clarifies some things but hopelessly clouds others. Knowing what I now do about the 1960s, about racism, about the Movement, and about Allen himself, can I recover with any certainty the Richie Allen who occupied my imagination in 1970, when the Cardinals’ road schedule and my family’s summer vacation intersected for a moment at a day game in San Diego? Can I see my young self any more clearly than I see Allen? Allen would not answer, or even look up, when I called out to him from behind the Cardinal dugout after infield practice, but I had not expected it to go any differently. I bore him no grudge for ignoring me, nor did it diminish in the least the magic of seeing him in person. Did I see the situation as “racial?” Did I see myself white standing there—another white fan, perhaps, from Allen’s point of view, who might meet his glance with an insult or an AA battery—another white boy who had been taught by some jeering peckerwood how to boo? I believe I did, because for one thing, this was one of the very first times I had ever addressed an African American directly; it is doubtful that I was unaware of my whiteness and his blackness, notwithstanding the era’s liberal bromides on the virtue of being colorblind. And for another thing, even if I did not know his precise thinking on “Whitey’s ways,” I had figured out some things by watching Allen and his career from afar. I understood at least dimly the burden in our exchange; and, rightly or not, in an inarticulate way I felt his rebuff to concern not me, exactly, but the larger web of relationships ensnaring us both. I had entered history, in other words, and this was perhaps the first time in my eleven years that I was aware of it. At least it seems so to me now. (See figures 1.1 and 1.2.) After the ’60s crested and began to recede, the culture was hungry for emblems of reconciliation; the Richie Allen narrative was conveniently pressed into service. Following his bitter years in Philadelphia, and two years of marked underappreciation in St. Louis and Los Angeles, Allen landed in a brief dream sequence with the Chicago White Sox. Not only did he put up the kind of numbers in 1972 that the best of his early years had promised (.308, 37 HR, 113 RBI), but in Comiskey Park he found a welcoming and comfortable home. The difference, according to Allen, was White Sox manager Chuck Tanner: “He’s from home and he’s like a brother.” (The two knew each other from the old days in Pennsylvania— Tanner’s hometown of New Castle is about seven miles from Allen’s Wampum—and they often called each other “Homey,” which perhaps hints at Allen’s intended meaning in the phrase “like a brother.”) Tanner thought
1.1 Allen heads for the dugout after infield practice, ignoring my calls from the stands. Old habits die hard: note that Allen wears a batting helmet in the field, even far removed from the projectiles of Connie Mack Stadium. Photo: Jerry Jacobson
1.2 “Dick Allen and me in San Diego, summer 1970. Allen is the distant figure directly above my left hand. The glasses make me look like Pirate pitcher Bob Veale, don’t you think?” Photo: Jerry Jacobson
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Allen “not only the best player in the American League, but the best in the majors . . . When he’s through with the White Sox, he’s going to walk right into the Hall of Fame.”69 Tanner thought that Chicagoans ought to build a monument to Dick Allen. The manager’s appreciation for Allen transcended baseball by a long way. “He has a magnetism,” said Tanner, “—like Clark Gable, say, or Marilyn Monroe.”70 This is an astonishing thing to say: daring to compare the appeal of a black man to the enchantment of these white icons—and one of them a beauty queen at that—strikes me as more radical in its way than anything Allen ever thought up in defiance of Whitey. This is a world, after all, where black and white ballplayers are rarely compared: even in the cosmos of sports talk today, Griffey might remind people of Mays, for instance, but certainly not of Mantle; and McGwire is said to have hit “with Frank Howard-type power.” Orval Faubus could do no better in segregating our common conceptions of who is “like” whom; and yet Tanner spotted Dick Allen’s similarities to Marilyn Monroe. We probably ought to build a monument to him. From Allen’s White Sox years onward, the baseball establishment fell in love with the story of its own acceptance of Allen, even if it did not quite learn to love the ballplayer himself as Chuck Tanner did. (He never did come near the Hall of Fame, for instance.) But Allen “is a man who marches to his own wry drummer,” reported Sports Illustrated in 1972. “On the day his teammates were going out on strike, Allen signed his 1972 contract.”71 “His own wry drummer” is a far cry from the portrait of the trouble-making militant that had predominated in the coverage of Allen as a Philly. After Chicago, the press began to find something lovably quirky in Allen’s history of unorthodoxies; but more important, the press seemed to find something laudable in its own warming up to Allen: it was as if, in embracing Allen, the white sports establishment could at once prove and celebrate just how far it had come. “He wrote dismissive notes to his general manager in the base-path dirt with his foot!” commented Sports Illustrated in tones of mock scandal in 1973. “What kind of man would do a thing like that? And why didn’t anybody think of it before?”72 Now Allen was “a team player who has bounced around . . . a mentor to the young, a seasoned veteran whom managements have seen as a discipline problem. The more you learn about Allen from outside sources,” remarked Sports Illustrated, “the more he swims before you.” Even the press’s conventional disregard for Allen’s point of view began to shift: as SI now described it, when Allen entered pro ball, “First thing, his name got changed . . . he did not care to be issued a new name by an organization.”73 Dick “Don’t Call Me Richie” Allen suddenly seemed fairly reasonable.
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America’s favorite Dick Allen story is the one about how he got a standing ovation when he returned to the Phillies in 1975. Although he found himself “wondering where all the brothers had gone” as he looked around the Phillies’ new, suburban ballpark, evidently Allen is fond of this one, too. “Things had changed,” he wrote, “ . . . blacks were beginning to run the city. In the old days, I represented a threat to white people in Philadelphia. I wore my hair in an Afro. I said what was on my mind. I didn’t take shit. But now, like the rest of the country, Philadelphia had come around to accepting that things had changed and were going to keep changing, like it or not.”74 The movement, had, after all, accomplished some things; the logic and the accepted idioms of American race consciousness had shifted significantly; the terms of sports celebrity, too, had changed, unorthodoxy taking its place among the new orthodoxies—Jim Bouton, Joe Namath, Rosey Grier, Steve Carlton, Bill Lee. Perhaps Dick Allen had merely been a few years ahead of the curve, and there was no depth to the tragedy of his Philadelphia story after all. Many found it comforting to think so. And yet the reconciliation narrative—the Allen/Philadelphia story, and the national healing for which it is an implied allegory—cannot plow under all the chicken bones, the bolts, and the batteries that rained onto the field in those earlier years in Philadelphia, nor can it wipe from memory Allen’s whimsical sorrow songs, the letters in the dirt. Perhaps this is why the player who had integrated professional baseball in Orval Faubus’ Arkansas and who had later distinguished himself as one of the most powerful hitters in the Major Leagues, expressed elation in 1987—as if finally receiving affirmation—when aging Negro star Cool Papa Bell pronounced that he indeed would have had what it takes to make it in the Negro Leagues. Inverting the conventional storyline of baseball aspiration and fulfillment, a buoyant Allen exclaimed, “He said I could have been one of them. . . . He said I had power and I could run, the two most important requirements in Negro League baseball.” Even he recognized the irony in his being “a big leaguer who felt like he lost out because he never got a chance to play in the Negro Leagues.”75 This is not to paint Allen as a victim of desegregation. But his implied daydream about being “one of them,” a Negro League star, does say a bit about the operations of race in the game, even two decades after Jackie Robinson had broken down the color barrier. “People said there was one set of rules for me and another for the rest of the team,” Allen once said, reflecting on his image as the Phillies’ troublemaker. “When I was coming up, black players couldn’t stay in the same hotel or eat in the same places as whites. Two sets of rules? Baseball set the tone.”76 This is the political lesson that Allen’s career had been teaching all along: desegregation did not come off as advertised.
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Notes 1. Dick Allen and Tim Whitaker, Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), xvii; “Dick Allen,” in BaseballLibrary.Com/ baseballlibrary/ballplayers/A/Allen_Dick.stm; Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 105; William Kashatus, September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 191. 2. “Dick Allen,” in BasballLibrary.Com; Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970; June 12, 1972. 3. John Thorn, Pete Palmer, Michael Gershman, Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball [Seventh Edition] (Kingston, NY: Total Sports, 2001), 158. 4. Hank Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler, I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 334–335. 5. Bob Gibson with Lonnie Wheeler, Stranger to the Game: The Autobiography of Bob Gibson (New York: Viking, 1994), 224. 6. Willie Stargell and Tom Bird, Willie Stargell, an Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 168. 7. New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1989, Sec. 7, 36–37. 8. Ebony, Oct. 1972, 192. 9. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 186. 10. Roger Angell, “Distance” [1980], in Game Time (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 208. 11. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 53. 12. David Wolf, “Let’s Everybody Boo Rich Allen,” Life, Aug. 22, 1969, 50. Folksinger Chuck Brodsky’s “Letters in the Dirt” is a paean to Allen and his infield writing. Baseball Ballads, chuckbrodsky.com, 2002. 13. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 209. See also Jules Tygiel, “Black Ball: The Integrated Game,” in Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska/Bison, 2002), 104–117. Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy [1983] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) remains the standard in the field on the early period of integrated ball. 14. David Halberstam, October ’64 (New York: Fawcett, 1994), 113. 15. Frank Robinson and Barry Stanback, Extra Innings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 23, 26. 16. Donald Hall with Dock Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 123, 128. 17. Halberstam, October ’64, 203; Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 58. 18. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 55, 56. 19. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 79. 20. John Roseboro with Bill Libby, Glory Days with the Dodgers and Other Days with Others (New York: Atheneum, 1978), 54–55; Felipe Alou with Herm Weiskopf, My Life and Baseball (Waco, TX: Word, 1967), 29. (Even
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21.
22.
23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34. 35.
36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
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so, writing in 1967 the highly conservative Alou averred that the urban uprisings were inspired by communist agitators, 103.) Curt Flood with Richard Carter, The Way It Is (New York: Trident, 1971), 38; Samuel Regalado, Viva Baseball! Latin Major Leaguers and Their Special Hunger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 66, 67. Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 52–53; Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92; Hall and Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, 134; Orlando Cepeda with Herb Fagen, Baby Bull: From Hardball to Hard Time and Back (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1998), 74–75; Kashatus, September Swoon, 113; Regalado, Viva Baseball!, 84–87. Halberstam, October ’64, 151. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 11–14; Kashatus, September Swoon, 45. Ebony, July, 1970, 90. Quoted in Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 111. Bruce Kuklick, To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909–1976 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 145–148; Kashatus, September Swoon, 9–37; Bryant, Shut Out, 5; David Faulkner, Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson from Baseball to Birmingham (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 163–164; Tom McGrath, “Color Me Badd,” The Fan, September, 1996, 39. Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska/Bison, 2003), 67. Kuklick, To Everything a Season, 155–156, 158; Early, This Is Where I Came In, 70–71. Kuklick, To Everything a Season, 155–156; Early, This Is Where I Came In, 75–89; Kashatus, September Swoon, 76–80, 111–113. Sports Illustrated, June 1, 1970, 40; Kashatus, September Swoon, 54. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 111; Kashatus, September Swoon, 82. See also William Kashatus, “Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism,” Nine, Fall 2000, 151. On Allen’s general mistreatment by the press, see Craig Wright, “Dick Allen: Another View” (originally published in SABR magazine), posted at www.expressfan.com/dickallenhof/docs/defense.pdf. Kashatus, September Swoon, 80. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 4. See “The Thomas Incident, July 1965” in Kashatus, “Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism,” and Kashatus, September Swoon, 149–157; Sports Illustrated, Sept 10, 1973, 111; Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 1–10. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 58–59, 10; Leonard Schechter, “Richie Allen and the Use of Power,” Sport, July, 1967, 66. Newsweek, July 8, 1968, 52; Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 111; Kashatus, September Swoon, 155–156. Kashatus, September Swoon, 172. Don Malcolm, “The Angry Negro Problem,” Baseball Primer: Baseball for the Thinking Fan, www.baseballprimer.com/articles/malcolm_2001–03–05_0.shtml. Kashatus, September Swoon, 160.
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41. Newsweek, July 8, 1968, 52. 42. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 107. 43. Jim Bouton, Ball Four [1970] (New York: Wiley, 1990), 393; Kashatus, September Swoon, 189. 44. Bouton, Ball Four, ix. 45. This is the Richie Allen canon. See Allen and Whitaker, Crash, and Kashatus, September Swoon (Mauch quoted 166). New York Times, Aug. 23, 1968, 79; July 3, 1969, 35. 46. “Richie Allen is Not All Bad Boy,” New York Times, May 18, 1969; Ebony, July 1970, 92. 47. Kashatus, September Swoon, 171; New York Times, “Sports of the Times,” June 25, 1968; Newsweek, May 19, 1975, 58; Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1972, 83; Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970, 18; April 29, 1974, 19; July 19, 1999, 19. 48. Bill Conlin, “Richie Is Beautiful. He Don’t Give a Damn for Nobody,” Jock, January 1970, 88; Sports Illustrated, May 19, 1975, 59. 49. Afro-American, July 13, 1968, 13. 50. Ebony, July, 1970, 89, 90, 92, 93. 51. Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970, 21. 52. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 188. 53. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 139. 54. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 206; Halberstam, October ’64, 364. 55. Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 219; Sports Illustrated, March 23, 1970, 22. 56. Kuklick, To Everything a Season, 163. 57. See “Oppositional Identity” in Kashatus, “Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism”; Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1972, 84. 58. Lee Vilensky, “Ode to Dick Allen,” Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review, Vol. 20, number 3, www.efqreview.com/NewFiles/v20n3/dustofthefieldstwo.html. 59. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 40. 60. Jim Brosnan, Great Rookies of the Major Leagues (New York: Random House, 1966), 165–167. 61. Roseboro and Libby, Glory Days with the Dodgers, 232. 62. Stuart Hall, “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities,” in Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House that Race Built (New York: Vintage, 1998), 291. 63. Aaron and Wheeler, I Had a Hammer, 231. 64. Gibson and Wheeler, Stranger to the Game, 188. 65. Thorn, Palmer, and Gershman, Total Baseball, 2204–2222. 66. Flood and Carter, The Way It Is, 16. 67. Hall and Ellis, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, 177. 68. Brodsky “Letters in the Dirt,” The Baseball Ballads (Weaverville, NC: chuckbrodsky.com, 2002), track 5. 69. Sports Illustrated, June 5, 1972, 64. 70. Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1974, 20. 71. Sports Illustrated, June 5, 1972, 64. 72. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 107.
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73. Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1973, 108, 110. 74. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 159–160. 75. Allen and Whitaker, Crash, 85. 76. Sports Illustrated, July 19, 1993, 84.
TWO In Sports the Best Man Wins How Joe Louis Whupped Jim Crow Theresa E. Runstedtler
A single column cannot begin to describe the feeling of the man of color who watches a brown-skinned boy like Joe Louis, from Alabama, the most backward State in the Union, fight his way up from the coal mine and the cotton field through strength of his body and mind. —Ted Benson, Sunday Worker, reprinted in Pittsburgh Courier, February 29, 1936
American Hero or Race Man? On June 22, 1938, when Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, won a decisive, first-round knockout in his revenge match against Nazi-promoted Max Schmeling, white America embraced the black heavyweight champion as a national hero. Amid increasing reports of Hitler’s imperialistic aggression and persecution of the Jews, the mainstream white press highlighted the bout’s worldwide implications, claiming Louis’s triumph as an American victory in the larger fight against fascism. As Heywood Broun of the New York World-Telegram mused, “One hundred years from now some historian may theorize, in a footnote at least, that the decline of Nazi
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prestige began with the left hook of a former unskilled autoworker.”1 Inspiring more than just a mere footnote, Louis’s 1938 win expanded into a celebrated epic of American patriotism and democracy. Brimming with postwar confidence in 1947, Louis’s close friend, Frank Sinatra, declared: “If I were the government official responsible for the job of making the rest of the world understand our national character and the ideals that motivate us, I would certainly make use of the case history of Joe Louis.”2 However well-known the narrative of Louis as the quintessential U.S. citizen became, another story, one that white America and history have overlooked, meant more to African Americans in the 1930s: Joe Louis as Race Man. That Louis earned the customary title of “Race Man” was a mark of high distinction, since this phrase had long been reserved for men who best exemplified racial progress and leadership in areas like business, academics, and politics.3 Writing for the New Masses in 1938, a skeptical Richard Wright derided the Louis-Schmeling fight as “a colorful puppet show, one of the greatest dramas of make-believe ever witnessed in America.”4 For Wright, the real significance of Louis lay not in his dubious status as a national hero, but in his ability to inspire the black masses. Three years earlier, in September 1935, when Louis garnered a swift victory over Jewish American Max Baer in front of 90,000 fans at Yankee Stadium, Wright described the “religious feeling in the air” on Chicago’s South Side, where over twenty thousand “Negroes poured out of beer taverns, pool rooms, barber shops, rooming houses and dingy flats and flooded the streets.” With Louis’s win over Baer “something had ripped loose, exploded,” claimed Wright, allowing “four centuries of oppression, of frustrated hopes, of black bitterness” to rise to the surface. Louis was “a consciously-felt symbol . . . the concentrated essence of black triumph over white.”5 Wright was certainly not alone in recognizing Louis’s influence as the period’s iconic New Negro. African Americans’ limited access to legal and political channels of protest meant that sports, and in particular boxing, became one of the preeminent mass media through which they articulated their conflict with the racial status quo. Until 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined baseball’s Major League, boxing was the only professional sport that allowed whites and blacks to compete in the same arena. Moreover, in this individual sport of hand-to-hand combat, fighters emerged as contested symbols of race, manhood, and nation among the American masses. By 1933 Louis was already a fixture in the black press, supplying African Americans with the cultural ammunition to critique their persistent lack of democratic rights and dignity. Louis graced the front page of the Chicago Defender more times than any other black figure during the
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Depression, including Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie.6 Not only did his life story become the focal point of sports and human-interest sections in various weekly newspapers, but his pugilistic exploits sparked larger debates about black representation as editorialists evaluated his role in racial advancement. As the dawn of the New Negro era symbolized the race’s passage into “the sunlight of real manhood,” Louis’s well-documented whupping of Jim Crow provided a public outlet for diverse expressions of black struggle across the socioeconomic and political spectrum.7 The term “New Negro,” meaning a progressive, politically savvy African American, initially emerged from the turn-of-the-century writings of Booker T. Washington.8 However, black participation in World War I in tandem with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities like New York and Chicago had a radicalizing effect, infusing the New Negro movement with a heightened sense of militancy, urgency, and racial pride. In revisiting the Harlem Renaissance, historians have begun to expand on its traditional interpretation as a middle-class, bourgeois literary movement to uncover the various facets of New Negro activism from black theater companies to leftist internationalism.9 The sport of boxing offered yet another arena in which New Negroes could express their racial militancy, albeit vicariously, through the hard punches and prosperous lifestyle of men like Joe Louis. Indeed, the rising figure of Joe Louis gave the masculine New Negro ideal unprecedented, mass appeal. A detailed analysis of Louis’s coming of age in his first major professional fight against Mussolini’s darling, Primo Carnera, on the eve of the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian conflict, capped off with a suggestive re-reading of his well-known loss to Max Schmeling in 1936, not only uncovers how discussions of black manhood dominated both domestic and diasporic resistance strategies, but also helps to explain the historical emergence of the male sports celebrity as an integral symbol of black success in the twentieth century.10 The Louis-Carnera match takes center stage, since most accounts have tended to downplay its significance as a matter of coincidental timing in which foreign affairs overlapped with box-office promotion. However, a close examination of the riotous celebrations Louis inspired, along with his mass representation in the black and leftist presses, photographs, fight films, and blues songs, reveals that African Americans actively fashioned him as a Race Man, using him to fight racism and fascism on two fronts—at home and abroad.11 Taken from this vantage point, the Louis story obliges historians to expand their understandings of the New Negro’s popular dimensions as a cultural conduit through which African Americans of the 1930s continued to address the interlocking questions of race, gender, nation, and class.
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Biography of a Race Triumphant tales of the young boxer’s rise to fistic fame filled the pages of black and young communist publications, along with mass-circulated biographies. Even though each had a differing agenda, they all spun his life story into a kind of utopian biography of the race. While the sympathetic white writer Edward Van Every engaged in hyperbole when he claimed the boxer’s life made “story book tales of fight heroes seem tame,” the popular depictions of Louis’s struggles from southern sharecropper to northern migrant to industrial worker to successful boxer must have resonated with the experiences of many of his African American fans.12 Providing a mythical link that connected an oppressive black rural “past” with the promise of a prosperous urban future, the young boxer’s personal story defied regional, class, and even generational boundaries to offer an accessible, yet decidedly masculine vision of collective progress. According to the composite story that emerged in the black press, Joe Louis Barrow was born on May 13, 1914, in Lafayette, Alabama, the seventh of eight children in a sharecropping family. In 1926, Louis and his kin joined the Great Migration to the North, settling in one of Detroit’s black ghettos. Soon after their arrival, twelve-year-old Louis developed his young muscles in a part-time job delivering ice to the city’s wealthier citizens. Trained in cabinetry at the Bronson Vocational School, Louis later worked at the Ford plant right up until he joined the ranks of professional boxing.13 As the papers revealed, Louis had honed his fighting skills at Detroit’s Brewster Recreation Center during his teenage years. By the time he won the national Amateur Athletic Union light heavyweight championship in April 1934, the youthful pugilist had participated in fifty-four bouts, winning forty-three of them by knockout, thereby garnering the support of the African American management team of John Roxborough, Julian Black, and Jack Blackburn. Writers bragged that at twenty-one, Louis was already two hundred pounds, standing six feet, one and a half inches tall, with fifteen-inch biceps.14 Showcasing his muscular physique, groomed hair, and boyish smile, the black press helped mold him into a statue of strength and charm that appealed to men, women, and children. Even the Young Worker, an interracial communist organ, included frequent reports on Louis that tended to cast him as an exemplary African American worker. As one journalist related, “He was born in the slums of Birmingham, Ala. When only a mere lad, he carried cakes of ice to eke out a living. He worked in King Henry Ford’s plant in Detroit. Always on the fringe of starvation, he learned how to struggle for self-preservation.” Imbuing Louis with a black labor consciousness, the writer continued, “He can see that as a worker, he will end up just where he started from, in the
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slums, because of the widespread discrimination that is practiced against his race.”15 Portraying him as an everyday man with “a chance to cash in on his skillful dukes,” the Young Worker used Louis to not only advance a positive image of African Americans to white youth, but also to show black workers that they did not have to give up their race heroes to join the communist ranks. White and black laborers both could rally around this male protagonist. By the time Louis entered the ring against Primo Carnera in June 1935, his humble beginnings and subsequent climb to international success had taken on an epic quality, as sympathetic journalists fashioned his biography into the ultimate story of racial and economic uplift. In an era when images of bumbling Sambos, feminized male minstrels, and confused primitives still held currency, Louis’s public personification of forcefulness and fairness, virility and respectability, stylishness and responsibility, resonated with popular understandings of manhood, civilization, and modernity. Thus, from the footnotes of the well-known narrative of Louis as American hero emerges not only the buried history of a black diasporic icon, but also a larger story about the intersection of gender and resistance in America’s race wars.
From Uncle Tom to New Negro Writing in the New York Amsterdam News, editorialist Theophilus Lewis dubbed Joe Louis a “Boxing Business Man.” Lewis praised him as a model of mature focus, telling readers, “Joe Louis prefers to be Joe Louis and not what white people think Joe Louis should be. Professional boxing is his chosen road to success.” As Lewis continued, “A man’s success is not a playful matter—it is a serious business. He refuses to pretend it is a pastime, a sort of youthful prelude to mature living.”16 Despite the obvious passion and respect with which Louis’s African American contemporaries followed his career, sports historiography, much like popular memory, has tended to overlook black representations of Louis. For the most part, scholars’ focus on mainstream daily newspaper accounts has skewed their assessments of him as a moderate and even ineffectual figure of white cooptation.17 While several historians challenge this “Uncle Tom” critique, most still emphasize Louis’s contributions as a crossover American hero, without deconstructing whites’ and blacks’ differing perceptions of his cultural and political importance.18 Overall, these approaches obscure the reality that various segments of black America acknowledged and even lauded Louis’s accomplishments, fashioning him as a gendered expression of public resistance.
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Louis’s folk hero status relied, in large part, on his masculine embodiment of the period’s shifting constructions of black identity and advancement. Just ten years earlier, in the opening essay of The New Negro, scholar Alain Locke had declared that “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on,” and now the “American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro.” According to Locke, despite African Americans’ continued exclusion from the rights of full citizenship, they could still “celebrate the attainment of a significant . . . phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.”19 As Louis rose in the ranks of professional boxing alongside this collective rite of passage, racial progress became increasingly conflated with the redemption of black manhood. African Americans had long deployed masculine constructions of powerful blackness to confront what historian Gail Bederman describes as the Progressives’ tradition of weaving race and gender into a web of white male supremacy. According to popular, early-twentieth-century thought, one could determine a group’s civilization based on their extent of sexual differentiation. In keeping with this pseudoscientific doctrine, black men and women were supposedly identical, while the patriarchal organization of the “civilized” white race signified that they were not only the furthest along in the Darwinist chain of evolution, but also uniquely capable of wielding political authority and exercising the rights of citizenship.20 According to historian Barbara Melosh, the economic difficulties of the Depression helped to reify this overall paradigm of white male supremacy. Concerns over family stability and conflicts over female labor led to the retrenchment of white patriarchy after the gender subversions of the 1920s such as the passing of the 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage, the rise of the assertive New Woman, and the racy culture of the flapper.21 Not surprisingly, as whites continued to articulate their racial supremacy through an assertion of male control, many African Americans attempted to prove their equality using resistance strategies that embraced male dominance. Even though the African American political and intellectual movements of the 1930s shared a common focus on promoting the legitimacy of black manhood, New Negro activists, by no means, agreed on a standardized definition of its cultural, political, and economic terms. Instead, they harnessed and shaped gendered discourses to suit not only their differing philosophical and tactical aims, but also their varied constituents. While established organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had long appropriated the white Victorian principles of patriarchy, propriety, industry, and thrift as the foundation for black advancement, Harlem’s up-and-coming cadre of New Negro writers and poets began to challenge these rigid ideals by exploring
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homosocial bonds and masculine pursuits beyond the realm of bourgeois domesticity.22 In turn, the public assertion of militant black manhood became a rallying cry for the emerging politics of collective race and class protest led by groups like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and the Communist Party.23 Whether they worked within the framework of American democratic ideals, or rejected their hypocrisy, African American activists of the 1930s used manhood as a mobilizing force. As different sectors of black society claimed Louis as one of their own, his public representation came to embody the class and generational tensions surrounding Depression-era articulations of black manhood. On the one hand, the period’s constructions of black manliness incorporated the contradictory ideals of savagery and civilization, as metaphors of battle and physical prowess existed alongside discussions of intelligence, artistry, and respectability. On the other hand, the New Negro movement also signaled a nascent shift toward a more modern sense of masculinity grounded less in middle-class notions of gentility, and expressed through recreational pursuits, the conspicuous consumption of mass-marketed commodities, and the open display of bodily might and sexual virility.24 The popular celebration of Louis as Race Man connected these gendered imaginings of blackness with the spirit of the masses. This was not a solo performance on the part of Louis, but rather a collective spectacle involving a complex process of negotiation among his body of black supporters. However, even as one uncovers Louis’s significance as the quintessential New Negro of the 1930s, the inherent dangers of a masculinist critique of racism inevitably rise to the surface. Trapped in a paradox, Louis, his black fans, and members of the black press challenged white superiority by engaging the same constructions of patriarchal authority that were simultaneously confirming their racial inferiority. Not only did they ultimately legitimize existing power relations, but their male-centered modes of resistance also pushed black women to the periphery of the struggle.
Boxing’s New Negro Comes of Age When Louis celebrated his twenty-first birthday on May 13, 1935, the black press urged his African American fans to pay tribute to his work as “a sterling young fighter, a gentleman and sportsman.” In calling Louis “the finest type of American manhood,” they granted him two labels that blackness did not usually allow.25 On the front-page of the Pittsburgh Courier sports section, one writer declared, “Joe Louis, you are a man now. . . . [O]nly a step across the threshold of boyhood, the hopes of a race and the best wishes of a nation are with you.” Recognizing Louis’s importance as an emblematic
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figure through which gender and race coalesced in a narrative of black progress, the writer warned the young fighter to “live a clean, honest life . . . and always remember that your very qualities of modesty and manliness are the things which bring thousands of people to see you fight.”26 In emphasizing Louis’s own coming of age as a man, black journalists exposed the collective focus on questions of black manhood. In the buildup to his bout against Primo Carnera, the black press promoted Louis’s redemptive and unifying mission in what some were dubbing the “battle of the century.” With bold optimism, one writer in the Pittsburgh Courier maintained that Louis would defend successfully “the ardent hopes of more than twelve million Americans” when he stepped into the ring at Yankee Stadium. Another pre-fight feature in the Chicago Defender named Louis the most “outstanding Race athlete of the past 30 years,” citing his unprecedented ability to draw black fans to the box office. In the month preceding the fight, Harlem buzzed with expectant energy as African Americans of all ages kept Louis as their favorite topic. The New York Age even noted that “women from all walks of life, some who had never taken any interest in fights,” prayed for a race victory in the ring.27 As widespread interest in the Louis-Carnera match cut across racial lines, many African Americans relished the fact that the black fighter’s rise was revitalizing the entire boxing industry after years of sparse ticket sales.28 In a bid to bring Louis closer to a title bout, his African American managers, Roxborough and Black, had formed a pragmatic alliance with Mike Jacobs, an influential Jewish American promoter. Jacobs held a virtual monopoly of the industry, organizing major heavyweight events in conjunction with the Hearst Milk Fund for Babies, a New York charity run by the wife of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.29 Even though Louis was already a superstar in the black press, Jacobs “introduced” the young fighter to white America. A public relations mastermind, he hired press agents like black journalist Russell Cowans to crank out daily media releases for white and black newspapers all over the country. These reports carefully constructed Louis as the epitome of white middle-class respectability.30 While this centralized communications scheme ensured that overlapping portrayals of the “official” Louis appeared in both presses, a comparison of white and black sources reveals that writers reinterpreted and reshaped the Louis image along racial lines, often using manhood as a metalanguage for race. While most journalists in the mainstream press certainly favored Louis to win, they were not ready to count out Carnera, even though a streak of fixed fights and messy dealings with the mob underworld soiled the veteran boxer’s seven-year record.31 Despite their high praise of Louis’s technical abilities and well-mannered conduct, many white writers held reservations
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about his physical and mental toughness. Invoking the emasculating stereotypes of black cowardice, infantilism, and emotionality, they charged that Louis’s encounter with Carnera would determine if this “beardless” boy could hold his own against boxing’s big men. After all, in addition to being eight years Louis’s senior, Carnera stood nearly half a foot taller and outweighed Louis by almost 70 pounds. As one writer in the Macon Telegraph observed, the question of “Can he take it?” was the “one predominant note of skepticism” among the white, fight-going public.32 Nationally syndicated sports columnist Grantland Rice agreed that if Louis failed to score an early knockout, the “rugged” Carnera would “outmaul” the boy to win by decision. Moreover, Rice and many of his colleagues questioned whether the young fighter would remain poised in the midst of the “terrific ballyhoo” of what promised to be one of the biggest fight crowds in many years.33 Casting Louis as the “dusky David” to Carnera’s “Goliath,” white journalists wondered whether the youthful, black technician possessed the gritty manhood to defeat the roughhousing Italian Giant.34 As Louis’s rite of passage to boxing manhood, the fight also became a litmus test for the strength and maturity of the race. However unconvinced the white press was, black writers supported Louis with great resolve, predicting an easy knockout in two to five rounds.35 The question of whether or not Louis could “take it” reportedly drew a loud chuckle from Manager Roxborough, who bragged that the young fighter had already prevailed in the face of knockdowns, a fractured knuckle, and even punches to the jaw.36 Louis’s manly battle against Carnera not only had “colored America looking to redeem its honors in the fistic world,” but it took on greater implications as a proxy for larger racial conflicts at home and abroad.37
Enlisted for Ethiopia While Louis prepared for his conquest of Carnera, another race war threatened to erupt across the Atlantic. Benito Mussolini’s imperialistic designs on Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia weighed on the minds of many African Americans. From the Courier to the Crisis, articles in the black press kept readers apprised of the latest news on the impending Italo-Ethiopian conflict during the spring and summer of 1935. While mainstream publications tended to bury the reports of Abyssinia, the black press featured them prominently, often as front-page news. They carried not only current, but historical accounts of Ethiopia, along with human-interest stories on Selassie, his family, and the plight of the Abyssinian soldiers. Ethiopia was the last independent nation on the African continent and its potential takeover had grave implications for struggles of black autonomy
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and equality throughout the world. In particular, the perception of a parallel between Italian fascism and United States racism served to provoke strong, public African American reactions to the looming invasion.38 Moreover, when the League of Nations failed to come to the aid of the African country, it further emphasized the racial dimensions of the conflict, as self-interested, white governments turned a deaf ear to the pleas of their colored counterpart.39 Given the depressed economic conditions in northern black communities like Harlem and the continued terror of Jim Crow in the South, African Americans recognized the close connections between their plight and that of their Ethiopian brothers. As poet Langston Hughes declared: Ethiopia, Lift your night-dark face, Abyssinian Son of Sheba’s Race! ... May all Africa arise With blazing eyes and night-dark face In answer to the call of Sheba’s race: Ethiopia’s free! Be like me, All of Africa, Arise and be free!40
Out of the crucible of modern colonialism and fascism emerged a growing sense of black diasporic consciousness. Many black fans saw the upcoming Louis-Carnera fight as an apt microcosm of the pending match up between Il Duce and Selassie. In the major black weeklies, stories and photos of Louis’s training regimen, his victory, and the subsequent celebrations ran side-by-side with reports of the Abyssinian crisis and pictures of the Ethiopian emperor. Arguably, even African Americans who did not read the papers must have picked up on the obvious analogy. Enthusiastic discussions of the Louis-Carnera bout, from street corners and front porches to local barbershops and beauty salons, surely touched on the boxer’s symbolic role as he went fist-to-fist with Mussolini’s Darling. Not only had Louis become a ubiquitous folk hero by 1935, but as historian William R. Scott argues, Italy’s imminent invasion stimulated an unprecedented period of black American militancy and group protest. From Los Angeles to New York, the black masses organized Abyssinian-defense loans, acts of civil disobedience, huge rallies that attracted thousands of participants, economic boycotts, and even the recruitment of volunteer combat troops.41 Complementing the efforts of grassroots activists, Louis became a popular outlet for articulations of nascent black nationalism, along with radi-
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cal, international critiques of racism. He offered a public embodiment of the intellectual discussions of the conflict that graced the pages of periodicals like the Crisis, Opportunity, and Marcus Garvey’s Black Man. Various black groups even met with Louis during his training camp to underscore the importance of his upcoming fight for black people on the world stage. Louis recalled, “Now, not only did I have to beat the man, but I had to beat him for a cause.”42 Enlisted as a fistic soldier in the fight against fascism, he promised to enact Abyssinia’s struggle for black autonomy in a way that his legions of African American fans could grasp with a sense of visceral immediacy. In the spectacle of the ring, Louis’s body would perform a utopian vision of not only the black American body politic, but also that of the Ethiopian homeland. Beyond just the basic fact that Louis, a black man, would wage handto-hand combat against an Italian fighter, there were a number of physical and metaphorical parallels between the real and ring conflicts enabling African Americans to engage in a gendered critique of domestic racism and foreign fascism.43 In particular, contemporary black American discourses of African redemption were suffused with the language of manly battle, independence, and honor. To black writers and political figures of the New Negro era, the colonized continent represented black womanhood, while the autonomous Abyssinian nation was a decidedly male construct. Writing to the Negro World, a Garveyite publication, in the lead-up to the annual UNIA convention in 1924, Irene Gaskin exhorted, “Our flag boys [the African tricolor of red, black, and green] . . . means loyalty to our country and the protection of our women in our motherland Africa.”44 Labeling colonized Africa the “motherland,” she placed men at the head of both nation-building and the defense of black womanhood. Since white imperial justifications often connected a society’s ability to self-govern with its degree of patriarchal order, it is not surprising that African American commentators infused both these battles for racial nationalism with an overwhelmingly masculine bent. The conflict between Italy and Ethiopia became anthropomorphized into a duel between Mussolini and Selassie, as the black press portrayed Abyssinia’s struggle to remain autonomous as a test of the tiny country’s racial manhood. At a time when a boxer’s moniker usually had ethnic overtones, Louis, dubbed the Brown Bomber, the Ethiopian Exploder, and the African Avenger, became a natural stand-in for the Abyssinian emperor, and by extension, black nationhood.45 African American cartoonist Jay Jackson encapsulated this connection in a clever drawing that showed a much smaller Louis boxing against a bestial caricature of Carnera in front of Ethiopian and Italian fans, while a seat reserved for the League of Nations remained empty in the foreground.46 (See Figure 2.1)
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2.1 “Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth,” May 25, 1935. During the lead-up to his match with the Italian, Primo Carnera, Joe Louis became a natural stand-in for the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and by extension, black nationhood. Used with permission. Source: Chicago Defender.
As the celebrated “Crown Prince of Fistiania,” Louis was, in many ways, the ultimate “Abyssinian Son of Sheba’s Race.”47 While some white journalists and intellectuals questioned the racial heritage of the lightskinned Louis and Selassie, writers in the black press embraced both men
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as strong Race heroes. White biographer Edward Van Every’s attempts to connect Louis’s athletic prowess with his tri-racial “blood strain” resonated with numerous reports in the mainstream dailies that sought to deemphasize the boxer’s African roots. Although the biographer acknowledged that Louis “insists . . . the Negro predominates in his blood,” Van Every stressed the possibility that Louis was “a good part white and more Indian than African.”48 Flying in the face of such efforts to undermine Louis’s role as Race Man, African American writers positioned him as the “Black Hope,” arguing that Louis was a “badge of racial prestige . . . in man’s most honored sphere of endeavor—the noble art of self-defense.”49 Similarly, the black press showed impressive pictures of the emperor Selassie in his full regalia, underscoring his links to the ancient kingdom of Cush and claiming him as the “King of all Negroes everywhere.” One editorial in the Baltimore AfroAmerican even maintained that “one glance at . . . [Selassie’s] hair” surely proved that Ethiopia was a black nation.50 Louis and Selassie’s shared African roots became a reservoir of strength, and thus, their victories in manly battle would be victories for the race on both a national and international scale. Just as reports conflated Louis with Ethiopia’s emperor, Carnera became the Italian dictator’s sporting deputy. With ethnic epithets like Mussolini’s Darling, the Ambling Alp, and the Vast Venetian, Carnera served as a popular platform for the fascist leader’s chest-beating propaganda. Just five years earlier in July 1930, when Carnera’s criminal associations had caught up with him, Il Duce had personally intervened to prevent the fighter’s deportation from the United States. Moreover, when Carnera won the world heavyweight title against Jack Sharkey in 1933, Mussolini ordered a uniform of the black shirt fascisti for his boxing champion and posed with Carnera in photos that he sent to newspapers throughout the world. The fighter even addressed his leader with the fascist salute.51 Paralleling the Louis-Carnera pre-fight publicity, white Americans wondered whether the tiny Ethiopian nation would survive the onslaught of Il Duce’s larger, more modernized forces. Despite Italy’s clear military advantages, an editorial in the Crisis challenged Mussolini’s bravado, claiming that the “last gobble of Africa” would prove to be a “bloody swallow.” It charged that Il Duce and his army would have to navigate the country’s treacherous terrain while facing the unpredictable guerrilla strikes of Selassie’s courageous and cunning men.52 In the ring, Louis would have to practice and then engage a similar guerrilla strategy in order to compensate for the gigantic proportions and long reach of Mussolini’s Darling. Mapped out by trainer Blackburn and perfected by Louis, the ingenious battle plan involved breaking down the
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Italian’s defensive stance with punishing body shots, and then moving in to attack Carnera’s head. While Marcus Garvey urged his pan-Africanist brothers to “act manly, courageously, [and] thoughtfully” in mobilizing for the crisis that would come with Mussolini’s invasion, the black press highlighted Louis’s strict training regimen as another confirmation that he would prevail. Although Garvey lamented that Abyssinia’s lack of preparation would only permit a “passionate, enthusiastic, and emotional” response to Italy’s attack, the calm and conscientious Louis appeared well-equipped to conquer Carnera as he slashed his way through a host of gargantuan sparring mates.53 Intelligence and rational discipline became integral to Louis’s performance of black nationhood. Many African American journalists and politicos connected the LouisCarnera fight to the gendered debates of savagery versus civilization in the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. Although Mussolini declared that he sought to bring progress to the supposedly backward nation of Abyssinia, black intellectuals like James Weldon Johnson questioned the dictator’s rhetoric, arguing that Italy was simply after African loot. Critiquing Mussolini’s violent designs, Johnson questioned the conventional, Western definition of civilization, arguing that even though Ethiopians lacked a modern infrastructure, they were at least civilized in character, with “courage, honesty, and consideration for the needs of others.”54 Drawing on similar tropes, Pittsburgh Courier commentator J. A. Rogers compared “Selassie, The Gentleman, And Mussolini, The Braggart.” Not surprisingly, Rogers used heavyweight boxing as a metaphor for this larger battle of savagery against nobility, emphasizing Mussolini’s baseness by equating his “gesturing” and “clowning” to that of the irreverent black fighter Jack Johnson.55 In this racial and gendered reversal, Mussolini became the minstrel, as Rogers not only claimed Ethiopia as a civilized nation, but also referenced Louis’s concurrent role in bringing racial progress to the boxing ring. Playing on the brutish appearance of Mussolini’s Darling, along with his reputation for illegal wrestling and holding, the black newspapers’ drawings and photos of the Italian Giant made Carnera appear more beast than man, while their renderings of Louis retained a lifelike appearance. Although white journalists and cartoonists certainly portrayed Louis in more humane ways than his predecessor, Jack Johnson, some still tended to depict him using Sambo stereotypes. Paul Gallico’s fight-day column in the New York Daily News included a thick-lipped, hairy depiction of Louis chasing after Carnera. Even though Gallico predicted that Carnera would face a “shy, easily upset man mellow,” the writer also suggested that the animalistic Louis could “go berserk” at any time.56 In contrast, the black press steered away from caricatures of Louis and quoted him using full sentences. Moreover, while boasting of his strength,
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black journalists also emphasized his kindness and generosity to his mother and family. In mid-April 1935, many black writers celebrated Louis’s display of patriarchal responsibility when the fighter used one of his purses to purchase a fully furnished home for his mother.57 Whereas the Italian Giant embodied everything that was barbaric and violent about white racism and fascism, Louis came to exemplify an exalted form of civilized black manhood, grounded in a mix of physical prowess and force of character.58 By more than just a case of coincidental timing, Louis became a gendered metaphor of black militancy and nationalism that drew on the rhetorical power of prevailing discourses of manliness and civilization. Even if Selassie had little chance of preventing an Italian takeover, Louis would defend black honor.
The Manly Art of Self-Defense As Louis fought for Ethiopian independence, he also fought for the dignity and citizenship rights of African Americans at home. In addition to his symbolic connections to more radical, transnational black activism, he became the focus of an interrelated debate over questions of black American manhood and the state of the race. This discursive battle in the popular media was an equally significant race war being waged on the African American home front. While he prepared for his match, black journalists shaped many of the same gendered critiques associated with the international dimensions of his fight into a domestic narrative of black progress. Black Americans’ disproportionate suffering during the Great Depression only served to highlight their continued alienation and second-class citizenship. In the South, Jim Crow segregationists still ruled by legal and extralegal means, as struggling black sharecroppers and laborers sought to combat economic exploitation, widespread disfranchisement, and the terror of lynching.59 Many African Americans left the South in search of safety and opportunity in the North, but even the Black Mecca of Harlem experienced police brutality and high unemployment. On March 22, 1935, the famed New York neighborhood erupted into violence after rumors circulated that the white manager of a local store had beaten and killed a Puerto Rican boy. Even though several hours later the rumors were discounted, Harlem’s first-ever race riot continued into the night, as African Americans expressed their frustrations through mass destruction.60 Against this oppressive backdrop, Louis’s success became the most conspicuous argument against the continued exclusion of African Americans from the benefits of full national citizenship. Black journalists inscribed his body with the ideals of black manliness and masculinity, and they sculpted
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his persona into a cultural vessel in which they poured their hopes and dreams. As an editorial in Opportunity described, “[t]he picture of a young Negro boy working in the Ford plant at $5.00 per day . . . who literally forces his way to a place where he can command a half million dollars within a single year” appealed to African Americans from “every walk of life.”61 While establishment uplifters could still embrace Louis for his respectability and productivity, a younger generation of New Negroes lionized him for his style and virility. To them, Louis was not exceptional; rather, he represented what black America could do with the chance to compete on level ground. As he climbed his way from the dirt of the cotton fields to the bright lights of the boxing ring, he linked African Americans from different classes and vocations in a story of collective progress. As musicologist Paul Oliver argues, Louis’s heroic climb from the cotton fields of Alabama to boxing fame encapsulated the appealing drama and seeming invincibility of traditional African American ballad heroes like John Henry. Indeed, Louis was the only Depression-era athlete that popular blues artists commemorated in recorded songs.62 As a man who faced the prospect of punishment alone in the ring, he enacted through sport the same kinds of struggles confronting many of his fans. Houston singer Joe Pullman’s recording, entitled “Joe Louis is the Man,” was the first song to honor Louis’s toppling of Carnera. Although Oliver describes Pullman’s creation as a “naïve piece of folk poetry,” it captured the essence of Louis as the archetypal New Negro. While revering the Bomber as “a battlin’ man,” it also noted that he was “not a bad dressed guy,” and that even though he was “makin’ real good money,” it failed to “swell his head.” Just as Pullman celebrated “powerful Joe” in his performance, the husky-voiced Memphis Minnie McCoy of Chicago recorded “He’s in the Ring (Doin’ the Same Old Thing)” as a tribute to Louis’s two-fisted “dynamite.” The mix of Memphis Minnie’s throaty lyrics, her guitar, and Black Bob’s pounding piano emphasized the indestructibility of Louis, who knocked out his opponents with remarkable consistency to the delight of his poor and working-class fans: When your people’s goin’ out tonight, Jes’ goin’ to see Joe Louis fight, An’ if you ain’t got no money gotta go tomorrow night, ’Cause he’s in the ring doin’ the same ol’ thing.63
As a rallying point for black communities across the nation, the figure of Louis served to unite the ethereal realm of diasporic politics with the everyday troubles of African Americans. Louis received a hero’s welcome from the black community at Grand Central Station in New York City in the middle of May 1935. As the black
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press included photos of Louis in chic suits enjoying the finer things in life like driving brand-new cars, he moved beyond his station as prizefighter to become both celebrity and socialite.64 His bodily display of impeccable fashion was one of the most integral aspects of his gendered performance of black pride, since it allowed him to transgress racial norms, moving beyond the ubiquitous black identity of poor worker to showcase his wealth and individuality. One black correspondent praised Louis for looking the part of fistic champion in “his street togs,” while another carefully itemized the boxer’s wardrobe of a “dozen suits, nine pairs of shoes, two dozen shirts, 100 neckties, ten hats, six coats and countless sweaters, zippercoats, [and] suits of underwear and pyjamas.”65 Likewise, newspaper ads for Murray’s Pomade, a popular hair straightener, reinforced Louis’s reputation for being not only a great fighter, but also “one of the best dressed men in America.” As the text of the advertisement claimed, Louis strived to be “well-groomed” both in and out of the ring. The company encouraged the reader to support Louis and to buy their product, since doing both would enable a man to take on the young boxer’s power and panache in his everyday life.66 As the consummate New Negro, Louis reinforced his manhood through his prodigious consumption and street-hip style, offering an optimistic vision of the possibilities of black urban America. Part politician, part pop idol, and part philanthropist, Louis spent a busy week in the Big Apple meeting with civic leaders like Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia, shaking hands with boxing legends like Jack Dempsey, and attending a series of charity benefits. Trading in his trousers for workout gear four times a day, Louis also starred in a promotional, vaudeville show at the Harlem Opera House, scoring one of the biggest draws in the history of the theater. With a kick-line of pretty dancing girls in the background, he sparred, skipped, and punched the heavy bag to the delight of packed houses. However, the respite was short-lived. With only a month left before the Carnera fight, Louis left for his training camp in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.67 Black correspondents painted an idyllic picture of the countryside estate where Louis prepared for battle, emphasizing its connections to old American gentility, while also touting its modern conveniences. Celebrating Louis’s role as the temporary master of the “Big House,” they cloaked him in a mantle of both bourgeois respectability and technological efficiency.68 According to local lore, George Washington had slept there, and black writers claimed that Louis now occupied the same room where the first president had stayed. Reputedly “one of the most famous fistic training grounds in the world,” the camp was “[n]estled in a nature-scooped nook of the Ramapo Mountains,” yet close enough to the city of Patterson to offer all of the amenities of rural and urban life combined. Although Louis spent most of
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his days working out, in his few moments of leisure time he supposedly enjoyed freshwater fishing, boating, golfing, and even horseback riding.69 The training camp itself became an expression of not only Louis’s nobility and modernity, but also the dignity and advancement of his people. As the first fighter to ever rent the entire grounds for the exclusive use of his training camp, Louis ruled as lord of the estate. He retained a sixteen-man, African American entourage that included an eighteen-year-old, personal valet and the “expert dietician” Frank Sutton, a former restaurateur. In particular, Sutton, who had once served Booker T. Washington, became a popular figure in the black press reports from Pompton Lakes. Referencing the “nutritionist,” black writers presented detailed accounts of Louis’s disciplined, “two-meal-a-day diet,” countering white reports of the fighter’s supposed penchant for ice cream and tendency to overeat.70 Editorials in the black press insisted that African American fighters no longer needed to seek out white assistance to get ahead. Louis reputedly rejected the possibility of white patronage, saying that he would “hang up the gloves for good” if Roxborough and Black sold any part of his earnings. By this time Jacobs certainly provided much of Louis’s financial backing, but black reports tended to downplay the white promoter’s role, while emphasizing the influence of his black managers. Roxborough, Black, and Blackburn’s tactical abilities at the negotiating table and at ringside formed an important plotline in the story of Louis’s success. In true New Negro form, Louis and his black “Board of Strategy” were beating white men at their own enterprise.71 A steady stream of cars and pedestrians traveled to the estate to see Louis in action. In this seemingly apolitical space, showing support for Louis enabled his black supporters to publicly express their own status and worth and to gain vicariously the strength of his fists. By the middle of June, his sparring workouts had already attracted around 3,200 visitors, and as the fight drew nearer, writers predicted crowds of 1,000 per workout of mostly African American fans from all along the East Coast.72 Alongside regular folk, professionals and celebrities made appearances. Black newspapers like the New York Age and the Baltimore Afro-American provided weekly lists of the VIP spectators—judges, sportsmen, entertainers, entrepreneurs, orchestra leaders, morticians, and politicians—who ranged from local to national elites. Many of those who saw Louis in the flesh achieved their own form of celebrity as they returned home to trumpet his prowess on the street corners and in the bars of their urban communities.73 Attending the Louis camp became, for spectators, an expression of pride and promise. As Louis toppled his sparring mates, his African American fans celebrated him as a polished, physical specimen of black virility. Louis embod-
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ied an undeniable, yet understated sexuality that appealed to the younger generation of New Negroes without upsetting the traditional conventions of respectability. Even though the Louis team’s “official” position was that the fighter did not associate with women, black fans still celebrated his bodily perfection. As public school teacher Helen Harden recounted in a letter to the New York Age, many spectators visited the camp “with one purpose,” and that was “to gaze on the Detroit Bomber.” Harden gushed that he was simply “lovely to look at. Not a blemish on his saffron hued skin.” Another black female fan refused to believe the official reports that claimed Louis would keep women out of his life until he won the world title, arguing that “Joe is a real man, after all.”74 Although the young boxer obviously appealed to women, many articles in the white press twisted the Louis party line to unsex and infantilize the black fighter, claiming that “iceberg” Louis had “no time for women” and that his only “sweetheart” was his mother.75 Challenging these images, the black press fashioned him as an idol of masculinity, showing suggestive photos of Louis washing himself in the shower and gazing at the camera partially disrobed. While black writers did acknowledge that Louis had no serious plans for marriage, they also reported that camp intimates swore he was a “lady-killer.”76 However, concerned with dissociating their fighter from the negative legacy of Jack Johnson, Louis’s handlers kept the young man’s sexual escapades with white women, along with his love of speeding cars and frivolous spending, out of the press.77 In an era when black male sexuality connoted rape and recklessness, Louis’s carefully constructed balance of physicality and decency offered a positive model of virile black manhood. Despite the more daringly masculine aspects of his persona, Louis still stood as a paragon of manly productivity in the face of racist, white reports of his laziness. Even a sympathetic white writer like Van Every betrayed his prejudice when he claimed that Louis’s trainer had to “force Joe . . . to cut out his dissipation . . . even if it infringed on his sleep.”78 In refuting these types of disparaging comments, one journalist in the New York Amsterdam News declared that “[n]o fighter during the past twenty years has trained with more earnestness than this Detroit boy.”79 Following the conventions of contemporary boxing manuals, the black press provided detailed descriptions of Louis’s routine, arguing that his abilities were not just “natural,” but cultivated.80 With scientific precision and utmost discipline, Louis arose at six in the morning to run in the mountains, followed by a demanding afternoon of sparring matches, bag punching, rope skipping, and bending exercises. So important was it to counter notions of black indolence that one sportswriter even maintained that Louis was a model of efficiency when he slept, taking “it as seriously as he
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does his fighting. No faking, no lost motion.”81 In this way, Louis’s persona combined the traditional watermarks of gentlemanly respectability with the rising tide of New Negro masculinity. He became not only the Race Man, but also an Everyman for the race.
The New Negro and his New Crowd Just days before the fight-date, the impending Italian invasion of Ethiopia permeated local politics as the Hearst Milk Fund contemplated canceling the Louis-Carnera bout for fear that it would inspire race riots. The Hearst announcement marked the high point in a month-long racial debate over the potential for black-Italian violence at the match. Pointing to the rioting of Harlem’s black population in March 1935 and the ongoing furor over the Abyssinian crisis, white sportswriters Westbrook Pegler and Arthur Brisbane warned that a boxing match pitting a black American against an Italian fighter would furnish the fuel for racial unrest in both the stands and streets. Pegler deemed the bout a “new high in stupid judgment,” while Brisbane worried that it might inspire “a fight bigger than the scheduled fight.”82 Given Pegler and Brisbane’s predictions, it became clear that not just Louis’s manhood was on the line in the upcoming match, but also the collective manhood of his African American spectators. The black press responded with vehemence. Al Monroe of the Chicago Defender recognized white America’s unease with the sudden rise of the Race Man Louis, whose burgeoning popularity was “moving ‘out of control.’” He dismissed the warnings of violence, claiming that his Nordic counterparts had no intention of writing “the real facts.”83 In turn, while the New York Amsterdam News claimed that “Negroes today are unlikely to riot over anything less than deep-seated social injustice and economic exclusion,” they also warned that “Negroes ARE likely to be forced to defend themselves against attack by whites who have been stirred by repeated comment on the possibilities of rioting.”84 In late June, when a front-page editorial in the white Newark Ledger called for a boycott of the fight, the black press upped its ante. The Baltimore Afro-American claimed that this was a deliberate move to prevent Louis from advancing to the heavyweight championship, reporting that blacks and Italians in Newark’s “hill” sections had responded with their own boycott of the Ledger. Linking it to larger political questions, the Chicago Defender placed the ultimate blame in Mussolini’s lap, declaring that the dictator’s shameless use of the Louis-Carnera fight as fodder for race hatred in the Italian American press had provoked the Ledger boycott.85 Just as Louis’s individual victory would prove his boxing manhood,
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so too would his black fans have a communal chance to prove their maturity and respectability as spectators. Characteristic of the period’s wider questioning of the merits of bourgeois respectability alongside the rise of popular strains of more aggressive, mass politics, class tensions surfaced in this aspect of the pre-fight publicity. Recalling the controversy over Harlem’s first-ever race riot in March, black journalists understood that much was at stake. Their arguments were not just defensive, but prescriptive. While Louis’s win would certainly be cause for celebration, it had to remain civilized. Otherwise, his ultimate strength would remain locked in his fists, unable to transfer its impact to the larger struggle against racism and fascism at home and abroad.86 On the morning of June 25, 1935, the Brown Bomber and Mussolini’s Darling readied themselves “to clash for the synthetic championship of two continents.”87 Despite the reassurances of the black press, the Hearst Milk Fund was taking no chances with the possibility of violence, and for the first time in New York City’s boxing history, a troop of armed police would surround the ringside at Yankee Stadium as Louis and Carnera fought. Over 1,000 patrolmen and detectives would also be stationed at strategic points throughout the arena.88 Since the major radio networks of NBC and CBS refused to air the match for fear of potential bloodshed across the country, the 100 ticket sellers in the stadium box office had their hands full with a last-minute rush of spectators.89 For weeks before the fight, several black newspapers had advertised organized bus trips to the event, along with special railroad rates and flights that welcomed both men and women.90 Under a sunny, steamy New York sky, most of the nearly 15,000 African Americans on hand to see Louis arrived long before the white spectators with ringside seats. They congregated in the right- and left-field bleachers as soon as the Yankee Stadium gates opened at five o’clock, singing, cheering, and performing ad hoc speeches during their two-hour wait for the preliminary fights. A journalist for the New York Age spoke with one man who had traveled with his wife all the way from Leland, Mississippi. The writer could only interpret this cotton buyer and Fisk University graduate’s dedication as an example of “the spirit of enthusiasm and race pride that urged him and thousands of others from Chillicothe, Kinder Lots and many other hidden hamlets” across the country to attend the fight.91 In addition to the lively crowds in the bleachers, black America’s royalty, from politicians to professionals, and from sportsmen to entertainers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lena Horne sat closer to the ring.92 By the time of the main event, over 60,000 spectators of all races packed the stadium, with gate receipts totaling nearly $350,000, a new high for a nontitular match.93
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As ring announcer Hugh Balogh urged, “in the name of American sportsmanship. . . . [R]egardless of race, creed, or color, let us all say, may the better man emerge victorious.”94 As the fighters approached each other, Carnera looked like a massive beast alongside the young David. Yet, it was Louis, expressionless and calm, who commanded the center of the ring, while Mussolini’s Darling danced around him. By the end of the first round, Louis had already drawn blood, cutting the Italian Giant’s lip with a smashing right to the mouth. Louis continued to explode with hard body shots, followed by rights and lefts that bruised Carnera’s face. Toward the end of the fifth, Mussolini’s Darling looked ready to collapse, with blood streaming down his face, but Louis, still fresh-legged, blasted him with more head and body combinations. Louis rocked Carnera with a series of hard rights in the sixth round, sending Mussolini’s Darling to the canvas three times. As Carnera staggered to his feet Referee Arthur Donovan called off the fight as Louis hit his target with a cannonade of punches. The crowd burst into cheers as Louis won by technical knockout, with not a mark on his face. Even without the benefit of a radio broadcast, news of Louis’s win traveled quickly. Not too far from the stadium, a phone call conveyed the result to the estimated 20,000 fans who gathered at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. As the Pittsburgh Courier reported, floods of African Americans poured into the streets from Seventh to Lenox and 125th to 145th with a carnival spirit “reminiscent of Marcus Garvey’s best days.” The ravages of the Depression seemed momentarily suspended as celebrants in the taverns offered up toasts to Louis, while cars with plates from as far away as the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, and Canada crawled and honked their way down Seventh Avenue.95 As the black press pointed to the relative order of the post-fight festivities as confirmation that African Americans were not as uncivilized as Pegler and Brisbane had thought, the behavior of Louis’s fans became another mark of resistance. As a correspondent for the Journal and Guide asserted, “Contrary to unfounded anxiety expressed in some quarters, there was no sign of disorder before, during or after the fight.”96 Yet, the glowing descriptions in the black press appear to have obscured the multiple ways in which African Americans from different walks of life expressed their support of Louis. Articles in the white dailies presented a much more raucous picture of the post-fight revelry. By reading their accounts intertextually with the black press reports, one can draw a more nuanced portrait of the vigorous celebration without much regard to hallowed respectability. One elderly, black orator named Gill Holton reputedly declared, “It [wa]s the greatest night Harlem . . . had since the riot.” Officers on foot and horseback, along
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with those driving motorcycles and radio cars, monitored the thousands of fans that surrounded the packed Savoy Ballroom. Mounted police had to intervene when members of the crowd stormed the entrance, breaking down one of the doors and injuring a half-dozen people. When the community’s honorary mayor, entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, arrived in a limousine, he made a cursory speech cautioning the throngs of fans to remain calm, but minutes later he, too, joined in the shouting as he moved down the street. Belligerent youths postured on the hoods of moving cars, yelling at the tops of their lungs, while children who should have been in bed pounded ashcans on the streets and compared their flexed biceps.97 Even if Louis’s managers advised him against expressing his jubilation in the ring, the Brown Bomber’s victory gave his fans an opportunity to aggressively assert their racial pride en masse, in a way that defied conventional racial norms. The events surrounding the Jersey City Riots of August 1935 paint an even clearer picture of this sense of militancy. According to a report in the New York Age, around 100 black and Italian men armed with knives, baseballs, stones, and other blunt objects engaged in a “free for all” of street fighting on August 11. A verbal dispute over the impending Italo-Ethiopian conflict and the related Louis-Carnera bout had apparently sparked a fistfight that exploded into a massive brawl, leaving four wounded and leading to eleven arrests. An emergency squad consisting of radio cars, along with police on foot with tear gas bombs, managed to quell the unrest. African Americans claimed that Louis’s recent victories had heightened white aggression in the district. Yet, according to the whites involved, black youths had been taunting passers-by, demanding that everyone acknowledge Louis’s superiority. After the initial clash, the hostilities almost resurfaced the next day, as two bands of white males totaling around ninety exchanged verbal challenges with a group of African American men.98 More than just an inspiration for the writings of New Negro elites, Louis’s decisive win sparked an already smoldering sense of militant consciousness among the African American masses, bringing strong expressions of black pride to the surface that defied the combined strictures of white racism and elite decency.
Brown Moses? In addition to energizing the masses, Louis’s conquering of Carnera ignited a passionate debate in the black press regarding the proper representation of the race and what constituted legitimate forms of black progress. His victory gave writers and intellectuals a symbolic slate on which they attempted
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to negotiate and navigate their struggle for manhood rights. For the most part, black writers never questioned whether Louis had “sold out” to the white establishment or had shirked his duties to black America.99 Rather, they argued over whether Louis, as boxer, was a suitable male figurehead for the future of the race, both nationally and internationally. After all, with his success in the corporal realm of pugilism, Louis presented somewhat of a dilemma to the traditional politics of bourgeois uplift. Many black elites struggled to come to terms with the fact that this popular hero was gaining unprecedented notoriety and wealth through muscular achievement, rather than education and erudition. As African Americans endeavored to escape the reductionist stereotypes of black physicality that consigned most to menial labor, Louis emerged as a gendered wild card with multiple possibilities in the changing game of racial construction. Some commentators expressed their utter joy over Louis’s manly victory as a source of racial pride and progress. Dan Burley of the Baltimore AfroAmerican dubbed Louis the “Brown Moses of the Prize Ring,” claiming that through his win over Carnera, Louis had become a national leader in the way that Moses brought the Israelites out of bondage. Citing the fact that Texas was now competing for a chance to host a Louis fight, along with Missouri’s decision to lift its ban of interracial matches, Burley maintained that Louis was literally knocking out Jim Crow, with his wins being every bit “as good as electing a Congressman to represent us in Washington.”100 In some respects, Louis could exert physical force and command white attention in a way that escaped his black political and intellectual counterparts. Only in the ring could a black man actually harm a white man without being arrested or lynched. Because of the ostensibly apolitical nature of Louis’s triumph, many black writers, conscious of its larger symbolic implications, could celebrate it in detail without fear of reprisal. Extensive photo layouts of the Italian Giant’s boxing demise splashed across the pages of many black newspapers, presenting multiple pictures of Louis standing over his conquered foe.101 Even though some African American journalists highlighted Louis’s mix of muscular prowess and mental acuity, contending that “his cunning brain work[ed] in accordance with fast and deadly fists,” others cautioned black Americans not to place their hopes in the individual, physical triumph of Louis.102 While the Crisis understood his importance to the “rankand-file,” they advised black America not “to hitch its wagon to a boxer, or base its judgments of achievement on the size of a black man’s biceps or the speed and power of his left hook.”103 Moreover, another editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American claimed that the contributions of intellectual Race Men like Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, along with the legal advances in the anti-lynching campaign, were “worth a dozen suc-
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cesses in the prize ring.”104 Regardless of its cathartic value, Louis’s win had not altered the structures of oppression in America, nor had it blazed any new paths for racial progress. Placing more weight in the potential of academic and political tactics for achieving manhood rights, they questioned the significance of sporting victories. Falling between these two extremes, some editorialists believed that even if Louis did not bring institutional changes, he was still an appropriate role model of racial uplift, especially for young boys. While not inclined to view Louis as “a Moses of the race or as an Economic Hope,” one writer for the Journal and Guide maintained that the Bomber’s “moderation, temperance, [and] modesty” offered the “real moral in his victory, the most important thing to be proud of.”105 A few weeks after the Louis-Carnera bout, the New York Amsterdam News attempted to put these ideals into action, founding and sponsoring a “Joe Louis Boys Club” that encouraged youngsters to follow in the footsteps of “America’s model young man.” According to its advertisement, the club’s main purpose was to instil the young men of the community with Louis’s discipline and competitive spirit.106 Yet, however much adults wished that young boys would emulate Louis’s respectability, the teen generation had different reasons for idolizing the boxer. According to the fieldwork of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, black youths from all classes in the 1930s admired Louis for his conspicuous wealth and hip style and drew vicarious satisfaction from his brutalizing of white opponents.107 To them, Louis was less about uplift and more about black pride and militancy. Ultimately, even if the heavyweight emerged as a contested symbol with little concrete effect on the realities of long breadlines and Mussolini’s imperial designs, his win over Carnera still served to shine a critical spotlight on the struggles and ironies of black life. Both journalists and cartoonists in the African American press used the gendered images of boxing to formulate political critiques that drew explicit connections between foreign fascism and domestic racism. The focal point of the Chicago Defender’s picture page showed a battered Carnera on the mat with a caption that read, “I’d rather be in Ethiopia.”108 In another particularly poignant, postfight drawing, a boxer resembling Louis became a proxy for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, standing victorious over a dazed Carnera look-alike that had “Pullman Company, Unionism” written across his chest.109 As a figure that embodied the deep connections between diasporic and domestic politics, Louis’s victory in the ring had underlined the hypocrisy and unfairness of not only Mussolini and the League of Nations, but also white America. Pointing to the sheer absurdity of it all, another Afro-American editorialist wondered what “secret of mass psychology” turned white humanity
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in one part of the nation into a murderous mob, while in another “they cheer to the echo a little brown boy who pummels the gore out of a big white man mountain?”110 Louis’s victory over Carnera had exposed the many-headed beast of white supremacy, while also subjecting it to a cultural barrage of strong black manhood.
Schmeling takes Sampson Following the Carnera fight, many journalists in the white dailies suddenly became repositories of advice for Louis, offering cautionary tales of what could happen if the young fighter let amusement and overconfidence get in the way of his boxing. Bill Corum of the New York Evening-Journal warned Louis to stick to his “Ma” and to steer clear of the jazzy night life in Harlem. In a patronizing, almost race-baiting fashion, the writer counseled: “Don’t get big headed. . . . Behave yourself.” Above all, Corum reminded Louis that he was not only a fighter, but a symbol to his race.111 On May 16, 1936, in Lakewood, New Jersey, Louis celebrated his twenty-second birthday, along with the official opening of his training camp for the first of his two bouts against Germany’s Max Schmeling. Boxing’s dignitaries, from Nat Fleischer of Ring Magazine to World Heavyweight Champion Jim J. Braddock, honored the young fighter for his spectacular achievements over the last year.112 However, with his next match only a month away, one of the most popular questions in the white mainstream press was whether or not Louis “could take” the pressures of his newfound fame. As yet another test of his mettle as Race Man, Louis’s skirmish with Schmeling would once again become a stand-in for larger racial conflicts at home and abroad. As Louis began his preparations, Corum’s foreshadowing of the young boxer’s potential downfall seemed to be coming true. Over ten pounds heavier and reputedly more interested in improving his golf game than his fighting skills, Louis appeared disinterested and sluggish during his initial practices. Even though Louis was the younger and more talented boxer, journalists from both presses wondered if his apparent smugness would cause him to falter. As Lloyd Lewis of the Chicago Daily News contended, “Joe Louis is the only man who can whip Joe Louis.”113 While some writers in the white dailies continued to infer that Louis’s listlessness confirmed that blacks could not handle positions above their usual station, the African American press responded with continued faith in the abilities and ambition of their New Negro of the manly art. Although one journalist in the New York American argued that “success and plenty” were spoiling the former “canebrake baby” turned “million-dollar corpo-
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ration,” most reports in the black press tended to take on a more positive view of Louis’s training efforts by the beginning of June.114 Outside the ring, African American writers celebrated Louis’s new role as husband and provider for his sophisticated, beautiful bride, Marva Trotter, thereby appropriating the gender roles of white bourgeois society. After their wedding in September 1935, the black press seized on the opportunity to refute the popular racist image of Louis as a “Mammy’s boy,” promoting the young couple as black America’s first family. Freed from the responsibilities of her secretarial job, Mrs. Louis pursued charity work, practiced the piano, visited the beauty salon, and attended parties of New York’s black society. While Marva soon gained her own form of celebrity, admired by black women for her poise, charm, and fashion sense, she assured her fans that “Joe’s the boss of our family and he’s always going to be so.” 115 Even though economic imperatives prevented most African Americans from fulfilling these patriarchal ideals, journalists shaped Louis and his wife into a public display of healthy black American family life. Yet, an underlying critique of Louis’s decision to marry before obtaining the heavyweight title would later come back to haunt Marva after her husband’s loss to Schmeling. Even before their nuptials, many of Louis’s black fans made it clear that they thought his managers needed to shield him from the corrupting influences of women to protect his strength. As one editorialist in the Baltimore Afro-American argued, “An athlete who marries is usually no good for a year, trainers say. And this is the reason managers of Joe Louis will be shooing sweet girls away from their charge until he is champion.” The temptations of female sexuality were apparently a dangerous distraction in the field of manly battle, and the editorialist went on to warn Louis’ handlers not to take any chances “with some Delilah who might snear [sic] their Sampson.”116 In addition to this sexualized, domestic plotline, the Louis-Schmeling match up became a metaphorical battle in which African Americans could combat the theory of Aryan supremacy that stripped the Jews of their rights in Nazi Germany and kept blacks from achieving equality in the United States. The African American press had already been reporting the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews and its links to American racism as early as 1933.117 Arguably, the Jewish question did not acquire the same kind of popular resonance in the black press in comparison to the Abyssinian crisis, which still continued as a featured news item even in the summer of 1936. However, it was clear that, for some sectors of the black population, the Louis-Schmeling match had both international and national implications for the race. Although the suave Schmeling did not have the same savage appeal as Carnera, the black press still invited their readers to make
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ethnic comparisons, offering side-by-side photos of the fighters’ physical weapons, along with listings of their measurements.118 In contrast, white sportswriters generally ignored the international implications of the fight, since Hitler’s persecution of the Jews had not yet become an issue in the mainstream daily press. Even the Nazis had little interest in promoting their ties to the match, since they assumed that Schmeling would lose.119 In the weeks before the bout, many white American dailies appeared to put aside their national allegiances to promote the German in articles and pictures. While the text of the Atlanta Constitution grudgingly argued for Louis’s inevitable victory over Schmeling, the southern paper’s absence of Louis pictures versus its numerous, handsome photos of the German heavyweight spoke volumes about who they wanted to win.120 Other white sportswriters were more transparent with their allegiances to Schmeling, like Pat Rosa of the New York Post who claimed that the prideful and industrious German would certainly give Louis the “Drifter” a run for his money. For Rosa, this test of “mind . . . over matter” would favor the talents of Schmeling.121 Louis was not the American hero that he would later become in his rematch against the German in 1938. For many white fans, the upcoming bout was decidedly racial rather than nationalistic. Already delayed one day because of rain, the fight took place at Yankee Stadium on the overcast evening of June 19, 1936. The poor weather coupled with a Jewish boycott of the fight made for a relatively small crowd of 45,000 spectators. Unlike the cool, lean panther of just a year ago, Louis looked thicker around the waist, while Schmeling possessed the best physique of his career. In pre-fight interviews, Schmeling revealed that he had discovered a weakness in Louis’s supposedly impenetrable defense, and he intended to exploit it. Throughout the bout as Louis consistently dropped his left guard when throwing his right, Schmeling hit him with stiff counterpunches to the jaw. In the fourth round, the German fighter rocked Louis with a hard right, sending him reeling. Although Louis managed to stand his ground in the face of many punishing blows, in round twelve Schmeling smashed him with a right, sending him to his knees against the ropes. As Louis rose to his feet on the count of four, Schmeling finished him off with another stiff right. Louis dropped to the canvas and lay prostrate as if sleeping.122 A shell-shocked black America went into mourning. African American fans all across the country hung their heads in gloom. Their Race Man had fallen to the representative of Aryan supremacy. As one report from Louis’s home base of Detroit described, “It was like a sudden death in the family.”123 With black America grieving, the white press quickly threw their support behind Schmeling, arguing that the so-called Nazi boxer had proved
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“[h]e was too smart for the Negro.” While Grantland Rice exaggerated when he deemed the fight the “most severe beating in ring history,” the New York Post presented a pitiful picture of the fallen Louis on his backside, accompanied by a headline that reduced him to “Just a Scared and Beaten Boy.”124 Louis’s loss seemed to confirm black America’s inferiority. African American fans did not know what to make of their “Superman’s” fall from grace. Rumors of doping quickly hit the black press. Another particularly vicious example of the post-fight gossip pointed the finger of blame at Marva, charging that she had distracted Louis before the match by showing him a recent love letter from her former boyfriend. In the Black Man, Marcus Garvey maintained that Louis had simply married too early, reasoning that the young boxer would have won against Schmeling if he were still a single man. For Garvey and many of Louis’s black fans, the tragic defeat appeared to prove the liability of women in the war of the races. Their male-centered conceptions of the fight for racial equality seemed to leave little room for the mea