Jackie Robinson Day Whitewashes Baseball's Sordid History

As the Chicago White Stockings warmed up to take the field against the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884, so the baseball story goes, one of the White Stockings, star Cap Anson, didn't like something he saw on the other side. It was the catcher, a fellow named Moses Fleetwood Walker.

Anson was white, as was just about every pro baseball player then. Walker was black.

Anson, who was so influential in baseball then that his name was on brands of candy, cigars and bats and he charged to sign it, refused to play the game if it meant going up against a man who a generation earlier would've been thought of only as human chattel. Anson's protest was upheld, Walker was not allowed to play and the most-despicable chapter in pro sports in this country -- the 59-year-long racial segregation of baseball -- began to be written.

If you don't know that tale, it is, in part, because six years ago that most-disgusting chunk of Americana met a most-remarkable whitewashing of American history -- baseball invented Jackie Robinson Day.

"Jackie Robinson's incredible legacy continues to impact our society today," baseball commissioner Bud Selig stated Wednesday in anticipation of Thursday's remembrance of the next black major leaguer after Fleetwood Walker. "Baseball's proudest moment was when Jackie took the field in 1947, so it is important to always remember him and his achievements."

Baseball planned to do so Thursday by having every player, coach and umpire once again wear Robinson's No. 42 to honor the 63rd anniversary of the game finally allowing a black man to play again.

For the second year, Selig also invited personnel on the field to wear Robinson's number to further show the game's reverence for Robinson. It is yet another coat of paint.

Baseball should be congratulated, for what it has pulled off is one of the greatest public relations and marketing campaigns of all time. Every college or school of public communications should do a case study. It is right up there with the Swift Boat group that during the 2004 presidential campaign turned Sen. John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, into a virtual war deserter in an effort to support the re-election of President George W. Bush, who it all but turned into a war hero despite his never stepping out of the Texas National Guard. P.T. Barnum would appreciate and approve.

What baseball did in 2004 with the introduction of Jackie Robinson Day was co-opt truth and its consequences. It pulled the wool over the eyes of an increasing philistine public. It created a national amnesia.

After all, baseball told us we should celebrate on Jackie Robinson Day everything that Robinson stood for and did for our country. What he did, however, was agree to swallow his immense pride and keep his cheek turned the other way in order to have men of color who came after him not have to endure the broken hearts and shattered dreams of the generations of men of color who came before him and weren't allowed the opportunity to play baseball simply because of their parentage.

Jackie Robinson Day doesn't remind us of that. It doesn't recount that as a 25-year-old Army lieutenant at Fort Hood, Texas, Robinson refused to go to the back of a bus as black riders were expected to do in the Jim Crow South and opted to get arrested and court-martialed instead.

It doesn't recall the mythical, but fathomable, tragedy of black baseball slugger Josh Gibson, who suffered a stroke in a movie theater, was taken unconscious to his mother's house and died there a few hours later. It was 1947, the offseason before Robinson's maiden voyage in the big leagues. Gibson was just 38. He'd suffered from depression that was said to spark fits of rage and rambling outbursts. But a teammate and friend of Gibson's, Jimmie Crutchfield, always said Gibson died of a broken heart at having been born the wrong color to play in the major leagues.

There were countless Gibsons between Fleetwood Walker and Robinson. That is what shouldn't be forgotten; instead, it has been all but covered up. (It is good to know, however, that years after the Jackie Robinson Foundation was started in 1973 by Jackie's widow Rachel a few months after Jackie's death, baseball finally got around to contributing to it.)

There is no question that Robinson should be remembered for how well he put up with what he dared to go through. That he played as well as he did under the circumstances -- making six consecutive All-Star Games, winning the first Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, winning the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949 -- was one of sports' most amazing feats.

But there is no reason for baseball to just about have broken its collective arm patting itself on the back for having selected and invited Robinson from a short list of black baseball players to help it start to right a horrible wrong. Baseball should be apologizing for what Robinson became famous for doing.

And more disturbing, it has done so while inflating the myth that what became a successful Robinson experiment, as late historian Jules Tygiel so appropriately termed it, sparked the civil rights movement in this country. It didn't. It was part of the movement. It came after some critical court decisions and executive orders that mandated desegregation.

Robinson, however, attracted more attention than any such breakthrough before him because of baseball's self-proclaimed title at the time as America's pastime.

A lot of recorders of history, like the black magazine Jet, consider what Larry Doby did in baseball 10 years after Robinson's debut more significant for black dignity. He punched out white pitcher Art Ditmar for throwing at his head. The legendary sports columnist Shirley Povich called Doby's act then "the complete emancipation of the American Negro in America's national game ... for the first time a Negro player was daring to get as assertive as the white man whose special province Organized Ball had been for nearly a hundred years."

That was an immoral history. Tell it, too.