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George Will warns Class of 2003 against historical amnesia
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George Will delivers the Commencement address on May 18. Photo by Albert L'Etoile |
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George Will’s speech at BU’s 2003 Commencement was full
of baseball stories. Although Will is a political columnist, that should
not be surprising, because the self-professed baseball addict admits
that the sport “is always on my mind. I write about politics primarily
to support my baseball habit.”
Still, “the national pastime,
properly understood, is rich with pertinent lessons for the nation,” he
said. He warned graduates against “historical amnesia,” citing
the integration of major league baseball as an example: in 1947, with
the help of the late black
sportswriter Sam Lacy, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American
player in the major leagues. Will went on to say that Robinson rose to
the top on talent. It is a lesson, he said, that the Supreme Court should
consider in the next few weeks when it rules on whether or not giving
preferential treatment to minorities in college admissions is constitutional.
“
The lives of Sam Lacy and Jackie Robinson remind us that a core principle
of an open society is careers open to talents,” he said. “Open
to individuals, without interference — and without favoritism.”
Will
began the sun-splashed ceremony on May 18 with humor. Before his speech
to more than 5,000 graduates and 20,000 guests, he commented on
a bizarre play that had taken place during a Red Sox game the previous
day. “Before I begin, are there any mathematics majors here?” he
asked. “The Red Sox ask you to report to Fenway Park after this
ceremony to teach Trot Nixon to count to three.” Thinking there
were three outs instead of two, the Red Sox rightfielder unwittingly
threw a ball he had caught into the stands, allowing a crucial run to
score.
But Will later spoke about another Red Sox miscalculation, this
one more pernicious: not signing Jackie Robinson when they had the chance.
Robinson
had a tryout at Fenway Park in 1945, to no avail. In a “bitter-end
resistance to integration,” the Red Sox official responsible for
signing players wouldn’t show up. (The Red Sox were the last team
to field an African-American player.) The attitude cost the franchise
dearly.
“
The Red Sox suffered condign punishment for their bad behavior,” he
said. “In 1946 they lost the seventh game of the World Series.
In 1948 and 1949 they lost the American League pennant on the last day
of the season. The Red Sox might have won a World Series and two pennants
with Jackie Robinson in the lineup.”
What follows are excerpts from
Will’s speech. The complete text
can be found at www.bu.edu/news and in the summer issue of Bostonia,
due out at the end of June.
• • •
Of course baseball, the national pastime, like the nation itself, had
a long history of racism. And then Sam Lacy stepped, as it were, to the
plate.
Lacy, whose father was African-American and whose mother was a
Shinnecock Indian, was born in Mystic, Connecticut, but grew up in Washington,
D.C.,
which was then a very Southern, very segregated city. He became a baseball
fan. A fan of the Negro leagues, of course, but also of the old Washington
Senators, which was not easy at a time when the saying was “Washington:
first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”
How
bad were the Senators? Their owner, Clark Griffith, once said, “Fans
like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our
fans.”
Nevertheless, Sam Lacy loved the Senators, and loved major
league baseball, even though African-Americans were excluded from its
playing fields,
and in Washington — as in St. Louis — they were confined
to segregated sections of the stands. He hung out at the Senators’ ballpark,
shagging flies, running errands for the players, and working as a vendor
in the stands.
After graduating from Howard University, Sam Lacy became
a sportswriter for African-American newspapers, first, in 1930, at the
Washington Tribune,
then in Chicago, and after 1943, in Baltimore. He became a tireless advocate
for the integration of major league baseball. Writing columns, writing
letters, he prodded baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Landis,
who was named after the site of a Civil War battle, was a Confederate
at heart, and was hostile to Sam Lacy’s pressure. But Lacy persisted,
contacting people in major league baseball who he thought might be sympathetic,
including Branch Rickey of the Dodgers.
In 1945 Lacy wrote: “Baseball
has given employment to known epileptics, kleptomaniacs, and a generous
scattering of saints and sinners. A man
who is totally lacking in character has turned out to be a star in baseball.
A man whose skin is white or red or yellow has been acceptable. But a
man whose character may be of the highest and whose ability may be Ruthian
has been barred completely from the sport because he is colored.”
Notice
Lacy’s use of the word character. Lacy knew that the first
black big leaguer would need exceptional talent — and even more exceptional
character.
Early on Lacy focused on an African-American player who by
1940 had established himself as one of the greatest all-around athletes
America had ever seen.
This athlete became the first man at UCLA to letter in four sports. In
football, as a junior he led the Pacific Coast Conference in rushing,
averaging 11 yards a carry. Yes, 11 yards.
He also led the conference
in scoring in basketball. Twice.
On the track team he won the NCAA broad
jump championship. He dabbled at golf and swimming, winning championships
in both.
And he could play a little baseball.
His name was Jackie Roosevelt Robinson.
By 1945 he was playing baseball
in the Negro leagues. Lacy was one of those who advised Branch Rickey
that Robinson had the temperament to
play the demanding game of baseball with poise even while enduring the
predictable pressures and abuse of a racial pioneer.
But before the color
line was erased in Brooklyn, Lacy and others tried to get it erased in
Boston.
The Boston Braves were, almost always, dreadful. In fact, in the
1930s a new owner thought a change of name might improve the team’s
luck. Fans were invited to suggest names — and suggested the Boston
Bankrupts
and the Boston Basements. The newspaper people judging the suggested
names picked the Boston Bees, primarily because a short name would simplify
writing headlines. And the Bees they were for several years, before again
becoming the Braves.
But because the Braves were so bad, they would at
least listen to a good idea.
In 1935 a Boston civil rights pioneer, an
African-American, approached both the Braves and Red Sox about hiring
an African-American player.
The Red Sox gave him short shrift. The Braves, too, ultimately flinched
from challenging the major leagues’ color line — but because
the Braves were so awful, they took the idea seriously.
Notice what was
stirring. Competition concentrates the mind on essentials.
Sport is the competitive pursuit of excellence. The teams most in need
of excellence were the ones most receptive to the idea that baseball
should be color-blind.
Consider the case of Boston’s other team.
Boston has always been
an American League city. So the Red Sox were more complacent than the
Braves. Hence the Red Sox were less receptive to
the wholesome radicalism of the nascent civil rights movement.
But in
1945 a member of Boston’s city council threatened that if
the Boston teams continued to resist the integration efforts of Sam Lacy
and others, he, the city councilman, would block the annual renewal of
the license that allowed the Braves and Red Sox to play on Sundays.
The
Red Sox replied, with breathtaking disingenuousness, that no African-Americans
had ever asked to play for them and none probably wanted to because they
could make more money in the Negro leagues. The city councilman enlisted
the help of a journalistic colleague of Sam Lacy and brought three African-American
players to Boston for a workout at Fenway Park on an off-day.
One of them
was Sam Jethroe, an outfielder who later would play here, for the Braves.
Another was Jackie Robinson. The Red Sox official responsible
for signing players would not even attend the workout.
At the end of the
workout a voice from deep in the Fenway Park stands shouted, “Get
those niggers off the field!” It was 14 more
years — 1959 — before the Red Sox finally fielded an African-American
player, Pumpsie Green. At that time there were just 16 major league teams.
The Red Sox were the 16th to integrate.
During their bitter-end resistance
to integration the Red Sox sent a scout to Birmingham, Alabama, to look
at an outfielder playing for the
Birmingham Black Barons. The scout reported laconically that the outfielder
was not the Red Sox kind of player. The scout was right about that. The
outfielder was Willie Mays. . . .
The national pastime was integrated
in 1947, a year before the nation’s
military abolished segregated units. But 3 years before that — 11
years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated bus
in
Montgomery, Alabama — Lt. Jackie Robinson of the United States
Army was court-martialed for refusing, at Fort Hood, Texas, to obey a
bus
driver’s orders to move to the back of a segregated bus. Jackie
Robinson was acquitted.
It is instructive that the two most thoroughly
and successfully integrated spheres of American life are professional
sports and the military. This
is, I submit, related to the fact that both are severe meritocracies.
The
military is meritocratic because competence and excellence are matters
of life and death — for individuals and for nations. Sports are
meritocratic because competence and excellence are measured relentlessly,
play-by-play,
day-by-day, in wins and losses. Particularly in baseball, the sport of
the box score, that cold retrospective eye of the morning after.
Today
the principle that individuals should be judged on their individual merits,
not on their membership in this or that group, is still under
attack. The attack is against a core principle of an open society — the
principle of careers open to talents. Today there are pernicious new
arguments for treating certain groups of Americans as incapable of
doing what Sam Lacy knew Jackie Robinson could do: compete.
Sometime in
the next few weeks the Supreme Court, in a case rising from the University
of Michigan, will rule on the question of whether racial
preferences in college admissions are compatible with the constitutional
requirement of equal protection of the laws for all individuals. The
argument about racial preferences is another stage — in my judgment,
another deplorable detour — on our long national march toward a
color-blind society.
The lives of Sam Lacy and Jackie Robinson remind
us that a core principle
of an open society is indeed careers open to talents. Open to individuals,
without interference — and without favoritism.
It is no accident
that baseball was central to the lives of Lacy and Robinson, and to their
crusade for a meritocratic society blind to color.
Baseball’s season, like life, is long — 162 games, 1,458
innings. In the end, the cream rises — quality tells.
Quality told
in April 1946, when Jackie Robinson went to spring training with the
Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ highest minor league affiliate.
In an exhibition game he faced a veteran pitcher, a Kentuckian, who thought
he would test Robinson’s grit by throwing a fastball at his head.
Robinson sprawled in the dirt, then picked himself up, dusted himself
off, and lashed the next pitch for a single.
The next time Robinson came
to bat, the Kentuckian again threw at Robinson’s
head. Again, Robinson hit the dirt. And then he hit the next pitch. Crushed
it, for a triple.
After the game the Kentucky pitcher went to Robinson’s
manager, another Southerner, and said simply, one Southerner to another: “Your
colored boy is going to do all right.”
He did more than all right.
Jackie Robinson became 1947’s Rookie
of the Year, en route to the Hall of Fame.
In 1948, Sam Lacy became the
first African-American member of the Baseball Writers Association of
America. And in 1997, the day before he turned
94, he was inducted into the writers and broadcasters wing of the Baseball
Hall of Fame. So Sam and Jackie will forever be, as it were, teammates
in Cooperstown.
• • •
6
June 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations