The Color of Baseball: (The Myth About) How MLB Was Integrated
Keywords:
baseball, racial segregation, American culture, mythmakingAbstract
Baseball is a sport perceived locally - in the USA - as well as globally, almost in the sense of objective correlative to concepts of “America” and “American”. The most important professional competition in baseball is Major League Baseball (MLB), and it has existed for almost a century and a half. On the 15th of April in 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the MLB. Americans define this as an integration of baseball, or as a turnaround point in the process of breaking the color barrier. In this text I observe exactly this procedurality of events, that is the myth-making instrumentalization of events which signify the whole process. I maintain this by showing how did racial segregation in American baseball took place, how it was carried out, and how the fight was fought and won against it. Furthermore, I argue that such a discourse consists of elements similar to those which myths are built of - elements such as heroic actors and great deeds which manage to reverse the course of history. Also, they are transmitted in the similar fashion, by presenting historical facts as patterns, and not as a causal chain of events effected by different socio-cultural circumstances.
References
Alpert, Rebecca. 2008. Jackie Robinson, Jewish Icon. Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (2): 42–58.
Axelrod, Daniel Ryan. 2021. Baseball’s Minor Leaguers Call Foul: How the Save America’s Passtime Act Strikes Out Within State Lines. Hofstra Law Review 49 (2): 499–534.
Beck, Bernard. 2014. The Dark Knight Rises: In 42 Jackie Robinson Saves the American Dream. Multicultural Perspectives, 16 (2): 86–90.
Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Burgos Jr. Adrian. 1997. Playing Ball in a Black and White “Field of Dreams”: Afro-Caribbean Ballplayers in the Negro Leagues, 1910–1950. The Journal of Negro History 82 (1): 67–104.
Chacar, Aya S, William Hesterly. 2004. Innovations and Value Creation in Major League Baseball, 1860–2000. Business History 46 (3): 407 – 438.
Das, Veena. 1996. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Deanne, Bill. 2013. Baseball Myths. Debating, Debunking and Disproving tales from the Diamond. Lanham MD/ Toronto CA/ Plymouth UK: The Scarecrow Press.
Harnischfeger Mark, Mary E. Corey. 2010. Cap, Jackie, and Ted: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow Baseball. OAH Magazine of History 24 (2): 29–36
Gmelch, George. 2008. An anthropologist on the team. Studying baseball as a former player. Anthropology Today 24 (6): 10–15.
Henry, Patrick. 1997. Jackie Robinson: Athlete and American Par Excellence. Virginia Quarterly Review 73 (2): 189–203.
Kahn, Roger. 2014. Rickey & Robinson. The True Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press
Kanago, Bryce, David George Surdam. 2020. Intimidation, Discrimination, and Retaliation: Hit-by-Pitches during the Integration of Major League Baseball. Atlantic Economic Journal 48 (1): 67–85.
Kaplan, Paul M. 2007. Opening day: The story of Jackie Robinson’s first season. Library Journal 132 (2): 78.
Kelly William W. 2007. Is baseball a global sport? America’s ‘national pastime’ as global field and international sport. Global Networks 7 (2): 187–201.
Knee, Stuart. 2003. Jim Crow Strikes Out: Branch Rickey and the Struggle for Integration in American Baseball. Culture, Sport, Society 6 (2–3): 71–87.
Laliberte David J. 2013. Foul Lines: Teaching Race in Jim Crow America through Baseball History. The History Teacher 46 (3): 329–353.
Lamb, Chris. 2002. „What’s Wrong With the Baseball“: The Pittsburgh Courier and the Beginning of its Campaign to Integrate the National Pastime. The Estern Journal of Black Studies 26 (4): 189–203.
Leach, Edmund R. 1969. Genesis as Myth and Other Essays. London: Cape.
Lhamon Jr. W.T. 2003. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge MA/ London UK: Harvard University Press.
Lomax, Michael. 1998. ‘If He Were White’: Portrayals of Black and Cuban Players in Organized Baseball. African American Men 3 (3): 31–44.
Lowenfish. Lee. 2009. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books.
Macklin, Tony. 1999. American Pastime. The North American Review 284 (3/4): 14–18.
Mann, Arthur William. 1957. Branch Rickey: American in Action. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Nuñez, Alex. 2022. A Catcher’s Mask: Vincent Nava, Mexican Americans, and the Question of Race in Early Baseball. Journal of American Ethnic History 42 (1): 82–102.
Peterson, Robert. 1970. Only the Ball Was White. A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rowan, Carl. 2015. Wait Till the Next Year. The Story of Jackie Robinson. Mountain View, CA/ New York: Ishi Press.
Ruck, Rob. 2011. Raceball: How the major leagues colonized the Black and Latin game. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.
Schug, Mark C, M. Scott Niederjohn, William C Wood. 2021. How Jackie Robinson and Adam Smith Worked Together to Desegregate Major League Baseball: An Educational Note. Journal of Private Enterprise 36 (4): 75–83.
Sipress, Joel M. 1997. Relearning Race: Teaching Race as a Cultural Construction. The History Teacher 30 (2): 175–185.
Sparks, Glenn. 2022. Pee Wee Reese. The Life of a Brooklyn Dodger. Jefferson, NC: McFarland
Surdam, David, Kenneth Brown, Paul E. Gabriel. 2016. Not So Black and White: Race and Promotion in Major League Baseball, 1951–1955. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 40 (4): 315–328.
Swain, Rick. 2005. The Black Stars Who Made Baseball Whole: The Jackie Robinson Generation in the Major Leagues, 1947–1959. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Tygiel, Jules. 2002. “Unreconciled Strivings: Baseball in Jim Crow America”. In The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity, eds. Lawrence Baldassaro and Richard A. Johnson, 257–270. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Vajt, Lesli. 1970. Nauka o kulturi. Beograd: Kultura.
Vincent, Fay. 2007 The Only Game in Town: Baseball Stars of the 1930s and 1940s Talk About the Game They Loved. New York: Simon & Schuster
Volz, Brian D. 2013. Race and the Likelihood of Managing in Major League Baseball. Journal of Labor Research 34 (1): 30–51.
White, Leslie A. 1965. Anthropology 1964: Retrospect and Prospect. American Anthropologist (New Series) 67 (3): 629–637.
ERIH PLUS - European Reference Index for the Humanities
CEEOL - Central and Eastern European Online Library
The DOI Foundation