THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, June 20, 1996 TAG: 9606200002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By CHRIS LAMB
LENGTH: 62 lines
During a radio interview on July 29, 1938, New York Yankee outfielder Jake Powell said that during the off-season he kept in shape as a policeman in Dayton, Ohio, by ``cracking niggers over the head'' with his nightstick. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis suspended the ballplayer for 10 days. It was the first time in baseball history that anyone was suspended for using derogatory, racist language.
The ``Jake Powell incident,'' as it became known, has relevance today, given the recent suspension of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott for making racist comments. It is difficult, if not impossible, to defend the comments of either Powell or Schott. It also is difficult to defend the baseball establishment's record on racial issues, then or now.
When Powell was suspended in 1938, there had not been a black in major-league baseball since Moses Fleetwood Walker played in 1884. Nobody did more to ensure baseball's policy of racial separation than Landis, who suspended Powell for ``his uncomplimentary reference to a portion of the nation's population.'' Landis summarily blocked all attempts to allow black players in the game from 1921, when he took office, until he died in 1943.
Black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, Philadelphia Afro-American, Amsterdam News and Norfolk Journal and Guide, recognized far better than white newspapers the injustice of baseball's ``unwritten law'' prohibiting black ballplayers.
The black press used the incident to attack not just Powell, but baseball in general. The Philadelphia Afro-American said that Powell merely reflected the attitudes of the segregated game he played. The Amsterdam News reported that hundreds had signed a petition demanding that the ballplayer apologize or be banned from the game. The Chicago Defender demanded that Powell be suspended for life and discharged from the Dayton police force. As it turned out, Powell did not work as a policeman in Dayton after all. This, too, was part of his little joke.
The white press, for the most part, ignored the story, downplayed it, or dismissed the remark as a harmless joke. The exceptions included Hugh Bradley of The New York Post, who accused Landis of ``smug hypocrisy.'' Syndicated columnist Westbook Pegler said it was time for the major leagues to admit blacks. That wouldn't happen until 1947.
According to author William Donn Rogosin, the incident was important in the effort to integrate baseball because not only did it solidify the black community's outrage against the sport's color line, it also emphasized the instability of segregated baseball, where an intemperate comment could immediately embroil the sport in controversy. It also provides a history lesson in how the mainstream press often neglects, or at least marginalizes, coverage of minorities.
Marge Schott is an embarrassment to the game of baseball. Yet suspending Schott was hypocritical on the part of acting Commissioner Bud Selig and the rest of baseball's owners, whose collective record of putting blacks in positions outside the baseball diamond has been shameful. This part of the story has been lost in all the sound and fury over Schott. The nation's press should have saved some of its outrage for the inadequate number of black owners, managers, general managers and other front-office positions in the national pastime. MEMO: Chris Lamb is an assistant professor of journalism at Old Dominion
University. by CNB