Word: robinsons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tygiel, the Robinson story is about more than just baseball; it's a precursor of the potent new force in American politics--the civil rights movement. His thesis is that baseball's integration process closely mirrored the integration process as a whole across the United States over the next two decades. More than that, integration in baseball had a direct effect, Tygiel argues, on the efforts to desegregate society in general--acting as part and parcel of the forces breaking down old Southern mores...
...transformation. He painstakingly shows how much the elements of baseball desegregation resembled those of the desegregation movements as a whole. These included, he notes, direct confrontation with Jim Crow; courage in the face of personal abuse; economic pressures to allow Blacks into the mainstream; and indignant newspaper editorials. Jackie Robinson's increased militance towards racism over the course of his career, Tygiel writes, reflected the general militancy the civil rights movement adopted over time...
...even more difficult to conceive of all the ways--and Tygiel recounts many--in which baseball desegregation helped directly speed national efforts. Just consider the effect of teams bringing Blacks down to spring training. For Robinson's Dodgers, according to Tygiel, the tours through the South "challenged deeply entrenched Jim Crow traditions"--from the segregation on the trains players traveled in, the restaurants in which they ate, or the hotels where they slept. "We were paying our dues long before the civil rights marches," the great Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe told Tygiel proudly. "Martin Luther King told...
...emerging at the end of the 19th century in America--is an example of a number of instances where Tygiel would do well just to call people racist and be done with things. And he ought to be sentenced to bench duty for calling Pete Reiser a "colleague" of Robinson's on the Dodgers...
...recall it from personal experience and those less fortunate who remember it only from the worn pages of the record books, is brought back to life. The roll-call of greats that parade through Tygiel's pages pay ample testament to the glory of those days: Rickey, Robinson, Reese, Durocher, Sukeforth, Campanella, Veeck, Mays, Aaron, Newcombe...At the very least, we are grateful to Tygiel for culling these names and others from scrapbooks and long-destroyed card collections. And at the most, Tygiel transforms a dramatic but simple tale into a complex metaphor for some of the driving forces...