by Joseph Williams and Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier
Back when he played, baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was a great hitter in pressure situations. He was especially clutch in the World Series, so much that sportswriters gave him the nickname “Mr. October.”
Last week, nearly 40 years after his retirement from the game, Jackson came through in the clutch again — this time, for history, truth and Black people — during Major League Baseball’s “Tribute to the Negro Leagues” game in Birminham, Alabama.
Intended to celebrate the teams and players Jim Crow kept out of the major leagues, the event included the largest-ever gathering of surviving Negro League players. It climaxed in the first regular-season, major-league game ever played in Alabama, between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals in Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field, former home of the Birmingham Black Barons. And it was a perfect opportunity to honor the late Wille Mays, a MLB legend who was from Birmingham, played for the Black Barons and spent 21 seasons with the Giants.
During a pregame broadcast, however, Jackson — who played for the Birmingham A’s, the Oakland A’s farm team in 1967, on his way to the majors — kept it real. Asked on the nationally-televised pregame show what the spectacle meant to him, he spoke painful truths no one wanted to talk about.
“Coming back here is not easy,” he said. Then he talked about the year he spent in the mostly-white AA Southern League, a dangerous time in a dangerous city.
“I walked into restaurants, and they would point at me and say, ‘The n— can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel, and they’d say, ‘The n— can’t stay here,’” Jackson said, as the Fox Sports broadcast team — announcer Kevin Burkhardt, fellow Hall of Famer David Ortiz and former superstar Alex Rodgriuez — sat in awkward silence. When no one would rent to him, Jackson said, he couch-surfed with white teammates “3, 4 nights a week, for about a month and a half” until racists threatened to burn down their apartment building unless he left.
“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
In about 5 minutes of air time, Jackson inadvertently exposed the irony of baseball’s decision to honor the Black players it banned from its whites-only league 77 years ago. He called out Birmingham, a city so virulently opposed to the civil rights movement it was known as “Bombingham.” And he showed why right-wing politicians, white school boards and white supremacists want to bury Black history: to protect white people from feeling white guilt.
“The year before I got here, the Klan murdered 4 Black girls — children — here at a church, and never got indicted,” Jackson said, recalling the infamous 16th St. Baptist Church bombing of 1963. “Life magazine did a story on [the suspects] like they were being honored.”
Had it not been for his white teammates, “I would never have made it,” said Jackson, whose father played in the Negro Leagues. “I was ready to physically fight. I would have got killed here because I would have beat someone’s ass and you would have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”
Burkhardt, who is white, fumbled for an appropriate response. “Reggie, I — I can’t even imagine. It’s awful you had to go through that,” he said. “But, hey, you know, appreciate you sharing the rawness and the honesty of it with our audience.”
But most Black people can imagine: we have parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles who experienced the same things as Jackson. Talking about it is painful — six decades later, you can still see it in Jackson’s eyes, hear it in his voice — but passing it to the next generation keeps alive the history of what really happened in America.
That’s exactly why elected officials in states like Texas and Florida are trying to kill it with anti-diversity laws, book bans and rules restricting the teaching of race in America. Alabama, host of the Tribute to the Negro Leagues game, is following suit: the state legislature is considering a bill that allows the firing of teachers or state employees who teach “divisive concepts” in the classroom or office.
Banning discussion of racism and discrimination, though, doesn’t mean it goes away. Instead, it shape-shifts into inequality in American schools, the widening of the Black-white wealth gap, and the virtual resegregation of Major League baseball.
In 1967, when Mays was playing, American-born Black MLB players made up 13.6% of the league. This year, on Opening Day, that number had dropped almost by half. During the 2022 World Series, between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros, neither team had a native-born Black player.
The last time that happened was 1950.
To be sure, MLB did the right thing to honor the legacies of both Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues. But so did Jackson, by reminding us how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.
