Showing posts with label integration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label integration. Show all posts

October 3 - First Latin American Baseball Player in the World Series!

Posted October 3, 2019

Racism and segregation were a part of U.S. history from its beginnings, and it was a part of baseball's history, too. In 1919, Major League Baseball did not allow non-whites to play. That wasn't a written rule, but rather a "gentleman's agreement" among managers and team owners. This meant no African Americans, of course, but it also meant no black people from Latin America.

(Latin America includes most of the nations and dependencies in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. It's called "Latin" America because the European nations with Latin-based languages - mostly Spain but also Portugal and France - colonized those regions, intermarried with the native peoples to varying extents, and left their mark of influence including their languages.)



The fact that, on this date in 1919, Dolf Luque became the first Latin American ball player to play in a World Series Game was unfortunately not a blow against segregation. Adolfo Domingo De Guzmán Luque was born and raised in Cuba, but he had blue eyes and fair skin, and he was therefore considered white. 

Actually, quite a few white Cubans made it into MLB when it was still segregated - 17 of them between the years 1911 and 1929. Many of them also played Negro League baseball with integrated teams from Cuba - and that included Luque. (Professional baseball in Latin America was always integrated.)

You probably figured that Luque started his baseball career in the Cuban League; he also played a lot of winter ball there, and he became a manager in both the Cuban League and in the Mexican League.

So - a lot of different leagues!

Luque in Major League Baseball

During his MLB career in the United States, Luque was a pitcher who played for the Boston Braves, the Cincinnati Reds, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. He hit above average of other pitchers, and he helped the Giants win the fifth and final game of the 1933 World Series.

In addition to his excellent play, he was really good at helping others with their pitching; he ended up being the pitching coach for the Giants for a number of years. As I mentioned above, he was a coach and manager in Latin America in between and after his work in MLB.


Baseball's infamous color barrier

Before Jackie Robinson famously broke the MLB color barrier in 1945, the line was mussed a bit - maybe even downright blurred - by MLB's inclusion of non-black races such as Charles Albert Bender, who was part Chippewa and part white. There were numerous attempts to sign talented African American players under the pretense that they were Native American, and that held even more true for Latin American players who were often part white...and part indio, or African, or both. If the public questioned a player's brown skin, baseball managers often assured people that "So-and-so isn't Negro; he's Cuban" (or Puerto Rican, or whatever). 

Thanks to Jackie Robinson and everyone else who chipped away at and then tore down baseball's color barrier, black players have grown to 10% to 20% of all MLB players, and more than a quarter of all MLB players are from Latin America. (Obviously, there's a fair amount of overlap between those two figures!)

Integration of all races in all places and industries has been a huge boon - and we are still working on this goal! And celebration of all races, everywhere and everywhen, is another goal we have only begun to chip away at!





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November 11 - Happy Birthday, Daisy Bates

Posted on November 11, 2018

There have been so many awesome black women I have written about over the past year or two - and today's famous birthday is yet another!

Another activist, journalist, lecturer. One of the rare-for-then black publishers. Another Civil Rights icon.

Daisy Bates was born on this date in 1914 in Arkansas. She was adopted when she was only a few months old, and when she was only 8 years old she learned why: her mother was murdered, and her father had no way to raise a tiny baby while working his job at the mill. 

Daisy's mother was killed by three white men - and I won't get into the horrific, sickening details - but murder was barely investigated by the (white) police, and the killers were never found.

When Bates was a married adult, she and her husband started a weekly newspaper called the Arkansas State Press. It featured civil rights stories on the front page and stories of the achievements of black Arkansans throughout much of the rest of the paper. This newspaper was recognized as a voice for civil rights even before the nationwide Civil Rights Movement.


Bates had also been involved with the NAACP and was elected president of one of its branches.

Notice that Daisy Bates was featured alongside Jackie Robinson
and Dr. Martin Luther King!
Bates and her husband fought against school segregation - which was at that point illegal but still happening in Arkansas - through the power of the press and through publicizing the NAACP's protest events. 

But Daisy Bates was even more hands-on with integration: she was the one who guided and advised the "Little Rock Nine," the nine black students who dared to enroll in the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School. She arranged for ministers to escort the kids to school. Her house was the official drop-off and pick-up point for the kids, and Bates communicated often with the kids' parents. She joined the PTA of the high school (even though she didn't have a child there). In part because of her persistence, the kids did enroll, did attend, and eventually things did get better.

Whenever you see photos of the Little Rock Nine being escorted to
school, you see soldiers, not ministers, doing the escorting.

That's because the first few days of tension and some violence
prompted President Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas
National Guard, and he deployed soldiers to guard the students
and enforce the law - including the Supreme Court decision
that schools must be integrated.

Now the Little Rock Nine are honored by statues!

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August 31 - Happy Birthday, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

Posted on August 31, 2018

Woman's Era was the first newspaper published by and for African American women.

And today's famous birthday, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, was the woman who founded and edited it!

Ruffin, born in Boston, Massachusetts, on this date in 1842, was a civil rights leader and suffragist as well as a journalist and publisher. She helped start the American Woman Suffrage Association with prominent suffragists Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone, and she joined several other women's clubs, too. Eventually she started or helped start organizations for black women, including the Women's Era Club. 

Although she was probably treated as black by most people, including many Boston schools that were segregated during some of her schooling (and so she ended up going to schools in Salem and even far-away New York City!), Ruffin was biracial. Her father was from the Caribbean island of Martinique and had French and African roots. Her mother was white and from England.



When the General Federation of Women's Clubs met in 1900, Ruffin planned to go as representative of three different clubs, two that were made up of mostly white members, and the Women's Era Club, which had mostly black members and was considered a black club. The organizers of the General Federation said that Ruffin could be seated as a representative of the mostly-white clubs, but not of the black one. So...

So, of course, Ruffin refused on principle to be seated at all, and she was excluded from the meeting. There was a lot of publicity about this incident, and most of it was complimentary toward Ruffin.

And she continued to organize and write and publish and work...


Ruffin married a man who became the first African American graduate of Harvard Law School, AND the the first African American person elected to the Boston City Council AND the first African American municipal judge! They had five kids.



Also on this date:















































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