MAY 8, 1947 | BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – On this date in 1947 the sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune claimed to have uncovered a plot to put Jackie Robinson back behind the color barrier. Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers three weeks earlier. The thrust of sports editor Stanley Woodward’s story is that some members of the St. Louis Cardinals threatened to strike rather than play a team with a black player. Woodward reported that the alleged strike was thwarted by a stern warning from Cardinal team owner Sam Breadon that the league would suspend any player taking part in a strike. Breadon and others denied that any of what Woodward wrote ever took place, but several players were known to be vehemently opposed to Robinson playing and discussions of some kind of job action were not unheard of.
Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947 wasn’t the end of racism in baseball, in many ways it was just the beginning. Before April 15, 1947 there were no blacks in the game to put down, insult, threaten or force to stay in separate hotels. When Robinson began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers White baseball and White America had to confront its racism. Some of it was ugly.
And some of it was hopeful, such as later that May in Cincinnati. Robinson was being taunted mercilessly until shortstop and team captain Pee Wee Reese, a White man from Kentucky, walked across the infield and put his arm around Robinson’s shoulder to show baseball and all of America that a White man born in segregated Ekron, Kentucky and a black man born in Cairo, Georgia were in this together.
CONTRIBUTING SOURCES:
The Era: 1947-1957: When the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants
Ruled the World, by Roger Kahn
Baseball’s Greatest Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his
Great Legacy, by Jules Tygie
