In February 1971, MLB established a 10-man committee that will title one Negro League participant a 12 months “as part of a new exhibit commemorating the contributions of the Negro Leagues to baseball.” The rationale for not together with Negro Leaguers with their White contemporaries was that Negro League gamers didn’t meet the minimal 10 years requirement of MLB service. Critics instantly panned that plan as “separate-but-equal” therapy.
The committee’s first choice was legendary pitcher Satchel Paige, who made his major league debut in 1948 on the age of 42 after a protracted profession within the Negro Leagues. He took exception to the circuitous admission to the Hall.
“I was just as good as the White boys,” Paige said. “I ain’t going in the back door to the Hall of Fame.”
Jackie Robinson, who had damaged baseball’s shade barrier in 1947, suggested that Paige boycott that summer’s induction.
“It’s not worth a hill of beans,” stated Robinson, the Hall of Fame’s first Black inductee. “It’s the same thing all over again.”
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn wrote in his autobiography that there was opposition from some within the baseball institution about letting Negro League stars in below any circumstances.
“I found unpersuasive and unimpressive the argument that the Hall of Fame would be ‘watered down’ if men who had not played in the majors were admitted,” wrote Kuhn, who had grow to be commissioner in 1969. “‘The rules are clear,’ said my opponents. ‘You need ten years of major league experience. Moreover, where are the statistics to support them? There was only sketchy and sloppy record keeping in the Negro Leagues.’
“I thought these arguments were much too technical under the circumstances. Through no fault of their own, the black players had been barred from the majors until 1947. Had they not been barred, there would have been great major-league players, and certainly Hall of Famers, among them.”
Phil Dixon, co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and creator of the ebook, “The Dizzy and Daffy Dean Barnstorming Tour: Race, Media, and America’s National Pastime,” stated in an interview that baseball wished to maintain the Hall of Fame segregated, the best way the game itself had been.
“There’s a legacy where baseball had no place for Black players,” he stated.
Kuhn recalled in his ebook holding a “heated and unpleasant” assembly in early 1970 in his workplace to debate the difficulty. Hall of Fame President Paul Kerr and former baseball commissioner Ford Frick, who’s credited with serving to to create the Hall of Fame, opposed admitting Negro League gamers, whereas New York Daily News sports activities columnist Dick Young argued forcefully for their admission. Kuhn wrote that he realized the opposition was too nice to beat and that he didn’t have the votes on the Hall of Fame’s board of administrators.
“So I decided to slip around their flank and look for an opening,” he wrote, and created the committee for the Negro Leaguers — which included former Negro League gamers similar to Monte Irvin and Roy Campanella — to pick gamers to be honored at a Hall of Fame show. “A predictable furor ensued,” Kuhn recalled. “Cries of ‘Jim Crow’ were heard. … I was placed under personal attack for putting forth the idea.”
Or as Joe Posnanski wrote in 2013, Kuhn “tried a split-the-baby solution of having a special Negro Leagues display in the Hall of Fame which made exactly zero people happy.”
Ted Williams had given the Negro League gamers’ trigger a lift at his 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech.
“I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way could be added as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here only because they were not given the chance,” Williams said.
In a TV interview with Bob Costas years later, Williams ridiculed the Kuhn plan.
“It hit a little note,” he stated of his name to confess Negro League gamers. “They come out with, I gotta say, a half-assed program for the Black players to get into the Hall of Fame.”
The response within the media was unsparing on the time.
“1st Negro League Inductee Draws Spot in Back of Hall,” learn the headline on Bill Gildea’s Feb. 7, 1971 story in The Washington Post.
“This lone Negro will be admitted to Cooperstown’s anterooms, but not beyond,” Gildea wrote. “He will have gotten out of the bus and into his own little corner of the Hall. To be consistent, the ceremony ought to be held at the back door.”
Black stars, Gildea added, “should be honored alongside Ruth, Cobb, and DiMaggio, not around the corner from them.”
“The notion of Jim Crow in Baseball’s Heaven is appalling,’’ wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray. “What is this — 1840? Either let him in the front of the Hall — or move the damn thing to Mississippi.”
A era earlier, the Sporting News had mirrored baseball’s hostility to integration and ridiculed Jackie Robinson’s abilities when the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed him. Now, the outlet printed a bit by Wells Twombly calling out baseball for its therapy of Negro League stars.
“So they will be set aside in a separate wing,” Twombly wrote. “Just as they were when they played. It is an outright farce. If the commissioner had any shame, he would suspend the rules.”
When the committee unanimously selected Paige for induction, the New York Times reported that Kuhn, in response to “persistent questioning,” acknowledged: “Technically, you’d have to say he’s not in the Hall of Fame. But I’ve often said the Hall of Fame isn’t a building but a state of mind. The important thing is how the public views Satchel Paige, and I know how I view him.”
One of the members of the committee, Black sports activities columnist Wendell Smith, had been Jackie Robinson’s confidant and touring companion.
“Naming Satch to the Hall is a token, of course,” he said. “In a way, it’s baseball’s acknowledgement of past sins. But none of us on the committee feels that any form of segregation is involved in setting up a separate section for the black leagues. There’s nothing segregated about the regular Hall of Fame. We already have Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella there.”
In his autobiography, Kuhn wrote that he knew that the “predictable furor” could be “hard to resist. That is exactly what happened.” Baseball scrapped the separate wing in July, paving the best way for Paige to be inducted together with six White gamers and a former government in August 1971.
“Getting into the real Hall of Fame is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in baseball,” Paige advised UPI when baseball introduced the change. “All we players in the Negro Leagues could do was hear about the Hall of Fame. Now, it’s real.”
At the induction ceremony that summer time in Cooperstown, N.Y., Paige received the largest crowd response of any inductee, in response to the New York Times. Later that day, he advised reporters he’d prefer to handle in main league baseball — however that the game was not but prepared for a Black supervisor.
“I could manage easy — I’ve been in baseball 40 years,” he stated, The Post reported on the time. “And I would want to manage.”
But, he added: “I don’t think the White is ready to listen to the colored yet. That’s why they’re afraid to get a Black manager. They’re afraid everybody won’t take orders from him. You know there are plenty of qualified guys around.”
The subsequent 12 months, simply days earlier than his loss of life on the age of 53, Jackie Robinson used a nationwide platform on the 1972 World Series to induce baseball to rent a Black supervisor. It lastly occurred in 1974, when the Cleveland Indians introduced Frank Robinson as their supervisor for the next season.
Frederic J. Frommer, a author and sports activities historian, is the creator of a number of books, together with “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals.”
