The Negro Leagues and American education

Once again it’s been much too long since my last post. I’ve been working on posts but none of them seem to get done, unfortunately, but I really wanted to get something published about this particular subject.

That being the flood of state laws across the country that are banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory and outlawing in schools even the suggestion that systemic racism has always and continues to cripple our society by holding back a significant portion of the population – namely, non-white people.

(Here in Louisiana, Republicans in the State Legislature have tried to enact various anti-CRT measures but have fortunately been unsuccessful. Check out this and this.)

The basic truth of systemic racism remains that it has had and will continue to have a devastating impact it has on this country, and no amount of denying or ignorance can make it all disappear.

The notion that several well overdue laws like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, court rulings like Brown v. Board of Education, and even three Constitutional amendments simply and magically erased all the horror, evil and consequences of hundreds of years of codified racial oppression of slavery and segregation in matters of instance is laughably, erroneous and deeply, deeply flawed, offensive and injurious.

Hiding our heads from reality in the sand doesn’t make systemic racism go away, and such pathological avoidance of the truth only reflects the fear and cowardice of those who ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Just like with segregation, such laws reveal the moral weakness and terrified existences of those leaders and their supporters. People like Ron DeSantis are, quite simply, cowardly little children and bullies.

Pictured: The derpy face of white American cowardice

But with that screed of mine out of the way, we need to get at one of the fundamental questions springing from such draconian, ignorant laws – what practical effects will such bans have on education in America? What can now be taught and acknowledged, and not taught and unacknowledged, in schools in Florida, Texas and other reactionary states?

Specifically in relation to this blog, we must conjecture whether the history and impact of the Negro Leagues can be taught to our children? Many people in the modern Negro Leagues community and fandom have worked hard, with a mix of determination and opportunity, to go into schools and clubs across the nation to teach folks about the bittersweet glory of the Negro Leagues.

For decades these baseball missionaries have exposed Americans, young and old, to the wonder and greatness that was segregation-era Black baseball. But would such efforts be allowed today? Could a teacher or guest in a school introduce “Only the Ball Was White” to students? Could the brilliant work of many subsequent Negro Leagues researchers and writers even be mentioned in classes?

Or would such instruction be barred or punished in states like Florida?

Because it’s absolutely impossible to teach about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and Pete Hill and Rube Foster and Pop Lloyd and Effa Manley without relating the very reason the Negro Leagues existed at all. The history of the Negro Leagues themselves is indisputably intertwined with why they were there – oppressive bigotry, segregation and, yes, institutional racism.

As a result, I suggest that any class lessons involving these legends – and legendary teams like the Cuban Giants, Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays and Birmingham Black Barons, as well as numerous barnstorming all-star aggregations – that would be taught in school in Florida and elsewhere would be viewed by DeSantis and similar Palpatines as illegal and would be punished by the very legal system that should protect them. 

Pete Hill

In essence, the Negro Leagues now could not be taught in Florida. They simply couldn’t without vigorous, bigoted backlash.

But all this reveals another basic, unfortunate, tragic truth – that so much of what’s known as Black History in America is indeed the fight against institutional racism and oppression. The beliefs, writings and efforts of so many great African Americans were undertaken and put to paper as part of the centuries-long battle against bigotry, both codified and understood.

Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – they’re all legendary because they fought systemic racism. Think of some of the greatest works of Black literature – “The Souls of Black Folk,” “Up from Slavery,” “Native Son,” “The New Negro,” “Invisible Man” – and they all were created to, in some way, counter bigotry and correct the terrible political, economic and social impacts slavery and segregation had on our society.

Ida B. Wells

The people who are counted as important Black politicians and elected officials are, in part, remembered because they were racial pioneers in government. And from Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, John Lewis and John Conyers to Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, these trailblazers used their influence and power to affect achievements of tremendous social justice and political infrastructure.

Sports legends are no different. Isaac Murphy, Major Taylor, Jack Johnson, Fritz Pollard, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe and Charlie Sifford were not only phenomenal, accomplished athletes, but at least some of their importance to American history is the fact that they were firsts for people of color in the athletic world.

Fritz Pollard

Even someone like Michael Jordan, who although wasn’t an athletic trailblazer like Bill Russell or the Harlem Rens were, became such a crucial figure in America, and indeed the world, because he was a Black man who was able to leverage his sporting achievements into an entrepreneurial juggernaut and massive economic success. Folks like Jordan, Tiger Woods and Serena Williams represent the mythic American Dream itself by becoming millionaires and billionaires, something that even early pioneers like Marion Motley, Joe Louis or Jesse Owens couldn’t achieve. 

Which brings us back to baseball, the national pastime, the oldest American sport, and the oldest American athletic business and, quite necessarily, to the Negro Leagues and their sad reason for being.

And, progressing from that, we come to the one and only Jackie Robinson. While Jack Roosevelt Robinson was undeniably an incredible, accomplished athlete regardless of color or era – he would have been a star and Hall of Famer in any league or in any decade – the driving reason he’s held up as an American hero is because he was the first player of color in the modern-era Major Leagues.

And moreover, his greatness and legend and importance also stem from the way he withstood withering hate and abuse when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and beyond. He proved himself not just a good baseball player, but as a supremely strong, proud, resolute, honorable person and American. He was himself a Civil Rights pioneer who forever changed America for the better and bolder. That’s why he’s held up as a legend and an American hero today.

But, again, could his life, career and impact even be taught in the schools of Florida, Texas and other states today as a result? Would DeSantis-ites object to any mention in classes of a man who became a great American because of his battle and triumph over segregation and institutional, systemic racism, topics that are now feared taboo by weak, scared whites?

Frederick Douglass

Then extend the example of Jackie Robinson to other American Civil Rights legends. How could a teacher in Florida similarly instruct kids about why Frederick Douglass, Dr. King and Rosa Parks are important if those educators can’t even teach about someone – a “mere” baseball player – as fundamental to the last hundred years of American history and the lingering impact of that history?

When a nationwide movement calling, happily often successfully, for the removal of Confederate and Jim Crow statues, names and titles from the public sphere several years ago, reactionary whites leveled panicked cries of “how history was being erased.” They blustered and bloviated sanctimoniously about how Confederate history was, for better or for worse, American history, and thus shouldn’t be relegated to obscurity.

Overdue, to say the least

But now, these same reactionaries are now hypocritically doing the very thing they decried as an American catastrophe – effectively erasing history by banning its teaching. They’re deleting most of Black history from classrooms and textbooks across the country because teaching the reality of that history and the continuing, tragic impact of people of color would make them, and their precious white children, uncomfortable and sad. Snowflakes, indeed.

Black history – and therefore all of American history – is effectively being blotted out from lesson plans. We can’t teach about heroes like Jackie Robinson or MLK without accepting why they’re heroes – their heroism is defined and even exists because of systemic racism.

And without teaching the painful, ugly, centuries-long history of system and institutional racism in America, we cannot even begin to hope for the type of social and cultural reckoning that is absolutely necessary in order to affect nationwide healing that is so feared and almost pathologically avoided by people like DeSantis and his myopic, bigoted, cowardly supporters.

That reckoning with reality then necessarily envelopes the lives of, accomplishments made by and lessons imparted by American athletes like Jackie Robinson – and unavoidably, the Negro Leagues and Black baseball history.

It’s that Black baseball history that, sadly, stands as an emblematic microcosm of the entirety of American history and current American society. And if we can’t teach about Satchel Paige, Cum Posey, Sol White and Rube Foster – themselves relatively benign subjects compared to the shameful legacy of lynchings, mass murder and other violence – then how can we even teach the whole of Black history, as well as, then, the way that terrible, bittersweet history continues to cause the systemic, institutional racism that hasn’t simply disappeared in America, no matter how much some might want it to?