Baseball's Leading Lady by Andrea Williams

Author:Andrea Williams [Williams, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

As the collective conversation around baseball’s integration continued to escalate, it eventually reached the office of Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. For most of his tenure, Landis had evaded any discussion of race in America’s pastime. After all, he’d been hired to clean up the sport after the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which the Chicago White Sox allegedly lost the World Series on purpose in exchange for payouts from sports gamblers. Bringing Black players into Major League Baseball wasn’t on his list of job responsibilities.

Historians question whether Landis was truly an avowed racist, but we do know that, if nothing else, Landis was fully invested in maintaining the status quo. Segregation had been in place long before he became commissioner, and because he was kept busy with other matters, Landis likely believed that he was doing the right thing by remaining silent about integration. But come 1942, he could remain silent no more.

On May 6, the Daily Worker published an open letter from Rodney to Landis that quoted Durocher’s 1939 comments and took the commissioner to task for allowing baseball’s continued exclusion of Black players. Soon thereafter, Landis called a closed-door meeting with Durocher, presumably to chastise him for implying that Black athletes were intentionally being kept out of the Majors. Though Landis was reluctant to address the matter directly, he didn’t want Durocher’s comments to create a public perception that Major League Baseball was still rife with bad behavior.

After the meeting, Landis made his first public statement on the matter:

Certain managers in organized baseball have been quoted as saying the reason Negroes are not playing in organized baseball is [that the] commissioner would not permit them to do so. Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been during the 21 years I have served. There is no rule in organized baseball prohibiting their participation and never has been to my knowledge. If Durocher, any other manager, or all of them, want to sign one, or twenty-five Negro players, it is all right with me. That is the business of the managers and the club owners. The business of the commissioner is to interpret the rules of baseball and enforce them.

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