Cuban Star by Adrian Burgos Jr

Author:Adrian Burgos, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

7

GLORY DAYS

The big league teams are taking most of them now, and I have a very small field to pick from.

—Alex Pompez, The Pittsburgh Courier, June 1945

The Brooklyn Dodgers’ signing of Jackie Robinson on October 24, 1945, shook the professional baseball world. A major-league team had finally taken a very real step, not just making a halfhearted offer of a tryout as the Pittsburgh Pirates had done in 1942, or hosting a sham tryout for talented black players as the Boston Red Sox did in April 1945, or offering coy denials about no rule, written or otherwise, that denied black players the opportunity to perform in the majors. Integration was in its infancy, and those who had long campaigned for the demolition of organized baseball’s color line rejoiced. Black baseball owners scrambled. They were in an unenviable position: as businesspeople, they operated an entity whose finished product—talented black players—was now a desired commodity and in need of protection; as “race” men and women, they could not protest too vociferously that a formerly segregated institution had begun to open its doors to blacks. Thus, Pompez and his fellow Negro-league owners faced the monumental challenge of retooling what had been created as a “shadow” institution to serve the nonwhite community of baseball fans into a league serviceable for the new integrated era. Critics and supporters alike told them to “get their house in order,” which proved much more difficult than expected.

NNL owners set out to disprove that theirs was more “a racket” than a professional organization, as Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey had charged when he signed Robinson. At their January 1947 gathering at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, NNL owners finally unseated Tom Wilson as league president and elected the circuit’s first independent top executive, Reverend John H. Johnson, chaplain of Harlem’s St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. The death of Cum Posey swung the vote that ended Wilson’s decade-long hold on the league’s top post as Posey’s replacement, Sonnyman Jackson, aligned himself with Pompez, Manley, and Semler—all numbers men in the past—in casting a 4–2 vote for Johnson; Wilson and Gottlieb, unsurprisingly, voted to retain the status quo.1

Johnson’s election reflected the hope that new leadership could persuade those who wielded power within organized baseball of the mutual benefits of having the Negro leagues as a partner in desegregating the national pastime. The new NNL president joined the reelected vice president, Pompez, and instituted a series of reforms that raised the league’s professional standards and strove to build up the circuit’s good name. The reforms addressed concerns organized baseball officials previously expressed about the structure and operation of Negro-league baseball: the form of the official contract, the execution of the league schedule, the behavior and background of black baseball owners themselves. Johnson knew this rehabilition effort involved public relations, since major-league officials were hesitant to publicly partner up with Negro-league owners in the racial desegregation of organized baseball. Moving mountains seemed easier than budging Major League Baseball commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler and other big-league executives

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