Tom Yawkey. (Photo via Wikipedia by New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer - Library of Congress Prints)

DURING THE PAST decade, America has been engaged in heated debate over how to deal with statues, buildings, schools, and awards named for segregationists –- not only prominent Confederate and Ku Klux Klan figures but also people like President Woodrow Wilson. Should those statues be dismantled or those names stripped from institutions, so those they once honored might be forgotten? Or should they remain in place, but with appropriate explanations, to remind us about the role that racism has played in shaping our culture and institutions? 

Baseball has also had to reckon with iconic figures from its past who were also racists. For decades, Major League Baseball has congratulated itself for being a civil rights trailblazer, symbolized by the annual Jackie Robinson Day celebrations at every ballpark on April 15, the date that Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.  

Baseball certainly deserves credit for breaking the color line ahead of other major American institutions. But we often forget that the big leagues integrated at a snail’s pace after that. 

By 1951, only six of baseball’s 16 major league teams had a Black player. The Boston Red Sox were the final holdout, a chapter that finally ended when Elijah “Pumpsie” Green joined the team in the middle of the 1959 season, 12 years after Robinson joined the Dodgers. The person responsible for the Red Sox resistance was its longtime owner, Tom Yawkey.  

Baseball has sought to make amends for its racist past and its persistent racial inequities. It can do more to expand the pipeline of Black players, coaches, and managers – who are woefully under-represented in the major leagues.

When it comes to Yawkey, who was inducted more than 40 years ago into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball should seek to make amends, not by removing his plaque from Cooperstown, but by revising it to account for his role in maintaining the sport’s segregation.

Yawkey owes his place in the Hall of Fame to baseball’s buddy system rather than to any significant accomplishments. During the 44 years (1933-76) he owned the Red Sox, he was never an innovator or pioneer in any way. The best the Hall of Fame could come up with for his plaque was that he was the first owner to have his team travel by plane. With his lavish inheritance, Yawkey invested in some of baseball’s most expensive players, but under his ownership, his team didn’t win a pennant until 1946, and not again until 1967 and then 1975. During his long tenure, Red Sox never won a World Series.

Nevertheless, in 1980 the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, dominated by owners and executives — including American League president Joe Cronin, who had been the Red Sox player-manager, manager, and general manager — elected Yawkey into Cooperstown, four years after his death. At the time, Cronin called his former boss “one of the greatest sportsmen ever to come into the game.” Missing from Yawkey’s plaque is any mention of his role in sustaining baseball’s color barrier. 

While the Red Sox were the last team to sign a Black player, they had a golden opportunity to be the first and sign Jackie Robinson two years before he joined the Dodgers. 

In 1945, Isadore Muchnick, a progressive Boston City Council member, threatened to deny the Red Sox a permit needed to play on Sundays unless the team took steps to hire Black players. Muchnick persuaded Yawkey and Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins to schedule a tryout for three Negro League players.  

Pittsburgh Courier baseball writer Wendell Smith and Boston Daily Record sports columnist Dave Egan suggested that they audition Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams. The 90-minute tryout took place at Fenway Park on April 16, a few days before the regular season started. Robinson, the most impressive of the three, hit line drives to all fields. “What a ballplayer,” said Hugh Duffy, the Red Sox chief scout and one-time outstanding hitter. “Too bad he’s the wrong color.” None of the players heard from the Red Sox again.

Yawkey, who spent his winters on his South Carolina plantation, hired general managers and on-field managers, like Cronin, Collins, and Mike “Pinky” Higgins, who shared his opposition to integration. Their bias went beyond which players to put on the field. According to Howard Bryant’s book Shut Out: A Personal Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, as late as 1958 the Red Sox had no Black employees, including janitors, groundskeepers, and vendors, much less executives. 

You can’t blame Boston’s racial climate for the Red Sox’ reluctance to hire a Black player. The team’s National League rival, the Boston Braves, hired Negro League veteran Jethroe as its first Black player in 1950. That year he won the Rookie of the Year award at age 33. (The Celtics broke the NBA’s color barrier that same year by drafting Chuck Cooper.)

But the Red Sox waited nearly a decade, until 1959, before finally ending their ignoble streak. 

The Yawkey Foundation has claimed that the Red Sox tried to recruit African American players throughout the 1950s, but somehow they were never successful, even as other teams managed to do so. 

In 1959, when Pumpsie Green joined the team at spring training, he had to stay in a hotel in Phoenix, 15 miles from the team hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, which banned Black guests. The Red Sox brass sat on their hands. For years after the Red Sox moved their spring training to Winter Haven, Florida, in 1966, the team provided its white players, but not its Black players, with guest cards to eat at the all-white local Elks Club lodge. 

”The only way they would serve George Scott at the Elks Club was if he were on the menu,” Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee once recalled.

Over the years, the Red Sox have had some great African-American players – including Scott, Jim Rice, Mo Vaughn, Cecil Cooper, and Mookie Betts – but Black attendance at Fenway Park has always been paltry, an enduring legacy of the Yawkey years.  

‘When I go to the ballpark, there are no other blacks there,” Hubie Jones, then dean of Boston University’s school of social work, told the New York Times in 1986. ”It might as well be hockey.”

The greatest Red Sox player of all time – Ted Williams – played an important role in challenging baseball’s racism. On July 25, 1966, Williams was inducted into the Hall of Fame and used his speech to reproach baseball for keeping great Negro League players out of the Cooperstown shrine. Williams had competed against Negro Leaguers during barnstorming games starting in the early 1940s  

“I hope that someday, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson can in some way can be added as the symbol of the great Negro League players that are not here only because they were not given a chance,” Williams told the crowd that day. 

Because of his fame and prestige – and because he was viewed as a conservative – Williams’ speech had an impact, although the reluctant Hall of Fame took five more years until it inducted Paige in 1971. Many other Negro League stars have been inducted since then. 

Ironically, the Hall of Fame plaques of outstanding Negro Leaguers like Paige, Gibson, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Willie Wells, and others are in the same room with the plaques of Yawkey and Cap Anson, the driving force in banning African Americans from playing in the big leagues. 

Anson was an exceptional player and manager during the late 1800s. In 1887, he refused to allow his team, the Chicago White Stockings, to take the field if the Newark ballclub didn’t remove its two Black players, catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker and pitcher George Stovey. Other teams and leagues soon followed Anson’s example. By the early 1890s, there were no Black players in the top echelon of professional baseball. 

Anson’s Hall of Fame plaque calls him the “Greatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of 19th century,” but ignores his most enduring accomplishment – the absence of Black players from Major League teams for more than half a century. His plaque should be revised to correct that omission.

In recent years, sparked by the Black Lives Matter protest movement, MLB has made some efforts to address its own racism. 

In 2020, in the wake of a nationwide uprising over a Minneapolis police officer’s murder of George Floyd, the Minnesota Twins removed a statue of former owner Calvin Griffith from in front of Target Field in Minneapolis. At a Lions Club dinner in 1978, Griffith, who inherited the Washington Senators from his father in 1955 and moved the team to the Twin Cities in 1961, said, “I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when we found out you only had 15,000 Blacks here. We came here because you’ve got good, hard-working white people here.” 

Also in 2020, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BWAA) voted to remove the name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first  commissioner (1920-44), from the plaques given to the winners of the American and National League’s most valuable player awards. 

Landis zealously opposed baseball integration. For example, in 1923, Rube Foster, president of the Negro National League, proposed a series of games between the best Negro League and best Major League teams. Instead, Landis banned white major league teams from playing barnstorming games against Black teams, telling Foster, “When you beat our teams, it gives us a black eye.” In the early 1940s, when union leaders and publishers of Black newspapers asked to meet with Landis to discuss segregation, he denied that any ban existed.

It wasn’t until a year after Landis died that Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey signed Robinson to a contract. Ironically, in 1949 — after leading the National League in batting average (.342) and stolen bases (37), and leading the Dodgers to the World Series — Robinson received the MVP award named after the late racist commissioner. Since that year, more than half of all 151 MVP winners have been players of color—50  African Americans, 25 Latinos, and three Asians.

The baseball writer’s organization also removed the name of J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the influential Sporting News, long known as the “Bible of Baseball,” from 1914 to 1962, from its annual award to a baseball writer. Like Landis, Spink was an ardent opponent of integrating baseball. In 1942 he wrote an editorial arguing that segregation was in the best interests of both Blacks and whites because the mixing of races would create riots in the stands.  

This year, MLB began incorporating the statistics of Negro League teams that operated from 1920 to 1948 into its record books. In doing so, it acknowledged that the Negro Leagues were a “major” league and that the roughly 3,400 Negro League players will now be recognized for their on-field achievements.  

Some may think that revising Yawkey and Anson’s Hall of Fame plaques would be little more than symbolic gestures. But symbols influence how people think, and how people think can shape their behavior. They help all Americans realize that individuals with power and influence should be held accountable, even posthumously, for engaging in racist practices that damage all of society. 

In 2018, the Red Sox asked city officials to change the name of Yawkey Way outside Fenway Park to its original name, Jersey Street, to distance the team from Yawkey’s racism. Owner John Henry said he was “haunted” by the team’s racist past. He should encourage the Hall of Fame to revise Yawkey’s plaque accordingly.

Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, is co-author of Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America.