Rebuilding Rob

This past Thursday, Major League Baseball held its first ever regular season game at Birmingham, Alabama’s Rickwood Field. For those who aren’t familiar with Rickwood, it is the oldest professional baseball stadium in the United States, opening two years before Boston’s Fenway Park. Needless to say, dozens of Hall of Famer have played on the historic field before making their way to the major leagues.

Earlier in the week, there were other events that proceeded the MLB game at Rickwood, including a celebrity softball game and a minor-league baseball game. The Rickwood game was announced last year, on the announcement to renovate the field of dream, Stadium, and Iowa, major league baseball has held an annual game for the previous two seasons.

The entire event was an opportunity to spotlight the accomplishments of Negro League Baseball players as well as as a reminder of race, racism and baseball’s place as part of American history.

Reggie Jackson was one of the guests who joined the fox announcers during pregame festivities. He asked some questions about Willie Mays, who had passed away Tuesday. Jackson also took the opportunity to talk about some more candid, darker in his own experiences playing baseball in the South and early 1960s.  (the embedded link is queued to the 4:35 mark where Jackson begins)

This was… Sobering. You could tell the three other guys at the table were not ready for what Jackson had to say. There’s one point early in this response where you can hear Reggie’s voice cracking and he looks like he’s on the verge of tears. For a kid who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, this image of an old Reggie Jackson, talking about his own experiences with racism clashes with the “straw that stir the drink“ image he projected in the prime of his playing career.

There’s a lot to absorb here. Jackson talks about experiences that happened to him roughly 15 years after Jackie Robinson had integrated major league baseball. Of course, when does it need to be a major history buff to understand that the American south was, and continues to be fairly racist. Keeping in mind, this all took place before the passing of the civil rights act at 1964, which may have changed the law of the land; but didn’t change the mind and hearts of a lot of people.

The truth is people need to hear stuff like this. People need to know what things really were like athletes of color, or people of color that matter. my first thought were, Wow, this actually happened this long after Jackie Robinson? But the reality is, it’s not unlike a lot of peoples attitudes after Barack Obama was elected president and served in the office for eight years. There are a lot of people in this country who don’t want to admit it, but want to privately think to themselves “well, Obama was president. So therefore racism must be over!” Nothing can be further from the truth.

There’s an expression that has been attributed to many politicians and leaders over the centuries. It is best paraphrased as “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” The sad truth is that, as much as I love the utopian vision of Star Trek, we will never fully eradicate, hatred and racism from the minds and hearts of all people. This is why things like Black History Month are important. This is why it’s important that major league baseball is incorporating the Negro League statistics into its history. We society are not that far removed from the stuff happening. Hell, we have our own instances of hate crimes in the news today!

It wasn’t just the three other guys on the Fox pregame panel weren’t prepared for what Reggie Jackson had to say. I wasn’t really prepared to get on my soapbox like this today. I had seen this clip and was really moved by it, and I thought that it was worth sharing. Hopefully, it elicits some kind of reaction from you as well.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Thoughts that keep me up at night
• Requiem for a mall
• what makes a great teacher
• The O.R. Virgin
• A Day in the Life of Rob

The article “Reggie Jackson Gives a Sobering History Lesson at Rickwood Field” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.