The Answer is 42

16 April 2007



Baseball Celebrate 60 Years of Integration

April 15 is best known in America as the day tax forms have to be postmarked. However, for the last 60 years, it has also been the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. The event preceded the integration of the US military by about 15 months, and it is the real beginning of the civil rights era. Yesterday, the majors marked this occasion with a plethora of jerseys bearing Mr. Robinson’s old number, 42.

One can hardly imagine US sports without the full participation of athletes from all ethnic groups, and in particular black athletes. Basketball without Michael Jordan, both as a player and an owner? American football without Walter Payton or Donovan McNabb? Tennis without Arthur Ashe, to say nothing of the Williams Sisters? Yet baseball is the quintessential American sport, the game the immigrants adopted along with their new national identity to prove that they, too, were Americans.

For many years, black Americans were denied that status, even after they passed from being property to being (third-class) citizens thanks to President Lincoln. Then, the Jim Crow laws came in the traitorous states of the South, and South African apartheid was no worse. What America, and indeed the world, lost was the unrealized potential of thousands, even millions of human beings. However, merit eventually wins through.

Branch Rickey, the man who brought Mr. Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, didn’t pretend that he was a crusader for justice. He flat out said his motivation was to win baseball games. The Negro Leagues were loaded with talent (Mr. Robinson, Satchell Paige, Josh Gibson). Bringing that talent to the white leagues was nothing more than enlightened self-interest. But a funny thing happened on the way to the ball park; the country changed. As Charles Barkley of NBA fame said a couple of years ago, nowadays the greatest rapper is white, the greatest golfer in the world is black and the greatest basketball player is Chinese (this was before Mr. Barkley discovered Steve Nash).

There are fewer black players and fewer black faces in the stadia today than there were 10 years ago, and baseball is making an effort to reignite the interest it formerly held. After all, a 60th anniversary isn’t numerically important except that it ends in “0.” That is a reflection of the times. Major league baseball is now trying to attract black players and fans rather than keeping them out. There is one other difference. These days, the black athlete has to compete for the jobs with Latin American and Asian players as well as the white guys. That’s why yesterday, some teams gave everybody the number “42,” which as fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know is the answer to life, the universe and everything.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.


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