Black History Month celebrates the African American experience in February, partly because it contains the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
A lesser-known but meaningful February birthday belongs to Linda Carol Brown, a Black third-grader who changed the course of public education in America. Her 1954 Supreme Court victory came during the visible surge of Black major league baseball players in the 1950s. This could not have been a mere coincidence.
Sports not only reflect America, but they can be a major influence on America. After 1947, Jackie Robinson’s headline excellence and grace altered baseball, but it affected America, too. That journey began with Moses Fleetwood Walker, who was African American. He played 42 big league games in 1884 for the Toledo Blue Stockings.
Thereafter, no other Black players would be in the majors until Robinson. Commissioner Kenesaw Landis, a Chicagoan, ruled baseball for 23 years and enabled major league segregation. Soon after Landis died in November 1944, Branch Rickey signed Robinson to the Dodgers’ farm club Montreal Royals. That was no coincidence either.
Soon after Robinson debuted, Chicagoan Bill Veeck signed Larry Doby to the Cleveland Indians. Veeck championed minority players and even signed 42-year-old Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige when Cleveland went to the 1948 World Series. The Sporting News accused Veeck of taking the aging non-white African American as a publicity stunt. Veeck retaliated, “If Satch were white, of course he would have been in the majors 25 years earlier.”
Succeeding in the face of resistance
Most American sports have similar backstories. Black boxer Jack Johnson won the coveted heavyweight crown by defeating white opponent Tommy Burns on Dec. 26, 1908.
Former champion Jim Jeffries became the “Great White Hope” when he came out of retirement to fight Johnson on July 4, 1910. Johnson knocked him out in the 15th round, but Johnson’s flamboyance rankled many whites, especially when he took a white woman, Lucille Cameron, across state lines.
In 1912, the Chicago police arrested him for violating the new Mann Act, a “white slave” trafficking law to prevent the transportation of women (especially white women) over state lines for “immoral purposes.” Never mind that Johnson actually married Cameron later that same year.
In 1936, Olympian Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Berlin. Avery Brundage, the president of both the U.S. Olympic Committee and Amateur Athletic Union, seized the moment and forced Owens into an arduous publicity tour of Europe where Owens was overworked, sleep-deprived and otherwise mistreated.
When Owens protested, the vindictive Brundage banned him from track competition forever. Owens, the one-time national hero, was devastated. Four months after winning Olympic gold, he was reduced to racing against horses and scrounging for other demeaning exhibitions to support his family.
Black acceptance grew, although resistance was stubborn. Brundage, who grew up in Chicago, chaired the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972. He was heavy-handed and widely viewed as racist and antisemitic.
When American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos wore black gloves and raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics to protest racism, Brundage’s International Olympic Committee ordered the U.S. Olympic Committee to suspend both and send them home.
In 1967, heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, then the world’s most famous athlete, protested the Vietnam War on religious grounds and refused induction into the armed forces. Combining his war views with a determined stance against racism, Ali reportedly responded, “No Vietcong ever called me a n—.” He was vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.
More recently, 49ers Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested racial injustice by kneeling during a 2016 preseason game. He was subsequently shunned by every National Football League team for eight years and counting, and has not played since January 1, 2017. The NFL denies any collusion.
Soon after Robinson’s 1947 debut, the Supreme Court decided the 1954 civil rights public education case Brown v. Board by ruling for young Linda Carol Brown. The court expressly referred to outstanding Black achievements “in the arts and sciences, as well as in the business and professional world.”
By then the court, like much of America, knew that baseball offered daily front-page evidence of Black achievement. By then, Robinson had been in the headlines almost daily for seven years, followed by Larry Doby (1947), Minnie Minoso (1951), Willie Mays (1951), Ernie Banks (1953) and many others.
On April 13, 1954, the great slugger Hank Aaron debuted, and one month later, on May 17, the Supreme Court desegregated public schools using Brown v. Board. At that time, 5.6% of all major leaguers were Black, boosting the visibility of Black America. The Supreme Court noticed, and Linda Carol Brown made it count. Black history matters. So do sports.
Eldon Ham is a faculty member at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports, law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.
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