Wrong Righted?

On May 29, NPR carried this story about Major League Baseball (MLB): “The MLB announced on Wednesday [May 29] that it has incorporated the statistics of more than 2,300 Negro Leagues players from 1920 to 1948 into its records, which are now available in a newly integrated online database.” Databases like these are reference Libraries. That they were separate in the first place is of a piece with banning Black stories from Libraries, such as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” or Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Such separation, or like behavior, is the original American Shame.

Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, are you watching?

Willie Mays passed away at 93 on June 18. He began his professional career with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948. Fortunately for us, we got to see him play on the national stage. This was right, and his right. I am so glad to be able to say that I got to watch him when he started his New York Giants career at the old Polo Grounds in the Bronx. That deepest of centerfields was where he made his most famous catch, of a ball driven off the bat of Vic Wertz of the Cleveland baseball team in the 1954 World Series. Imagine not experiencing that because Willie Mays did not have white skin! One wrong righted, to some degree at least.

When Mays broke into the MLB, African Americans were still being lynched by vigilantes from lovely southern trees. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has its own on-line reference Library. It has kept score. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings are known to the NAACP. They were still going on 20 years after Willie Mays broke into baseball. It takes a while sometimes to fully right a wrong.

The NAACP also quotes from a 1937 poem, “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol, which he recast in song for Billie Holiday in 1939. The poem, in one of its surviving formats:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.

“Strange Fruit,” the song, was banned from radio for a time for being too radical. There again, another banning, but still another wrong eventually righted.