• About
  • Charleston Bio
  • Charleston Chronology
  • Stats
  • Buy the Book!

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Ironies of Jackie Robinson Day

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Buck Leonard, integration, Jackie Robinson, Jackie Robinson Day, Jules Tygiel

Jackie Robinson Day is five days from now. On April 15, 1947, Jackie played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Needless to say, this was a very good thing for baseball and for America.

But as is often the case with good things, there were ironic consequences. Almost overnight, once Jackie was donning a Dodgers uniform everyday black baseball became a source of embarrassment rather than pride for the African American community.

“When Jackie Robinson began playing with the Dodgers, everybody forgot about us,” wrote Buck Leonard, a former star for the Homestead Grays and one of the greatest Negro League hitters of all time. “Some of us got good salaries right on to ‘49 and ‘50, but most of them ended after the war in 1945. Salaries wasn’t the only thing that went down. So did attendance at black baseball games. We couldn’t draw flies. Then, when they started taking blacks into organized baseball, that was just the end of it.”

What happened? Prior to integration, especially when such a thing seemed impossible, black baseball was a symbol of black self-help, excellence, and professionalism. But after integration, it was simply a painful reminder of all that blacks had to endure under segregation. It became a symbol and reminder of blacks’ purported inferiority. Who wouldn’t want to forget about all that?

The historian Jules Tygiel concluded in Baseball’s Great Experiment, the best book about Robinson and the breaking of baseball’s color line, “The side effects of integration included the destruction of a significant cultural entity and way of life. At one time the Negro Leagues had constituted one of the largest primarily black-owned and operated enterprises in the nation. With its demise, as Charles Epstein notes, ‘The possibility is strong that fewer blacks make their living from professional baseball than at any previous time in this century.’”

That certainly wasn’t what anyone had intended. It’s an open question whether it was inevitable.

A dirty city

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Early Life, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Booth Tarkington, National Avenue, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Turmoil

The Indianapolis of Oscar Charleston’s youth was notable for its dirt. In the early 1900s soot would become so integral to the city’s landscape that it served as a literary device in the books written by Indianapolis native Booth Tarkington about the era, especially his Growth-trilogy novels: The Magnificent Ambersons, The Turmoil, and National Avenue. Black soot streaks the city’s statues and residents’ curtains in The Magnificent Ambersons. At times it is so thick it can be shoveled.

True to the booster spirit, the city’s new-rich industrialists take great pride in the dirt. The Turmoil’s capitalist protagonist, Dan Oliphant,

was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God’s country, as he called the some Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. “It’s good! It’s good!” he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. “Good, clean soot: it’s our life-blood, God bless it!” The smoke was one of his great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who called to beg his aid against it. “Smoke’s what brings your husbands’ money home on Saturday night,” he told them, jovially. . . . “You go home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets out o’ the pay-roll—and you’ll come around next time to get me to turn out more smoke instead o’ chokin’ it off!”

Oliphant’s words were no mere fictional fancy. In Indianapolis as elsewhere smoke was often regarded as a tangible symbol of progress—and Indianapolis had progress in spades. As one resident recalled, smoke fell from the sky so thickly that “if you rocked on the back porch all morning and then went in for lunch, when you went out again after lunch you had to clean the chair thoroughly again.” Anti-smoke ordinances passed in the late 1890s and early 1900s provided little if any abatement of the nuisance.

The city’s ubiquitous smoke signified an obsession with growth. In Tarkington’s portrayal, turn-of-the-century Indianapolis was fairly frenzied by a “profound longing for size” such as that which drove Dan Oliphant. “Year by year the longing increased until it became an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger! Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen.” The factories and, just a bit later, the automobile were the primary instruments by which the “thing began to happen,” argued Tarkington. Together they brought “Death [to] the God of Things as They Are.”

Newer posts →

Recent Posts

  • Charleston news
  • Baseball and Barbecue and other stuff
  • The New York Daily News
  • Reviews and radio
  • Baseball by the Book . . .

Archives

  • February 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • March 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015

Categories

  • Biography
  • Brown Dodgers
  • Cuba
  • Cuban baseball
  • Early Life
  • Evaluation
  • Harrisburg Giants
  • Homestead Grays
  • Indianapolis ABCs
  • Indianapolis Clowns
  • Lincoln Stars
  • Managing Career
  • personality and habits
  • Philadelphia Stars
  • Philippines
  • Pittsburgh Crawfords
  • Podcasts
  • Post-Career Reception
  • Reviews
  • Toledo/Indianapolis Crawfords
  • Uncategorized
  • Videos

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar