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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Tag Archives: Jackie Robinson

The Ironies of Jackie Robinson Day

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Uncategorized

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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.

Monte Irvin, R.I.P.

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Brown Dodgers

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Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson, Monte Irvin, Oscar Charleston

Nearly a year ago, I began to try to get in touch with former Giants great Monte Irvin. I was, of course, interested in talking to him about his memories of Oscar Charleston. Unfortunately, his health was already in serious decline. Today comes the sad news that he has died. May he rest in peace.

In his memoir, Nice Guys Finish First, Irvin wrote about Charleston and his role in helping Branch Rickey’s Dodgers scout black players–including, perhaps, himself:

“I had already gone to Puerto Rico when I heard that Jackie had signed with the Dodgers. I had gone down there to get back into shape shortly after I was discharged from the Army on September 1, 1945. Branch Rickey announced that he had signed Jackie on October 23rd of the same year. I was very happy for him. I wasn’t jealous of Jackie’s success, but I was envious. I thought, Gee whiz, why couldn’t that be me?

“Most people don’t know that Oscar Charleston was involved in the process of finding a player for Rickey to sign. Oscar was very smart and an astute baseball person. When they had their meetings, he was telling them who was out there, who was signable, and who would probably be able to make it. Oscar was probably working directly under Clyde Sukeforth. Clyde couldn’t have picked a better man to help him than Oscar, and Rickey couldn’t have picked a better man than Jackie Robinson.”

Seven reasons to care about Charleston

28 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Branch Rickey, color line, Connie Morgan, Indianapolis Clowns, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Mamie Johnson, Native American, Neil Lanctot, Oscar Charleston, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Tiger Woods

Why should anyone care about Oscar Charleston? Seven reasons:

First, Charleston achieved the highest level of excellence within his field. For black Americans in the pre-integration era, a transcendent star like Charleston served as an exemplar, if not the exemplar, of what virtue and excellence looked like with respect to the practices of baseball. Charleston’s mastery of those practices represented the apex of the black baseball tradition’s development. It revealed what was possible for the black player to achieve, and by extension what was possible for black flourishing more generally. To powerfully influence the black imagination, Charleston didn’t have to fight for black liberation or play in the white major leagues. He simply had to symbolize black equality, if not superiority, through his achievements on the diamond. And that is precisely what he did.

Second, Charleston was a great manager. One poll of former Negro Leaguers ranked him as the best, and virtually all black baseball historians agree he was one of a handful of truly great managers in the game. He not only managed after his career was over, he was a manager while he played, as was the style at the time. Among the teams he led were the 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the greatest teams of all time, black or white.

Third—and no one that I know of has ever made this point before—Charleston was probably the first black scout to work for a major league team. The Dodgers’ Branch Rickey hired Charleston sometime in 1945 or 1946 to help him identify and research black players who might be good prospects for breaking major league baseball’s color line. And (as historian Neil Lanctot pointed out to me) it was Charleston who convinced the Dodgers to sign future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella.

Fourth, Charleston was allegedly part Sioux Indian. If true, this makes him one of the three greatest Native American athletes in history, along with Jim Thorpe and Tiger Woods. And honestly, I’m not certain that Thorpe and Woods were greater.

Fifth, Charleston managed and mentored two of the three women to play professional baseball in the Negro Leagues. This was one of the Indianapolis’s Clowns’ tactics for getting fans to the park in the post-Jackie Robinson era. Charleston took his job seriously, putting Connie Morgan and Mamie Johnson through drills in winter-time Philadelphia to prepare them for the season. Mamie Johnson recalled to me on the phone that Charleston was “a beautiful person.”

Sixth, Charleston was perhaps the most respected man in the Negro Leagues because of his fierce commitment to his craft. He played hard—and, earlier, in his career, with a terrifying mean streak. In a word, he was a badass (but not a berserker). Charleston illustrated for the black community the toughness necessary to make it in an unjust world.

And finally, seventh, Charleston served a critical imaginative need within the black community by being more representative than either the theatrical Satchel Paige or the college-educated Jackie Robinson. To other Negro Leaguers and to black America at large, the temperamentally flawed blue-collar Charleston was much more clearly an everyman, one of them. That was worth a lot.

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