The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [32]
Robinson fascinated the press and the public. In 1947 he became the first Rookie of the Year, making it a coveted award forever after. Eleven weeks after Robinson signed with Brooklyn, Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians signed a Negro League outfielder named Larry Doby. Several years earlier Veeck had tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and sign numerous top black players, but after he told Landis of his intention, the club was suddenly sold to another bidder. Doby, who endured all that Robinson did, has been largely ignored by history because he was the second and not the first. This was why Satchel Paige had so wanted to be first. Doby was the first black player to hit a home run in a World Series, in 1948, which helped Cleveland win that Series. Satchel Paige was also signed, and helped the Indians win. Robinson was instrumental in helping Brooklyn win a World Series, but not until his final season, 1956, long after he became a legend.
The third black player was Hank Thompson, signed by the St. Louis Browns twelve days after Doby. The fourth, Willard Brown, played his first game for the Browns two days after Thompson. Thompson then went to the Giants in 1951, joining Monte Irvin and Willie Mays in the first all-black outfield.
Major-league teams were acquiring tremendous talent from the Negro League and winning pennants and World Series with them. But there was still enormous resistance from owners, players, and fans. The minor-league Class AA Southern Association refused to hire black players and was eventually the target of a civil rights movement boycott. The organization finally died in 1961 but maintained segregation to the last. Tom Yawkey, owner of the Boston Red Sox—today a favorite team of many Dominican fans—refused to hire black players. He turned down both Jackie Robinson, who tried out in Fenway Park, and Willie Mays. By the 1960s, while integrated teams were prospering, the Red Sox stubbornly remained at the bottom with their all-white team.
With only fifteen percent of the population white, mostly from a privileged class, the Dominican Republic rarely produces white baseball players. But by the 1950s, Dominican players had a chance at the major leagues. If they could get there, they would find themselves in a strange country, very different from theirs, and face a very different kind of racism.
Dominicans are not strangers to racism. The Dominican—in fact pan-Caribbean—obsession with the calibrating of racial differences is profoundly racist.
But the Dominican ballplayer is confronted with something entirely different in the U.S. It is because Dominicans are so familiar with the notion of racism that they find the American variety so baffling. Dominicans did not worry about issues of segregation and integration. In the Dominican racist logic, it made no sense to have separate baseball teams or lunch counters because racial traits are not transmitted over lunch counters or on baseball diamonds.
Most Dominican parents are so mixed that the children could come out most any shade. There are rural superstitions about pregnant mothers consuming white foods to ensure light-colored babies. As citizens of a mulatto country, Dominicans’ skin color could easily get darker or lighter, depending on whom they mixed with. According to the theory, if they got whiter, they would be a happier, more prosperous country, because white people enjoy happy and prosperous countries. On the other hand, were the population to get darker, the Dominican Republic would eventually become a black country. If that happened, it would simply be absorbed into Haiti, a barbarous and impoverished land. Since the first Haitian invasion the main concern has always been the threat of a Haitian takeover.
Historically,