Marcantonio, like other notable Harlem figures such as writers Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, practiced what I call “living in difference,” or deeply engaging with those who are unlike you for a shared project.
One player in particular is laying waste to the Major League record book: Josh Gibson. The debut of Robinson was also the first step toward MLB’s destruction of the Negro Leagues, strip-mined for talent. Teams were left without their main attractions
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Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding athlete and a deeply religious man. The aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical with a long involvement with the civil rights movement.
If we require our progressive and radical heroes to be saints we won't have many people left to admire.
Major League Baseball is a conservative institution. It speaks volumes that it moved the All-Star Game from Brian Kemp’s Georgia...Baseball needed to make this move. It had to finally do more than talk a good game.
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Branch Rickey certainly deserves credit for confronting his fellow owners and their racist attitudes by signing Jackie Robinson and, in doing so, advancing the cause of civil rights. However, there is more to this story than Rickey and Robinson. In fact, the desegregation of baseball came after a decade-long campaign by black and left wing journalists and activists.
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