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Segregationists targeted games played between Black and white teams,
but they were unable to overcome the city’s love of good baseball,
McKenna writes:
“Black and white ballplayers continued to play on the same field at
the same time. The crowds continued to be interracial. … In Baltimore,
baseball obsessed as it was, those games and the manner in which they
were reported [in the press] served as powerful civil rights tools.
Baseball fields functioned as one of the few places where Blacks and
whites had the opportunity to congregate together.”
In many ways, he said, the key was the quality of play. African
American athletes and their teams were clearly skilled and talented, and
white players and fans recognized that fact.
“Anybody who had eyes could see that the African American teams were
the best,” McKenna said. “If you were a white player and wanted to claim
to be the best, you had to play against African American teams. You
couldn’t get away from it.”
Long before Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, he said,
white players knew that their African American counterparts belonged on
the field with them.
McKenna relied on digitized newspaper accounts for his research. As a
literary scholar by training, he said he had to teach himself a new
genre of historical research while also learning the subject matter. But
detailing the struggles of the Black Sox managers and players, as well
as the historical context of their time, was similar to what he teaches
writing students to look for — “the stories of a community, the stories
that people don’t normally tell.”