{"id":22,"date":"2026-05-26T18:12:50","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T18:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=22"},"modified":"2026-05-26T18:12:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T18:12:50","slug":"on-this-jackie-robinson-day-reject-this-lie-major-league-baseball-tells-about-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=22","title":{"rendered":"On this Jackie Robinson Day, reject this lie Major League Baseball tells about itself"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

One of the first things President Donald Trump did after his second inauguration was invalidate an executive order from former President Joe Biden that prohibited discrimination against transgender people, especially those playing sports.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more Megan Thee Stallion says her boyfriend cheated. But to the manosphere, she\u2019s the problem<\/a><\/p>\n

How did the major sports institutions react? They lined up behind Trump\u2019s transphobia. In\u00a0 February 2025, the NCAA banned transgender athletes from women\u2019s sports. Late last month, the Olympics followed suit.<\/p>\n

The disappointing responses from the NCAA andInternational Olympics Committee serve as yet more evidence that sports are not on the vanguard of social change, as we\u2019re asked to believe every April 15 on Jackie Robinson Day.<\/p>\n

Historically, and much to our detriment, those who lead sports leagues and associations have been followers at best. The leaders of the NCAA and the IOC have showed us that.<\/p>\n

But we in the media created a mythology that the games we love are the tip of the spear in social progress, and we\u2019ve done that in large part by distorting Robinson\u2019s arrival in Major League Baseball in 1947 after the league spent 80 years or so segregating itself for white men only.\u00a0 The MLB doesn\u2019t deserve its reputation as a revolutionary social change agent in this country. To the contrary, much like leaders of the NCAA and the IOC have bended their knee this Trump era, it had a long, regrettable history of\u00a0 reactionary politics. Indeed, its embrace of segregation served as a model for other leagues that conformed to, and didn\u2019t confront, a racially partitioned America.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not long after the MLB\u2019s first pitch in 1876, it was integrated. Moses Fleetwood Walker, a Black man who attended Oberlin and Michigan, suited up for the Toledos. His brother Weldy\u00a0Walker followed him in the big league for a while.<\/p>\n

But the United States was in the process of rolling back Black people\u2019s rights and their nascent participation in democracy. President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction by withdrawing\u00a0 from the South federal troops who protected the formerly enslaved. The move seeded American apartheid enforced by extrajudicial violence by white people against those they once shackled.<\/p>\n

If Black people were being excluded from democracy, then why not exclude them from baseball?\u00a0 Near the end of the 1880s, Cap Anson, the \u201cgreatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of the 19th century,\u201d according to his Hall of Fame plaque, convinced his fellow managers\u00a0 to enter one of those so-called gentlemen agreements to deny men of African descent the continued freedom to play the major league game.<\/p>\n

Anson\u2019s regressive lobbying to segregate baseball is not included on his Cooperstown inscription. But it is undoubtedly his biggest contribution to baseball \u2014 and to sports writ large. To be sure, the two other big sports of the time, horse racing and boxing, eventually followed the precedent Anson set in baseball.<\/p>\n

Horse racing, this country\u2019s first big sport, was dominated in the antebellum and post-Civil War South by Black jockeys; they disappeared by the early 1900s. A National Bureau of Economic Research brief noted, \u201cThe key push to exclude Black jockeys came when White jockeys began violently attacking their African American counterparts by boxing them out during races, running them into the rail, and hitting them with riding crops.\u201d <\/p>\n

Read more Some are cheering the end of the Saudis\u2019 involvement in sports. Here\u2019s why I\u2019m not<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cSoon after the attacks began, African American jockeys found they could not get rides.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Boxing\u00a0refused to let Black men fight for its crowning title, heavyweight champion of the world. It\u00a0relented only for\u00a0Jack Johnson, a Black man,\u00a0to topple a\u00a0white\u00a0man\u00a0in 1908\u00a0and become the\u00a0first Black\u00a0emperor of masculinity. \u00a0The boxing\u00a0world responded by persecuting Johnson\u00a0and\u00a0returned to its unwritten racist rules\u00a0until\u00a0the 1930s.<\/p>\n

In 1933, the NFL, which was born in 1920 as an integrated professional football league, decided to segregate as well. It shut the locker room door to Black men and kept it closed for the next 13 years until Kenny Washington (who was Robinson\u2019s offensive backfield teammate from UCLA) and three other Black football players were offered NFL contracts.<\/p>\n

That was 1946. Robinson was in Canada playing for the Dodgers\u2019 minor-league affiliate Montreal Royals. The Dodgers were only taking baby steps toward re-integrating baseball with Robinson as the game\u2019s racial guinea pig. And it lagged well behind the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

After all, in 1944, the Supreme Court declared whites\u2019 only primaries unconstitutional, and in the summer of 1946, it said the same about segregated interstate bus travel: that it was unconstitutional . Before the MLB integrated, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a 1941 executive order desegregating the armed forces, and all-Black Tuskegee University in 1943 graduated its first Army flight cadets, who became known as the Tuskegee Airmen.<\/p>\n

Sports was behind the times, not ahead, and baseball was behind some of the other sports. Even America\u2019s popular music at the time, jazz, was ahead of the game, with Benny Goodman adding Black pianist Teddy Wilson in 1935 to make his trio one of the first integrated bands and the club Cafe Society in New York daring to welcome Black and white patrons in 1938. There were a few sportswriters then\u00a0 calling on baseball to desegregate. But league officials ignored them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fitting that we celebrate Robinson. But we ought to be able to do so without promoting the propaganda that sports organizations in general, and the MLB in particular, have been at the forefront of social change.<\/p>\n

As the recent capitulations from the NCAA and the IOC remind us, sports, however exciting and inspiring, have not been the social justice trendsetters we have made them out to be.<\/p>\n

Read more The complaints about the price of World Cup tickets aren\u2019t adding up<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We can celebrate Robinson without promoting the propaganda that sports organizations have been at the forefront of social change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"yoast_head":"\nOn this Jackie Robinson Day, reject this lie Major League Baseball tells about itself - Long Distance Movers USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longdistancemoversusas.com\/?p=22\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On this Jackie Robinson Day, reject this lie Major League Baseball tells about itself - 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