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From Detroit Free Press, which is doing a series on Cobb.
BY RICHARD BAK
FREE PRESS SPECIAL WRITER
It seemed like a harmless way to honor an icon.
In Augusta, Ga., the community Ty Cobb had long been
associated with as a ballplayer and taxpaying citizen, city
commissioners proposed to change the name of the minor
league ballpark from Lake Olmstead Stadium to Ty Cobb Field.
The accolade was timed to coincide with the centennial of
Cobb's 1904 debut in organized baseball.
But John Maben wouldn't stand for it. The former head of the
local NAACP chapter had heard the stories of Cobb's virulent
racism. The ballplayer's name was too vivid and painful a
reminder of Georgia's discriminatory past. As Maben said at the
time, such an honor would be an "insult" to both black and
white Augustans.
Tempers flared and sides were taken. In the end, though, civil
rights activists won. There would be no Ty Cobb Field. The
mighty Georgia Peach had struck out -- in his home state, no
less. It was one more sign of how Cobb's prejudice, largely
overlooked during his lifetime, has come to dominate his public
persona in this era of heightened racial consciousness.
Cobb, who played his first game for the Tigers 100 years ago
this month, was born in 1886 and grew up in the embittered
heart of the defeated Confederacy. Although few would argue
that his reputation as a bigot is undeserved, some would
protest that his designated role as the great metaphor for
baseball's historic racism is misplaced. On the issue of blacks'
breaking into organized ball, his influence during the apartheid
era was practically nil. It was the sport's first commissioner,
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis -- and the cabal of white
owners that hired him -- who kept the national pastime all white
until two decades after Cobb's retirement.
Dick Clark of Ypsilanti has been chairman of the Negro
leagues committee of the Society for American Baseball
Research for 20 years. While no apologist for Cobb, he strives
to be objective.
"Well, he was a bigot, but that doesn't detract from anything he
accomplished on the field," Clark said. "Listen, I can guarantee
you guys like Shoeless Joe Jackson, Tris Speaker and Rogers
Hornsby were just as racist. They were all Southerners, and
they came up at a time when there was discrimination
everywhere -- not only against blacks, but Jews, Native
Americans, immigrants.
"The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on
people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but
it was a different era, a different country then."
In the pre-civil rights world that Cobb inhabited, the "N-bomb"
had the explosive force of a cap pistol. The pejorative was
freely tossed around in everyday conversation, even as Jackie
Robinson and the first wave of black players began the
incremental desegregation of the majors in the years following
World War II.
How, then, did Cobb come to represent a racism that, as
reprehensible as it was, was not even remarkable in its time?
Part of the reason was the sheer "nastiness" of his bigotry,
Clark said.
Examples from his playing days abound. One afternoon in
1908, Cobb knocked down a laborer on Woodward Avenue
after the man yelled at him for stepping into some fresh cement.
The following year he got into an altercation with a night
watchman in a Cleveland hotel, slashing the man with a
pocketknife before being knocked silly by a blow from a
blackjack. In 1919, in another ugly episode, Cobb slapped an
argumentative chambermaid and kicked her down a hotel
stairwell.
All of these incidents resulted in successful legal action against
Cobb, but they didn't deter his odious behavior toward blacks.
Unlike today, society simply didn't demand it of him. While
newspapers dutifully reported Cobb's latest run-in with "an
Ethiopian," rarely was there any indication in the white press
that such encounters were racially motivated.
As hard as it is to believe, in certain cases they weren't. Cobb
was quick to use his fists whenever he felt he had been
wronged, no matter what a person's color. But as a true son of
the Old South, he reacted especially violently against blacks he
thought were uppity, people he had been conditioned to
consider inferior.
Such hostility influenced the generation of creative artists who
grew up in the civil rights era immediately after Cobb's death in
1961. Ken Burns, for example, used Cobb as the foil for Jackie
Robinson in his PBS documentary series, "Baseball." Burns'
thinly veiled treatise on race came out in 1994, the same year
Warner Bros. released Ron Shelton's lurid biopic, "Cobb,"
starring Tommy Lee Jones as a violently neurotic redneck.
Reaching a smaller audience, but no less influential, is Lee
Blessing's long-running play, "Cobb," which has been staged
since 1989. Blessing employs the literary device of having
Negro leagues great Oscar Charleston -- often called "the black
Ty Cobb" -- taunt the Tigers outfielder for his refusal to measure
himself against the colored stars of the period.
Millions have come away from these creative treatments of
Cobb's life convinced he was little more than an unhinged
cracker who just happened to be one hell of a hitter. As is often
the case with Cobb, the truth is a bit more complicated.
Deference, not chumminess, was what kept the social order to
Cobb's liking. One can detect a strong strain of plantation
paternalism running through his relationships with those blacks
who generally had good things to say about him: batboys,
chauffeurs, handymen.
As an old man, Cobb began to demonstrate some remorse for
his messy life. He had the time and money to make partial
amends. His two major philanthropic activities, both started in
the early 1950s and rarely mentioned by his detractors,
continue to benefit blacks as well as whites.
One is an educational foundation that to date has provided
about $10 million in college scholarships to Georgians of all
colors. The other is a nonprofit hospital in his hometown of
Royston that has grown into a regional health care provider
servicing a largely black clientele.
Today, T.W. Cobb of Reno, Nev. (no relation, but whose family
knew Cobb), recalls that Cobb regularly bragged about the
hospital's black nurses, "though, of course, he could never
bring himself to associate socially with blacks." That would
have been out of the question in the rancorous South of the
1950s. All the more surprising, then, that a black physician, Dr.
J. B. Gilbert, was the hospital's chief of staff during this period
and regularly treated white patients.
Cobb came to accept baseball's integration long before his
former employer did. In 1952 he told a reporter he saw "no
reason why [whites] shouldn't compete with colored athletes."
This was six years before Ozzie Virgil finally cracked the Tigers'
color line. During the 1950s, he wrote letters to Hank Aaron
and other black stars, offering them unsolicited advice.
Despite these conciliatory signs, many refuse to believe the old
Tiger was truly capable of changing his stripes. Last year, a
plan to recognize the centennial of Cobb's brief minor league
stay in Anniston, Ala., came under attack.
Calhoun County Commission chairman Eli Henderson had
headed a drive to have the state place a historical marker at a
bank built on the site of the rooming house at which Cobb had
boarded while playing for the Anniston Noblemen in 1904.
Permission and funding were in place, and the bank had
agreed to erect a temporary display case exhibiting
memorabilia.
As commemorations go, this one promised to be small and
innocuous. But support evaporated once Cobb's toxic
encounters with race, most dating back 75 or more years,
became part of the discussion. Nobody wanted to antagonize
Anniston's populace, evenly divided between blacks and
whites. Once again, activists were intolerant of Cobb's
intolerance.
"We are so judgmental today," Henderson said. "Let's face it,
1904 was a long time ago. Everybody today knows racism was
wrong. It's just like everybody used to smoke cigarettes and eat
all kinds of food that was bad for you and other things we knew
nothing about back then.
"We have to look past all that."
White or black, it remains easier said than done. Consider the
recent flap in Hagerstown, Md., where Willie Mays played his
first minor league game, in 1950. This past spring, the mayor's
proposal to name a street after Mays fizzled, as did an
alternative plan to rename the ballpark. The mayor, who
happened to be white, suggested race had something to do
with the public backlash.
It's too bad Cobb was not around to weigh in on the matter. It's
an open question as to whether the Peach truly was a reformed
racist in his final years. Less mystifying was his choice as the
modern game's greatest player. He consistently touted the
flamboyant black star from Alabama.
"Mays is the only man in baseball," claimed the old bigot, "that'd
I pay to see.
BY RICHARD BAK
FREE PRESS SPECIAL WRITER
It seemed like a harmless way to honor an icon.
In Augusta, Ga., the community Ty Cobb had long been
associated with as a ballplayer and taxpaying citizen, city
commissioners proposed to change the name of the minor
league ballpark from Lake Olmstead Stadium to Ty Cobb Field.
The accolade was timed to coincide with the centennial of
Cobb's 1904 debut in organized baseball.
But John Maben wouldn't stand for it. The former head of the
local NAACP chapter had heard the stories of Cobb's virulent
racism. The ballplayer's name was too vivid and painful a
reminder of Georgia's discriminatory past. As Maben said at the
time, such an honor would be an "insult" to both black and
white Augustans.
Tempers flared and sides were taken. In the end, though, civil
rights activists won. There would be no Ty Cobb Field. The
mighty Georgia Peach had struck out -- in his home state, no
less. It was one more sign of how Cobb's prejudice, largely
overlooked during his lifetime, has come to dominate his public
persona in this era of heightened racial consciousness.
Cobb, who played his first game for the Tigers 100 years ago
this month, was born in 1886 and grew up in the embittered
heart of the defeated Confederacy. Although few would argue
that his reputation as a bigot is undeserved, some would
protest that his designated role as the great metaphor for
baseball's historic racism is misplaced. On the issue of blacks'
breaking into organized ball, his influence during the apartheid
era was practically nil. It was the sport's first commissioner,
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis -- and the cabal of white
owners that hired him -- who kept the national pastime all white
until two decades after Cobb's retirement.
Dick Clark of Ypsilanti has been chairman of the Negro
leagues committee of the Society for American Baseball
Research for 20 years. While no apologist for Cobb, he strives
to be objective.
"Well, he was a bigot, but that doesn't detract from anything he
accomplished on the field," Clark said. "Listen, I can guarantee
you guys like Shoeless Joe Jackson, Tris Speaker and Rogers
Hornsby were just as racist. They were all Southerners, and
they came up at a time when there was discrimination
everywhere -- not only against blacks, but Jews, Native
Americans, immigrants.
"The problem is when you try to impose today's standards on
people living back then. It's the politically correct thing to do, but
it was a different era, a different country then."
In the pre-civil rights world that Cobb inhabited, the "N-bomb"
had the explosive force of a cap pistol. The pejorative was
freely tossed around in everyday conversation, even as Jackie
Robinson and the first wave of black players began the
incremental desegregation of the majors in the years following
World War II.
How, then, did Cobb come to represent a racism that, as
reprehensible as it was, was not even remarkable in its time?
Part of the reason was the sheer "nastiness" of his bigotry,
Clark said.
Examples from his playing days abound. One afternoon in
1908, Cobb knocked down a laborer on Woodward Avenue
after the man yelled at him for stepping into some fresh cement.
The following year he got into an altercation with a night
watchman in a Cleveland hotel, slashing the man with a
pocketknife before being knocked silly by a blow from a
blackjack. In 1919, in another ugly episode, Cobb slapped an
argumentative chambermaid and kicked her down a hotel
stairwell.
All of these incidents resulted in successful legal action against
Cobb, but they didn't deter his odious behavior toward blacks.
Unlike today, society simply didn't demand it of him. While
newspapers dutifully reported Cobb's latest run-in with "an
Ethiopian," rarely was there any indication in the white press
that such encounters were racially motivated.
As hard as it is to believe, in certain cases they weren't. Cobb
was quick to use his fists whenever he felt he had been
wronged, no matter what a person's color. But as a true son of
the Old South, he reacted especially violently against blacks he
thought were uppity, people he had been conditioned to
consider inferior.
Such hostility influenced the generation of creative artists who
grew up in the civil rights era immediately after Cobb's death in
1961. Ken Burns, for example, used Cobb as the foil for Jackie
Robinson in his PBS documentary series, "Baseball." Burns'
thinly veiled treatise on race came out in 1994, the same year
Warner Bros. released Ron Shelton's lurid biopic, "Cobb,"
starring Tommy Lee Jones as a violently neurotic redneck.
Reaching a smaller audience, but no less influential, is Lee
Blessing's long-running play, "Cobb," which has been staged
since 1989. Blessing employs the literary device of having
Negro leagues great Oscar Charleston -- often called "the black
Ty Cobb" -- taunt the Tigers outfielder for his refusal to measure
himself against the colored stars of the period.
Millions have come away from these creative treatments of
Cobb's life convinced he was little more than an unhinged
cracker who just happened to be one hell of a hitter. As is often
the case with Cobb, the truth is a bit more complicated.
Deference, not chumminess, was what kept the social order to
Cobb's liking. One can detect a strong strain of plantation
paternalism running through his relationships with those blacks
who generally had good things to say about him: batboys,
chauffeurs, handymen.
As an old man, Cobb began to demonstrate some remorse for
his messy life. He had the time and money to make partial
amends. His two major philanthropic activities, both started in
the early 1950s and rarely mentioned by his detractors,
continue to benefit blacks as well as whites.
One is an educational foundation that to date has provided
about $10 million in college scholarships to Georgians of all
colors. The other is a nonprofit hospital in his hometown of
Royston that has grown into a regional health care provider
servicing a largely black clientele.
Today, T.W. Cobb of Reno, Nev. (no relation, but whose family
knew Cobb), recalls that Cobb regularly bragged about the
hospital's black nurses, "though, of course, he could never
bring himself to associate socially with blacks." That would
have been out of the question in the rancorous South of the
1950s. All the more surprising, then, that a black physician, Dr.
J. B. Gilbert, was the hospital's chief of staff during this period
and regularly treated white patients.
Cobb came to accept baseball's integration long before his
former employer did. In 1952 he told a reporter he saw "no
reason why [whites] shouldn't compete with colored athletes."
This was six years before Ozzie Virgil finally cracked the Tigers'
color line. During the 1950s, he wrote letters to Hank Aaron
and other black stars, offering them unsolicited advice.
Despite these conciliatory signs, many refuse to believe the old
Tiger was truly capable of changing his stripes. Last year, a
plan to recognize the centennial of Cobb's brief minor league
stay in Anniston, Ala., came under attack.
Calhoun County Commission chairman Eli Henderson had
headed a drive to have the state place a historical marker at a
bank built on the site of the rooming house at which Cobb had
boarded while playing for the Anniston Noblemen in 1904.
Permission and funding were in place, and the bank had
agreed to erect a temporary display case exhibiting
memorabilia.
As commemorations go, this one promised to be small and
innocuous. But support evaporated once Cobb's toxic
encounters with race, most dating back 75 or more years,
became part of the discussion. Nobody wanted to antagonize
Anniston's populace, evenly divided between blacks and
whites. Once again, activists were intolerant of Cobb's
intolerance.
"We are so judgmental today," Henderson said. "Let's face it,
1904 was a long time ago. Everybody today knows racism was
wrong. It's just like everybody used to smoke cigarettes and eat
all kinds of food that was bad for you and other things we knew
nothing about back then.
"We have to look past all that."
White or black, it remains easier said than done. Consider the
recent flap in Hagerstown, Md., where Willie Mays played his
first minor league game, in 1950. This past spring, the mayor's
proposal to name a street after Mays fizzled, as did an
alternative plan to rename the ballpark. The mayor, who
happened to be white, suggested race had something to do
with the public backlash.
It's too bad Cobb was not around to weigh in on the matter. It's
an open question as to whether the Peach truly was a reformed
racist in his final years. Less mystifying was his choice as the
modern game's greatest player. He consistently touted the
flamboyant black star from Alabama.
"Mays is the only man in baseball," claimed the old bigot, "that'd
I pay to see.
