even suggest the color of his skin.”
Anyway, each and every April I was glad to get the hell out of Dixie.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
AS I HAVE MENTIONED before, and may well mention again, Rickey traced his integration decision clear back to 1903, when the manager of the Oliver Hotel in South Bend tried to bar Charles Thomas from lodging for a night. To a devout Christian believer such as Rickey, the incident resonated with the Bible story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem. Once again, there was no room at the inn. The episode was fundamental to Rickey’s emotional development and to his long-held determination to bring blacks into the major leagues. When finally he acted, when finally he was free to act, no fewer than 43 seasons later, he found himself ambushed at a secretive baseball meeting held in Cleveland on April 26, 1945. That is another story now clamoring to be told. But to understand the forces that were at play on that contentious afternoon, one first needs to remember that Rickey was a lawyer long before he established himself as a premium baseball man. He did not move to integrate the game until he determined that the law was on his side. Even so, if Rickey read T. S. Eliot—I am not certain that he did—he would have agreed that April is the cruelest month,although not simply because it mixes memory and desire. Rickey’s April of ’45 mixed ostracism, anger and bigotry.
Again, as with the fans at Ebbets Field, we encounter that special closeness between Jews and blacks, for baseball integration proceeded from the passion of a white Methodist Republican (Rickey), the foresight of a conservative Episcopalian governor (Thomas E. Dewey) and a Jewish counterstrike at anti-Semitism.
For a significant part of the 20th century organized medicine—the American Medical Association and the governing bodies at medical schools—sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the lucrative business of doctoring. One reason was coldly economic. The WASPs at the top did not want to share the shekels—so to speak—with Jews. Another was irrationally emotional. Do we want to have leering Jews examining our naked Christian ladies?
The situation was particularly dramatic in New York City, where thousands of outstanding Jewish science students were routinely denied admission to medical schools, notably the ones affiliated with the Ivy bastions, Columbia and Cornell. As in Brooklyn, Jews made up a significant percentage of the voters in the city at large, and that was the wedge that various Jewish groups, led by the famous reform rabbi Stephen Wise, used to persuade the state legislature to hold hearings in 1944.
These proved to be a disaster for the Establishment bigots. One dean at Cornell Medical School said that of course a Jewish quota was in effect. No matter how many qualified Jews applied, no more than 5 percent of a freshman class “could be followers of the Hebrew religion.” The dean defended the quota with such stubborn arrogance that some listening to his words heard echoes of Hitlerism. Out of that came the drafting of the so-called Ives-Quinn law, which made job discrimination on the basis of race or religion a crime in New York State. (No mention of age or sex discrimination appeared. Those would have to wait for another time.) Soon journalists and otherswere calling this new law, remarkable in its day, FEP, for Fair Employment Practices.
Governor Dewey signed the FEP bill on March 12, 1945, using 22 pens during a crowded ceremony at the Red Room of the state capitol in Albany. The right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler furiously attacked the new law as “pernicious heresy against the ancient privilege of human beings to hate.” But the Federal Council of [Protestant] Churches; the American Jewish Congress; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing; and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP figuratively cheered.
A prominent black news photographer, the late Alfredo “Chick” Solomon,
Anyway, each and every April I was glad to get the hell out of Dixie.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
AS I HAVE MENTIONED before, and may well mention again, Rickey traced his integration decision clear back to 1903, when the manager of the Oliver Hotel in South Bend tried to bar Charles Thomas from lodging for a night. To a devout Christian believer such as Rickey, the incident resonated with the Bible story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem. Once again, there was no room at the inn. The episode was fundamental to Rickey’s emotional development and to his long-held determination to bring blacks into the major leagues. When finally he acted, when finally he was free to act, no fewer than 43 seasons later, he found himself ambushed at a secretive baseball meeting held in Cleveland on April 26, 1945. That is another story now clamoring to be told. But to understand the forces that were at play on that contentious afternoon, one first needs to remember that Rickey was a lawyer long before he established himself as a premium baseball man. He did not move to integrate the game until he determined that the law was on his side. Even so, if Rickey read T. S. Eliot—I am not certain that he did—he would have agreed that April is the cruelest month,although not simply because it mixes memory and desire. Rickey’s April of ’45 mixed ostracism, anger and bigotry.
Again, as with the fans at Ebbets Field, we encounter that special closeness between Jews and blacks, for baseball integration proceeded from the passion of a white Methodist Republican (Rickey), the foresight of a conservative Episcopalian governor (Thomas E. Dewey) and a Jewish counterstrike at anti-Semitism.
For a significant part of the 20th century organized medicine—the American Medical Association and the governing bodies at medical schools—sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the lucrative business of doctoring. One reason was coldly economic. The WASPs at the top did not want to share the shekels—so to speak—with Jews. Another was irrationally emotional. Do we want to have leering Jews examining our naked Christian ladies?
The situation was particularly dramatic in New York City, where thousands of outstanding Jewish science students were routinely denied admission to medical schools, notably the ones affiliated with the Ivy bastions, Columbia and Cornell. As in Brooklyn, Jews made up a significant percentage of the voters in the city at large, and that was the wedge that various Jewish groups, led by the famous reform rabbi Stephen Wise, used to persuade the state legislature to hold hearings in 1944.
These proved to be a disaster for the Establishment bigots. One dean at Cornell Medical School said that of course a Jewish quota was in effect. No matter how many qualified Jews applied, no more than 5 percent of a freshman class “could be followers of the Hebrew religion.” The dean defended the quota with such stubborn arrogance that some listening to his words heard echoes of Hitlerism. Out of that came the drafting of the so-called Ives-Quinn law, which made job discrimination on the basis of race or religion a crime in New York State. (No mention of age or sex discrimination appeared. Those would have to wait for another time.) Soon journalists and otherswere calling this new law, remarkable in its day, FEP, for Fair Employment Practices.
Governor Dewey signed the FEP bill on March 12, 1945, using 22 pens during a crowded ceremony at the Red Room of the state capitol in Albany. The right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler furiously attacked the new law as “pernicious heresy against the ancient privilege of human beings to hate.” But the Federal Council of [Protestant] Churches; the American Jewish Congress; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing; and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP figuratively cheered.
A prominent black news photographer, the late Alfredo “Chick” Solomon,
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