Throwback Thursday: Pumpsie Green Comes To Boston, Or Crossing The Line And Standing Still

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

The quadrennial presidential election season is always a test of the American ability to withstand cognitive dissonance, and this year's may be the greatest test we've ever faced. Sports, for better and worse, is proof of how well we're able to manage it. Undoubtedly, some of the people who are irreconcilable on subjects like immigration or how and when black lives matter are also those who turn out at the ballpark to cheer players who are immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and even Mexico, and who support African-American stars whose roots in this country are as deep and sustained as any white player's.

Which is to ask this question: how does a person love David Ortiz for his home runs or Salvador Perez for his postseason heroics and curse them for being in the country in the first place? Can you applaud Lorenzo Cain or Mookie Betts and list your house for sale if they or their relatives want to move into your neighborhood? The experience of the Boston Red Sox, who this week in 1959 promoted Elijah Jerry "Pumpsie" Green to the major leagues, and thereby put a belated end to the segregation of major league rosters, would suggest that both are possible.

The American ability to resist cognitive dissonance when it comes to equality seems bred in the bone. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson denied equal humanity to black Americans on the basis that, among other things, in his opinion, the enslaved writer Phillis Wheatley's poetry wasn't very good. Well, hell, neither was Jewel's. The point was that both were writing it in the first place: penguins don't compose sonnets and buffalo don't rap; if you can rhyme moon, June, and spoon, you're a human being, full stop.

The same reasoning should apply to sports. There isn't a lot of wiggle room in the art of hitting a home run: We have seen players of every national and ethnic origin swing for the fences, and it all looks pretty much the same regardless of the swinger's biological point of origin. In Boston, and in particular at Fenway Park, they didn't think so. Here's the Baseball 101 part of the story:

• In the late 1880s, baseball's "gentleman's agreement," an unwritten but ironclad ban against players of African American origin, was initiated. Segregation was universal until Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson in fall 1945, placed him in the minor leagues at Montreal in 1946, and brought him to the majors on April 15, 1947. However, the ban was not rescinded by either league—there was nothing to rescind since the owners had never had the courage of their racist convictions to formalize it—and the wall fell slowly, team by team, not all at once.
• By July 1947, two more teams, the Browns and Indians, put African Americans on the roster. After that, things slowed down considerably as the remaining owners looked for excuses not to integrate. "We are interested in Negro players," the Yankees said in an official statement in January, 1949. "Our scouts are instructed to report on any that they consider good enough to play for the Yankees. We simply have not seen any that we think are good enough to be Yankees and that's why we have not signed any." This was typical.
• When the Cubs added Ernie Banks and Gene Baker in September 1953, that got the majors to the halfway point, with eight of the 16 teams having made some concession to meritocracy. Six years and two months had passed since Robinson's arrival. Along the way, mediocre white players complained that blacks were taking their jobs.
• Four more clubs integrated in 1954. The Yankees finally yielded in the face of public pressure in 1955 and promoted Elston Howard. It was two more years until the Phillies gave in, and three until the Tigers broke their color line. That left the Red Sox alone.

The Red Sox' history with integration was more tortured than most because they could have been the first team to break the color line instead of the last. In 1945, the club, run by owner Tom Yawkey, a mining and lumber heir, general manager and Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins, and player-manager Joe Cronin, gave in to political pressure and held a closed tryout for Robinson, outfielder Sam Jethroe, and pitcher Marvin Williams at Fenway. The players performed well, but never heard from the Red Sox again. Worse, as the players were put through their paces by coach Hugh Duffy, someone reportedly shouted, "Get those niggers off the field!" It could have been Cronin; it might also have been Yawkey. Historian Mark Armour debunked the story in his biography of Cronin; Robinson, who spent the rest of his life talking about his bitterness at the sham tryout, never mentioned being heckled in such a vile way, and the story didn't emerge until years later.

And yet the tale was believable, if only because it was so consistent with the way the Red Sox organization had comported itself. The team had first signed an African American player, Piper Davis, in 1950. He was 31. They lied and said he was younger so as to pretend they were cultivating an actual prospect. They sent him to the Eastern League to keep him out of the South (their teams in the high minors were at Birmingham and Louisville); he hit .333 and slugged .540 in 15 games before they released him for "economic reasons." Three years would go by before they signed another player of color, Earl Wilson, a talented pitcher who would become the team's second African-American player a week after Green made his debut.

Green himself was just a run-of-the-mill middle infielder, a switch-hitter with patience but not much pop—in a five-year career in the majors he hit .246/.347/.364. He was, nonetheless, clearly viable after a strong showing at Panama in the offseason and a hot spring training at the bat. His defense was shaky that Cactus League season, though, and no wonder: the Red Sox booked themselves into a whites-only spring training hotel in Scottsdale and placed him in Phoenix, 15 miles away. When the Red Sox and Cubs barnstormed through Texas, Green had to travel with the Chicago team because his own club had once again failed to find accommodations that would accept all their players.

Green's level of stress gave Sox manager and sometime GM Mike "Pinky" Higgins, a Texan who had once told a team beat writer, "There'll be no niggers on this club as long as I have anything to say about it," cover to send him to the minor leagues when the team went north. After initially refusing to comment, Green later said the move was justified: "I played very poor defensive ball in Arizona. I wasn't ready. I didn't do anything right. When I fielded the ball, I threw it away. I was in a daze all the time I was in spring training." At the time, though, the Red Sox were understandably not given the benefit of the doubt. There were calls for investigation into the team as a bastion of Jim Crowism were heard.

Cronin had become general manager after Collins' retirement and held the position through January of 1959 when he became American League president. He was asked to explain the team's conduct going back to the 1945 tryout:

The color line hadn't been broken yet, and we didn't own any team where we could play them. I certainly regretted not taking Robinson, But there is no truth at all that the Sox practice discrimination. We just were never able to sign a Negro player we wanted. And Tom Yawkey is a fine man. He has colored help on his plantation in South Carolina, takes excellent care of them, pays good salaries and they are all very happy.

And that kind of talk is why, when it was only reported years after the fact, people were all too willing to believe that Jackie Robinson had been attacked in racist terms on the field in Boston. Higgins was kicked up to the front office at the beginning of July, Green was promoted—reportedly over Higgins' objection—a few weeks later. Higgins later returned to the dugout without incident, but Earl Wilson said the manager's disdain was palpable. When Higgins died in 1969, Wilson's comment was enigmatic on the surface, but not hard to decipher: "Sometimes," he said, "good things happen to people."

The Yawkey/Cronin/Higgins problem wasn't assignable to the team's location; the Boston Braves had brought Jethroe to the majors in 1950 and nothing dire had happened. Subsequent events proved the trio to have been even more misguided. In the 15 years after Green, Boston fans would watch their team go to two World Series, and while they cheered for Carl Yastrzemski, Rico Petrocelli, Fred Lynn, and Carlton Fisk, they also rooted for Reggie Smith, George Scott, Jim Rice, and Luis Tiant, integral players who Yawkey and his minions would have none too politely told to get the hell of the field. Yawkey was still around, and maybe he still would have refused the African American players who had finally made the team a winner had the pressure—and a distinct lack of success in the years after 1947, not a coincidence—made it impossible.

Smith, an unrecognized great, got his share of racist hate mail, but the positive reaction to the team's return to winning far outweighed the few Neanderthals who would have preferred the team remain a lily-white loser. And yet it's not quite right to say that Boston fans were more evolved than Boston ownership. This brings us back to the old cognitive dissonance.

At exactly the same time the Red Sox were integrating and rising to the "Impossible Dream" 1967 pennant, a school integration crisis was boiling over in Boston. A combination of legislation and court orders mandated that students be bussed across neighborhood lines to achieve racial balance in the city's schools, which, while not legally segregated, were effectively unmixed. This became a national issue, but the response in Boston was particularly acute, with rioting and violence beginning in 1974 (a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken at Boston City Hall in 1976 remains iconic). Protestors were for busing as long as the goal was to "bus the niggers back to Africa." They carried signs saying, "We don't want any niggers in our school," and "Monkeys get out of our neighborhood."

Though the crisis would drag on for years, in 1974 a Supreme Court decision provided an escape valve for those opposed to integration in schools or housing or wherever: In Milliken v. Bradley, the Court found that desegregation plans could not cross district lines. That is, if a city and its suburbs had segregated schools, the solution was not to bus students in and out of town. This basically sanctioned white flight. The whites left the cities, the black people remained. Some of the whites came back to watch baseball games. Then they left again.

So can they love you and hate you at the same time? The question was posed not by Pumpsie Green, who always insisted he was a ballplayer first and a crusader not at all, but by the parallel desegregation of Boston baseball and the enforced segregation of its schools. Can they throw tickertape at a non-white player or an immigrant who wins a World Series but throw bricks at his relatives? Hell, yeah they can. They do. In this most discordant and ugliest of ways—humanity has never really had a hard time with sticking to sports.

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