Roberto Clemente was a Black Puerto Rican, and pushed back against racism.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Though I was raised with a grandfather who was a fanatical Brooklyn Dodgers fan, one of my early baseball heroes was the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Roberto Clemente, so I’ve been following the upcoming tributes to him.
I revisited some of the many documentaries about him, and his contributions to baseball — this one was made in 1993.
It’s important that we pay attention to not only his feats on the ball field, which were legendary, but also his efforts off-field, and not just the humanitarian one that he gave his life for in a plane crash.
Growing up, it never occurred to me that Clemente wasn’t counted as one of the Black players that were my early heroes; like Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Roy Campanella. When I google Clemente, it’s interesting how few sites mention him being Black, which never gets missed when you search “Jackie Robinson.” Most refer to him as “Latin American.” Few online bios mention his early introduction to mainland racism when he wound up here in the States. This is not to imply that there was no racism in Puerto Rico, however teams there were integrated, and it was the off-season home for many Negro Leagues players.
Negro All Stars in Puerto Rican Baseball
The first pitch of Puerto Rican “beisbol” happened in Santurce, a neighborhood of San Juan, on January 11th, 1898, three years before the Red Sox were founded. Baseball seemed like a recreational sport until the late 1930’s when the Liga de B isbol Semiprofesional de Puerto Rico (LBSPR) was christened. The league quickly grew to six teams with teams from all over the island, ranging from the north central capital of San Juan to the western coastal town of Ponce (Carlos Correa’s hometown).
While Jim Crow laws prevented blacks and latinos from playing baseball in the majors, the Puerto Rican league was very welcoming of blacks, and in turn the Negro League allowed Puerto Ricans and Dominicans to join in. This openness between the Negro Leagues and the island is how Josh Gibson (and Satchel Paige, etc.) got to be a legend in Puerto Rico and conceivably change the culture of baseball in Puerto Rico forever. A 19 year old Josh Gibson played for the Homestead Grays in 1931 and went to the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1932 to catch for Satchel Paige. After the 1932 season Gibson traveled to Puerto Rico to be a player/manager for the new Santurce Cangrejeros. He was paid $250 a month and was a star on this new expansion team. In 1933, Gibson returned to Pittsburgh and played for the Crawfords in the new Negro National League through 1936…
It seems as if Puerto Rican baseball went from a local pastime to a regional profession in the early 1930’s. It’s too coincidental that this was the time that the Negro League players, and more importantly Gibson, started wintering on the island. Maybe it was a short term business move for the new league to invest in top flight talent from the mainland until the new league gained steam. During Gibson’s first year with the Santurce “Crabbers” in 1932, the uniforms they used were blank and they had no sponsor. By Gibson’s next trip a couple winters later they were sponsored by a national rum company and moved into a new stadium. By his last trip in the winter of 1941-42 baseball was a national treasure with the All Star game occurring over “Three Kings Day” (the Christian feast of the Epiphany). Is it a stretch to assume that when Roberto Clemente was working in the sugar fields as an 8 year old in 1942 he was swinging a stick of sugarcane pretending to be Josh Gibson ? Clemente was earmarked for his talent as a 16 year old and eventually signed a contract with the same Santurce Cangregeros as a 17 year old and he happened to have the same locker as “The Black Babe”.
I have very rarely heard Clemente’s name mentioned in connection to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (to be honest — I had not heard much about King’s visits to Puerto Rico either)
Martin Luther King Jr. & Roberto Clemente Connection: How MLK Impacted the Puerto Rican Baseball Legend's Life
Nobel Peace Prize-winning, African-American Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. impacted many lives, but he also had a great influence on Latinos who also faced racial discrimination -- including Puerto Rican baseball legend Roberto Clemente, who was both black and Latino. Dubbed the "Great One ('El Magnifico')" Clemente was a Spanish-speaking, Afro-Puerto Rican who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates (1955-1972). He was also "one who sought equality despite the disparity between Puerto Rico's easygoing acceptance of all, and America's hardline segregation regarding race, language and culture during the 50′s," according to MLB for Life.
"As if that was not enough disrespect, while his white teammates dined at roadside restaurants on Grapefruit League road trips, Clemente would have to remain on the team bus. Fed up with such atrocities, he finally coerced the Pittsburgh Pirates front office management to allow the black players to travel in their own station wagon. Clemente said that enduring the unjust racial divide during spring training was like being in prison."
It's important to note that during Clemente's professional career (from 1954 to 1972), he did however witness a significant change in both Major League Baseball and American society. "He was an intelligent and politically-charged activist who marched in the street protests of the 60′s and spent time with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. when the civil rights leader visited him at his farm in Puerto Rico," MLB for Life reports. "He had a strong connection to King as the humanitarian witnessed firsthand the black freedom struggle from the Montgomery Bus Boycotts to the urban ghetto rebellions and from Rosa Parks to the Black Panthers."
As a side note, I thought this was an interesting piece of baseball history.
There is a push to retire Clemente’s number, using the hashtag #retire21
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Wealth disparity and the racial wealth gap in America are dramatic. The median wealth for a Black family, $17,600 (inclusive of home equity), is only about one-tenth of the $171,000 median wealth for a White family. What’s more, the mean or average wealth of a White family, $933,700, is nearly seven times that of Black family wealth at $138,200.
But clearly, the “typical” White family are not millionaires and have nowhere near $933,700 in wealth. Instead, mean wealth is driven by a skewed distribution where the wealthy own just about everything. According to one study, the top 10% of American households owns nearly 80% of the nation’s wealth. More specifically, the top one-tenth of 1% of households, those with over $20.6 million in wealth, own about as much of the nation’s wealth as the entire bottom 90%. We haven’t seen this obscene a concentration of wealth and its accompanying plutocracy (i.e. the ability to translate all that economic might into political power) since the Great Depression, and it is being driven by a class of White billionaires.
Wealth concentration is wreaking havoc on our democracy and our capacity to collectively envision and establish a just American society. Our attempts at progress even for those things on which we agree are consistently thwarted. For instance, a large majority of Americans want action on climate change. Yet, a capitalist class of energy tycoons that stands to lose some of its short-term profits if we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels is able to fund aggressive lobbying that impedes democratic action.
Racial justice would mean that White and Black households are seen in equal measure throughout the wealth distribution—with Blacks accounting for 13% of the bottom, the middle, and the top, the same share we represent in the population as a whole. (That notion of racial economic equity, namely that the proportion of persons with wealth above a stipulated amount is the same in both groups, was established by the first and only Black Nobel laureate in economics, W. Arthur Lewis, in his seminal book, Racial Conflict and Economic Development.)
To be clear, we are not advocating for a new class of Black billionaires or for Black wealth distribution to replicate the dysfunctional distribution of wealth among White Americans. Although that might move us closer to racial equity as defined by Lewis, it would still leave unaddressed America’s plutocracy and hoarding of resources among the few—only now that few would be more racially inclusive.
To achieve economic justice, we would have to break up the concentration at the top. We would need a more egalitarian distribution of wealth so that the bottom half of all earners, which is disproportionately Black but is still composed of many White families, would own a lot more than just the 1% of our nation’s wealth that they currently own.
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This week it was revealed that former presidential candidate Michael R. Bloomberg is responding to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic by donating a $100M to Black students studying to become doctors.
According to the NY Times, Thursday, the billionaire businessman announced that his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, has committed to giving $100M to medical schools at four historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) over the next four years.
In an op-ed for CNN titled “To save Black lives, we need more Black doctors,” Bloomberg concedes that one of the many reasons Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at disproportionate rates is because of inequitable health care.
“Black patients overall have better outcomes when they are treated by Black doctors. A wealth of data supports this, including a recent study that found Black newborns treated by Black physicians had higher rates of survival,” he writes.
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When an incident of police brutality against a Black person in the United States is captured on video, the aftermath follows a pattern. Activists, members of the community, and certain writers say that American policing and police discipline are fundamentally flawed. They say that the way drug possession charges and civil-infraction tickets are pursued in low-income neighborhoods constitutes discrimination against people of color. Sometimes they discover evidence of explicit racism on the part of officers who’ve been accused of brutality, which they say is evidence of a rotten system. (The Google search for “police officer posted picture of Obama monkey” returns news stories from multiple states.)
In response, elected officials, police chiefs, and certain other writers say that most police officers are decent people doing a tough job to the best of their ability. They say that while acts of brutality should be condemned and punished, existing mechanisms are an adequate means of doing so. They say that the American system of policing is basically just and effective, not intrinsically discriminatory, and that the country’s police departments are not run by officers who hold personally racist views and are predisposed to violence.
This year’s presidential election makes for an interesting natural experiment to test which group’s viewpoint is correct. One of the candidates, Joe Biden, is critical of officers who perpetrate unjustified shootings and beatings, and supportive of peaceful protests against overpolicing. But he says that “most cops are good, decent people.” He believes that the existing levels of police funding should be maintained. He does not believe that “qualified immunity” laws should be changed to allow for easier prosecution of police brutality. One of his most significant achievements as a senator was the 1994 crime bill, which provided federal funding for hiring new officers. He served in a presidential administration that, by the standards of presidential administrations, was exceptionally clean and law-abiding.
The other candidate, Donald Trump, has a history of making racist comments about nonwhite people. (A new one was uncovered in a book published last month.) A number of those comments indicate a belief that predominately Black and Latino countries and communities are intrinsically undesirable places to live. He was accused—by the Nixon administration!—of systematically discriminating against Black tenants as a landlord. As a private citizen he fraternized with Mafia figures, worked closely with a convicted drug trafficker and a convicted racketeer, and sold apartments to an impressive number of organized crime leaders. He’s made supportive comments about a white supremacist rally, hired white nationalists in his administration, and defended a white member of a “militia” who recently shot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two. Two of the most notable chapters of his pre-presidential public life involved him making false accusations against Black people. He’s encouraged police officers to smash suspects’ heads against the sides of their cars, which is illegal. A number of his political advisers and associates have been convicted of crimes. A majority of voters believes that he, himself, has committed crimes in the past.
Which side are the police on? Do they favor the candidate who believes law enforcement basically means well, as long as it keeps working to “root out the bad apples” in police departments? Or the candidate with a record of supporting criminal behavior, extrajudicial violence, and racism—and of celebrating the bad apples?
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U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, slammed President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr for claiming that institutional racism does not exist.
“I don’t think that most reasonable people who are paying attention to the facts would dispute that there are racial disparities and a system that has engaged in racism, in terms of how the laws have been enforced,” said Harris in a Sunday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
“It does us no good to deny that. Let’s just deal with it. Let’s be honest. These might be difficult conversations for some, but they’re not difficult conversations for leaders,” Harris opined. “Not for real leaders.”
In an in-depth CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer earlier in the week, Barr dismissed the idea of “two justice systems,” saying, instead, “I think we have to be a little careful about throwing the idea of racism around. I don’t think it is as common as people suggest.”
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