On April 17, 2009, Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, the first African-American to play for the Boston Red Sox, was honored at Fenway Park in a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of his breaking the team’s color barrier. The 1959 Sox were the last of the pre-expansion teams to hire a black player. A week after Green’s first plate appearance, the pitcher Earl Wilson was called up from the minors, becoming the second black player on the team. Nine years earlier and just a mile and a half from Fenway, the Boston Braves had debuted their first black player, Sam Jethroe, the 1950 National League Rookie of the Year (at age 32). Why did it take so long for the Sox to put a black man on the field, some 12 years after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers?
The biases of Tom Yawkey, the sole owner of the Red Sox for 43 years, inevitably hold the answer. His ghost is so reviled that a move is afoot to rename Yawkey Way, the boisterous street of vendors beside the ballpark. “Yawkey Way Needs Renaming” reads the headline of a recent article by Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker (the Globe and the Sox are owned by John Henry, who claims to be “haunted” by the stain of Yawkey’s racism). Why did Yawkey pass up the chance to sign both Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson? Should Yawkey Way be renamed despite the Yawkey Foundation’s generous funding of many critically needed programs in the city?
Bill Nowlin has now produced the first expansive biography of the man in Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox. “Perhaps Yawkey was not personally racist,” he writes. “Regardless of how one looks at the issue, however, whatever the Red Sox decided, through action or inaction, during the Yawkey years was ultimately his responsibility … he had the power to see that the team was integrated.” But Nowlin also shows that the topic of integration was raised and repeatedly shunted throughout the 1940s and 50s by individuals within Major League Baseball and the city of Boston. Yawkey was simply reluctant to act – and ingrained racism cannot be dismissed as one of his faults. Drawing from many sources, Nowlin describes Yawkey as a low-key loner, “reserved and almost hermitic,” and unassertive about team issues which were left to his staff to deliberate.
“Not personally racist” is a tonally deaf way of describing Yawkee’s prejudice. Nowlin has written more than 35 books on the Red Sox; I don’t expect him to produce the insights of a political historian or sociologist. But his brief, early chapters on Yawkey’s upbringing, focused on the young man’s affluent privileges, are disinterested his family’s attitude toward people of color. Nowlin seems quite content to brush aside the looming issue of racism simply by assigning Yawkey as a man of his time. But the attitude of his time is the whole story when it comes to baseball’s color line.
Nowlin makes a game attempt to show alternate aspects of his subject’s personality and to illustrate Yawkey’s love of the game. He wants us to know, for instance, that “On June 26 [1962] Earl Wilson threw a no-hitter against the White Sox. Making one of his rare visits to the Red Sox clubhouse, Yawkey tore up Wilson’s contract on the spot and gave him a new one. It was a typical Yawkey move … it perhaps reflected the side of Tom Yawkey that had always argued he had no personal prejudice.” Perhaps. Nowlin tries to corroborate allegations of Yawkey’s use of racial slurs — but the evidence is inconclusive. Nevertheless, others in the Sox front office, especially before the arrival of team executive Dick O’Connell, are probably guilty.
Tom Yawkey allows the reader to be immersed in baseball’s atmosphere during the Yawkey era – and, with the exceptions of the 1947 and 1967 seasons, to wallow in the usual disappointing results of the Sox. Ball clubs then were the private reserves of all-controlling owners, and Yawkey ruled soberly from afar. A retiring figure, he never bonded with Boston and didn’t even own a house or apartment in the area, preferring to stay at the Ritz Carlton where he was a rare presence in the dining room. He would show up in Boston in June with the season well underway, and live for most of the year on his estate in South Carolina. In his younger days, he enjoyed taking batting practice, inviting local kids to shag his flies. Afterwards, he would give each of them a $20 dollar bill.
Born into a wealthy family, Yawkey acquired the Red Sox in 1933 after inheriting almost $3,500,000 on his 30th birthday from his step-father Bill Yawkey who himself had inherited over $10,000,000 from a fortune made in lumber. Bill had owned the Detroit Tigers. Just four days after receiving his inheritance, Tom bought the Sox for $1,500,000; hit by the Depression, the previous owner was desperate to sell. Yawkey was the sole owner of the team until 1976 when his wife Jean and the Yawkey Trust took over through 2002. It was widely believed for decades that Tom ran the team like “a country club,” offering salaries and benefits that were somewhat more generous than those given by his peers.
Jackie Robinson had a reason for calling Yawkey “the most bigoted man in baseball,” though the celebrated Dodger moderated his remarks in later years. Black players such as Jim Rice, Reggie Smith (pictured here with Yawkey) and others commented respectfully about Yawkey. And yet, the race issues persisted even after Yawkey’s death. Nowlin includes the disturbing episodes involving Tommy Harper during spring training in the 70s and again in the 80s. The team’s personnel had been invited to a whites-only Elks Club. “Here it was in the 1980s, and the ball club’s allowing this kind of membership card in our clubhouse,” said Harper. “I thought enough was enough … I wasn’t angry. I just said it was wrong.” Harper approached then club CEO Hayward Sullivan to register his complaint but nothing happened. He was fired in 1985.
Nowlin quotes Carl Yastrzemski: “He had the most humility of any person I ever knew. He had a soft heart. My mother was dying of cancer and for a month Mr. and Mrs. Yawkey went every day to the hospital to visit her. Then he went out of his way so that she could see the World Series before she died.” In 2014, Dick Johnson of the new England Sports Museum said: ”There are really two reasons I think he’s remained a hero in Boston. The first is that during the depths of the Depression, the rebuilding of Fenway park was the second-largest construction project in the city after the building of the Mystic River Bridge. And he hired union help when he didn’t have to. The second thing … is the philanthropy of the Yawkee Foundation.”
Nowlin’s narrative is well-researched in its baseball and business content, and he doesn’t make it easy to dislike Yawkey. Even so, Yawkey Way should and will probably be renamed. Adrian Walker wrote in the Globe, “Naming a street after such a retrograde on race sends a message, and a message like that matters. It serves to reinforce this city’s terrible, and largely deserved, reputation for not caring about a history of bigotry.”
As Nowlin reports, in 1973 Reggie Smith asked to be traded – but not because of Yawkey (“They don’t deserve an owner like Mr. Yawkey”) but because of the fans and the city. Smith told Nowlin, “I was being followed home … I felt it when they were doing things like that … A guy pulled up early one morning, and I found him in my driveway and then he took off. It was time to go. My family meant more to me than baseball.” The sign that says “Yawkey Way” is a city fixture – and the city must fix itself. Yawkey’s ghost, darkly benign, is a lingering wisp of a shameful past.
[Published by the University of Nebraska Press on February 1, 2018. 560 pages, $36.95 hardcover]