Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
Interesting brief counterargument: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...s-not-a-racist. There have been some good book length treatments with full citations in recent years that are much fairer biographies.
I'm not sure if people just repeat the Stump lies out of habit, or if people just really need some targets for their contemporary narratives and do not care whatsoever about evidence.
Trying to shovel contemporary narrative into the past and then vilifying the past for not being the present is a stupid game to play at all, but it's extra stupid when the chosen target was actually much more aligned with the contemporary narrative than the one of their own time and place. |
Here is a short piece by Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty that says: "But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that
Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.
Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought.
“The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.
A similar
piece by MLB.com echoes the above sentiments, stating that "We have zero evidence to suggest that Cobb was a racist."