Glory of Their Times

[byrone]

Originally Posted by Hankphenom

All good points. When I called Cobb a racist--and as I said, I'm willing to stand corrected on that--I was referring to the younger man, and drew on the comments of his teammates on GOTT. Of course, the country changed dramatically in its racial attitudes over his lifetime, and it would surprising if many of the old-time players didn't change also. For example, I don't know how you could call the U.S. Armed Forces, which remained segregated until 1948, or many of the nation's schools that stayed that way into the 1960s, anything but racist based on those policies. But eventually they changed, the country changed, and people changed. I will ask again what concrete documentation was discovered in the research for his many biographies, and what does it point to in the racial attitudes of the younger Ty Cobb? I did a page or two in my biography of my grandfather on the racial issue and what little I could find where it impacted his careeer, mostly based on a handful of exhibition games he pitched against black teams and his fulsome praise of Josh Gibson after seeing him play in a spring training game in Florida in 1939. What is there on Cobb from original sources, I'd like to know?

Here are a few accounts:


But a lot of people have made assumptions about Cobb based on the date of his birth and the location, which was 1886 in Royston, Georgia or near Royston, Georgia, and so people just assume that he must have been a racist. But what they don't know — and what I found out — is that he descends from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a preacher who preached against slavery and was run out of town. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. His father was a state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and broke up a lynch mob in town and had a very short political career because of it.

[Cobb] never said anything about race until 1952 when he told the Sporting News that "the Negro has the right to play professional sports," he said, "and who's to say he has not."


https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2015/...arles-leerhsen


I have over 40,000 newspaper articles, and NOT one article makes any correlation to Ty Cobb being a racist. All the evidence demonstrates Cobb’s support for the advancement of colored people, and yet, there is NO evidence that gives any indication that Mr. Cobb made any movement toward oppressing the black population.

Contrary, when Jackie Robinson entered into the major leagues, it began a slow process of allowing blacks to begin entering into every league in the country. When the Dallas club of the Texas League was considering allowing blacks to enter, Cobb was there to bat for them.


https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...s-not-a-racist



When he began work on a new biography, “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty” (Simon & Schuster), Charles Leerhsen expected to uncover fresh depictions of the player as a racist and a spikes-sharpening attacker of opposing infielders. If Cobb was the meanest man in baseball flannels, additional animosity would not be difficult to find.

“I thought I’d find new examples of monstrous monstrosity,” Leerhsen said in an interview last week. “Instead, I found a very different person than the myth. I was a little disappointed at first. He’s more normal than I thought.”

Leerhsen’s research found neither a saint nor a Rabelaisian character like Babe Ruth. Sure, Cobb could be unpleasant and overly sensitive. He had a temper and fought with his share of people, including a fan who heckled him mercilessly. But Leerhsen did not unearth a bigot primed to attack black men or a brandisher of carefully filed daggers beneath his shoes.

“It’s a warts-and-all biography,” Leerhsen said, laughing. “But they’re warts, not tumors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/s...notoriety.html