The Jet

[GeoPoto]

(Frank) Santos (of the Boston Chronicle) was right; Jethroe was quite a hit with fans from the start. Once they saw him run, they were even more convinced. Holbrook wrote, “Jethroe’s box-office appeal amazed even the Braves’ front office who knew they had acquired a good outfielder but never guessed the staid Boston fans would adopt him as their favorite National League player and murmur with excitement every time he reached base.”

Staid, but also racist? Jethroe was eager to play in Boston, “but I was also anxious because I knew when I arrived there, more was required for me to do than a white player,” Jethroe told Larry Whiteside. He hadn’t been able to board with the team in St. Petersburg, nor in the team hotels in Chicago and St. Louis, and he didn’t have a roommate his whole first year with the Braves in Boston. “In Chicago, my first time in,” he told Marvin Pave of the Boston Globe, “I stayed at a black hotel, but the next time in, our traveling secretary, Duffy Lewis, had me stay in the team hotel with him. Our third time in, I had a room of my own.” In Boston, Jethroe stayed at the Kenmore Hotel, not far from Braves Field.

“I was lucky,” Jethroe recalled. “Everywhere I went I seemed to have the fans on my side. They kidded me about my fielding but I didn’t have rabbit ears. The fans could say what they wanted. T he only confrontations I had were on the playing field.”

While the Red Sox took more than nine years before they fielded a black ballplayer, Jethroe seems to have been almost unreservedly welcomed in Boston. And yet, the Braves certainly hadn’t signed Jethroe because of his race. In 1950, the “non-white” population of Boston was just 5.3% of the city’s overall population. The African-American population itself was an even 5.0%. To be sure, was growing; in 1940 it had been 3.1%, and in 1960 it was 9.1%. Still, this was not in any way a constituency to which either the Braves or Red Sox needed to cater.

Nonetheless, one might think that the signing of a black ballplayer would have been a major story in Boston at the time. It was not. Instead, the focus on Jethroe over the months through spring training was on his speed. The Boston press made little of his race. An online search of the Boston Herald, Boston Globe, and Springfield Union from October 1, 1949 to April 17, 1950 – the day before Jethroe’s debut – turns up 230 stories that mention “Sam Jethroe” but only 30 that mention both “Sam Jethroe” and “Negro,” the term used then the way “African American” is used today. To their credit, more than 86% of the stories made no reference at all to his race, and some of those that did were matter-of-factual, such as the Globe‘s listing of Jethroe’s prior clubs, which included the “Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League.”

It could be argued that sportswriters simply shied away from mentioning “social issues” and restricted their coverage to play on the field. However, the online search also included columnists and opinionated men such as Dave Egan of the Boston Record, who had long pushed for desegregation of Boston baseball. Egan had written back in 1945 that Boston was “freedom’s holy soil” and that “someday, the bigots of baseball will die, and men of good-will will take their places…on that day, baseball can call itself the national sport.”

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