Reggie Jackson Keeps It Real About Racism: It’s ‘Not Easy’ Returning To Birmingham For Tribute

Negro League legend Bill Greason throws out the ceremonial first pitch prior to the 2024 Rickwood game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals as Reggie Jackson (second from left) watches at Rickwood Field on June 20, 2024, in Birmingham, Alabama. | Source: Daniel Shirey / Getty

I ‘d like to give a special shout-out to baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson.

On Thursday, Jackson served as a member of Fox’s broadcast crew during the Negro Leagues tribute game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was asked by former MLB shortstop Alex Rodriguez what it was like for him to return to Birmingham for the tribute after he and other Black players like Willy Mays and Jackie Robinson paved the way for future Black professional baseball players like himself. Jackson was probably expected to give a standard answer for athletes, especially Black athletes who are expected to be as race-neutral as possible during national broadcasts. He was probably expected to talk about what an honor it was to be there and about the pride he feels as an American trailblazer who crossed color lines and helped send us on the path to a post-racial America. Instead, Jackson talked about how racist white people were and how the memory of what he experienced decades ago quickly extinguished any pride he might have taken in being at the tribute this week. Instead of assuaging white guilt by saying he was proud to be there, he told the truth and said it was “not easy.”

He didn’t give the “right” answer, but he gave the correct one.

“The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled,” Jackson said. “Fortunately I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say ‘a n***er can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they would say, ‘a n***er can’t stay here,’” he recalled, adding that his coach and teammates often decided that if he couldn’t stay at a “whites only” establishment, no one on the team would stay there.

Still, the show of solidarity by his white coach and teammates doesn’t erase the fact that they should never have needed to stand behind him in that manner in the first place. It’s also worth mentioning that these incidents he speaks of weren’t confined to the Jim Crow era, which was legally over three years before Jackson reached the major leagues in 1967.

From CNN :

One violent incident that happened in 1980, when Jackson was a player with the Yankees.A few hours after a victorious game, a man fired his gun at Jackson over a parking space dispute on a New York street. Jackson was looking for a parking space when a car blocked his way.When Jackson asked the driver to move, a passenger in the car yelled racial slurs at Jackson and threw a broken bottle at Jackson’s car. A man in the car then fired three shots at Jackson, each of which missed.

1980 is the year I was born —a full 16 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed into law. White people in the current day and age, many of whom are old enough to remember government-sanctioned segregation and second-class citizenship for Black people firsthand, believe they’re nothing like the racist whites of old—but are they really all that different?

Are they all that different because now they’re randomly calling Black people “DEI hires” instead of the n-word while ignoring the very disenfranchising history Jackson spoke of that made diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives necessary in the first place? Were the old racists all that dissimilar from the new racists who dismissed it as “wokeness” when experts in the field of baseball statistics recently decided it was long past time that Negro League stats be included in the MLB database? Were they all that different from today’s white conservative anti-critical race theory legislators and “education” officials who would undoubtedly restrict and whitewash how Jackson’s experience could be taught in schools the same way they did regarding the experiences of Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges ?

So, yeah —shout out to Reggie Jackson for saying what America needs to hear rather than what Americans may want to hear. Because the more things change …well, you know the rest.

SEE ALSO:

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