{"id":35838,"date":"2014-02-14T22:40:21","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T22:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35838"},"modified":"2015-06-10T20:50:08","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T20:50:08","slug":"baseballs-secret-pioneer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35838","title":{"rendered":"Baseball\u2019s Secret Pioneer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Baseball\u2019s Secret Pioneer<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Slate<\/a>
\n2014-02-04<\/p>\n

Peter Morris<\/strong><\/a>, Baseball Historian
\nHaslett, Michigan<\/em><\/p>\n

Stefan Fatsis<\/strong><\/a>, Sports Writer<\/p>\n

William Edward White, the first black player in major-league history, lived his life as a white man.<\/em><\/p>\n

On June 22, 1937, Joe Louis<\/a> knocked out James Braddock<\/a> with a right to the jaw to become the world heavyweight champion. At a time when Major League Baseball was still a decade from integration, Louis\u2019 victory in Chicago\u2019s Comiskey Park<\/a> was a triumph for black America, and for racial progress. \u201cWhat my father did was enable white America to think of him as an American, not as a black,\u201d Joe Louis Jr. told ESPN in 1999. \u201cBy winning, he became white America\u2019s first black hero.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three months before the fight, another notable moment involving race and sports occurred in the same city: the death of a 76-year-old man named William Edward White, of blood poisoning<\/a> after a slip on an icy sidewalk and a broken arm. Fifty-eight years earlier, White played a single game for the Providence Grays<\/a> of baseball\u2019s National League<\/a> to become, as best as can be determined, the first African-American player in big-league history. Unlike Louis\u2019 knockout, though, White\u2019s death merited no coverage in the local or national press. A clue as to why can be found in cursive handwriting in box No. 4 on White\u2019s death certificate, which is labeled COLOR OR RACE. The box reads: \u201cWhite.\u201d<\/p>\n

William Edward White was born in 1860 to a Georgia<\/a> businessman and one of his slaves, who herself was of mixed race. That made White, legally, black and a slave. But his death certificate and other information indicate that White spent his adult life passing<\/a> as a white man. Since the 1879 game was unearthed a decade ago, questions about White\u2019s race have clouded his legacy. If he didn\u2019t want other people to think of him as black, did he actually break the sports world\u2019s most infamous racial barrier? Or is the reality of his racial heritage, and the difficult personal issues it no doubt forced him to confront, enough to qualify him as a pioneer? Should William Edward White be recognized during Black History Month alongside Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson<\/a> and other groundbreaking African-Americans?<\/p>\n

These are complicated questions. Allyson Hobbs<\/a>, an assistant professor of American history at Stanford, says the practice of \u201cracial passing\u201d in America dates at least to runaway slaves in the 1700s. Slaves, she says, often attempted to pass as white to gain their freedom but then lived out their lives as black. By the Jim Crow<\/a> era, when William White came of age, the social and economic advantages of living as white\u2014and the disadvantages of living as black\u2014were so profound that people who could successfully pass did so and never looked back.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who passed did not want to leave a trace,\u201d says Hobbs, whose book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/a><\/em> will be published by Harvard University Press<\/a> in the fall. \u201cThey did not want to leave records, they did not want to have anyone find them, to discover that they were passing. It\u2019s very difficult to get a well-rounded image of these people\u2019s lives, and that\u2019s by their design. It\u2019s a hidden history, and it\u2019s one that can be very frustrating because there is often so little data available about these people.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Baseball\u2019s Secret Pioneer Slate 2014-02-04 Peter Morris, Baseball Historian Haslett, Michigan Stefan Fatsis, Sports Writer William Edward White, the first black player in major-league history, lived his life as a white man. On June 22, 1937, Joe Louis knocked out James Braddock with a right to the jaw to become the world heavyweight champion. At […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,6462,20],"tags":[9812,7947,16977,7435,7222,16978,16976,16979],"class_list":["post-35838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-baseball","tag-peter-morris","tag-slate","tag-sports","tag-stefan-fatsis","tag-william-edward-white","tag-william-white"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}