Quote:
Originally Posted by bender07
(Post 1125050)
I couldn't find anything about chapman being a sheriff but wiki has this:
In June 1936, Chapman – then hitting .266[3] and expendable with the arrival of DiMaggio[4] – was traded to the Senators. The trade was ironic in that the player the Yankees received in return was Jake Powell, who would become infamous for a 1938 WGN radio interview in which he stated that he liked to crack blacks over the head with his nightstick as a police officer in Dayton, Ohio during the off-season. Furthermore, earlier in the 1936 season, Powell had purposely collided with Hank Greenberg, the Detroit Tigers' Jewish first baseman, breaking Greenberg's wrist and ending his season after only 12 games.[1]
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/sp...ewanted=print&
July 27, 2008
Public Slur in 1938 Laid Bare a Game’s Racism
By CHRIS LAMB
The National Baseball Hall of Fame recently updated Jackie Robinson’s plaque to reflect the courage and poise he showed in integrating baseball in 1947. No plaque or distinction will ever be accorded Jake Powell — nor should they — but his racist comment 70 years ago broke the conspiracy of silence that protected segregated baseball.
During a pregame interview at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 29, 1938, the WGN Radio announcer Bob Elson asked Powell, a Yankees outfielder, what he did during the off-season. Powell replied that he was a policeman in Dayton, Ohio. When Elson asked him how he stayed in shape, Powell, using a common racial slur, replied that he cracked blacks over the head with his nightstick.
Hundreds of outraged listeners called the station. Others called the Chicago office of the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Before the next day’s game, a delegation of black leaders presented a petition to umpires demanding that Powell be barred from baseball for life.
Although Major League Baseball had turned a deaf ear to criticism of its color line, it could neither dismiss nor deny the outcry over Powell’s slur. Landis suspended him for 10 days. The Sporting News reported that it was the first time that a major league ballplayer had been suspended for a racist remark.
L’affaire Jake Powell, as it was called, revealed the hypocrisy of segregated baseball. Landis punished a racist player, yet Landis and the baseball establishment had long practiced racial discrimination against black players.
This was not the story’s only twist. In 1936, the Washington Senators traded Powell to the Yankees for the virulent racist Ben Chapman. Powell never worked as a police officer in Dayton or anywhere else, as he had contended, though, as it turned out, he died in a police station a decade later.
The Powell incident unified those who had begun calling for the end of segregated baseball, and it put the game’s establishment on the defensive. It is doubtful whether Landis, known derisively in the black press as the Great White Father because he blocked attempts to integrate baseball, would have suspended Powell without outside pressure.
Alvin Jacob Powell was born in Silver Spring, Md., on July 15, 1908. He was known as a hustler — on and off the field. During a trip with the minor league Dayton Ducks, Powell tried to leave his hotel room with a circular fan, the drapes and a bedspread.
“He probably would have taken the mattress if he could have got it in his suitcase,” Ducks Manager Howard E. Holmes said at the time.
Powell and his wife made their home in Dayton. He talked about joining the police department, and friends said his remark about blacks was his idea of a joke, according to The Dayton Daily News.
In Powell’s first full season with the Senators, in 1935, he hit .312 and had 98 runs batted in. But by the next year, the Senators wanted to trade him. The unpopular Powell deliberately collided with Detroit first baseman Hank Greenberg, who was Jewish, breaking Greenberg’s wrist and ending his 1936 season after 12 games. In addition, Powell’s creditors had threatened to sue the Senators to settle his gambling debts.
The Yankees had also had enough of Chapman, who taunted Jewish spectators at Yankee Stadium with Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic epithets.
Powell hit .302 in 87 games with the Yankees in 1936, then led the team in hitting and runs during the World Series — the first of four straight championships for the Yankees. Powell’s playing time was reduced during the 1937 and 1938 seasons.
To most white sportswriters, who were silent about the color line, Powell’s words were harmless and unintentional. The columnist Dan Daniel, the longtime president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, said Powell could have been more careful, but “he is a hustling player, aggressive, and always getting into a jam.”
Black journalists, however, railed against Powell and the baseball establishment. They urged their readers to boycott Yankees games and the corporate sponsors of the team’s radio broadcasts. The Yankees, the most powerful team in baseball, were forced to apologize and ask what they could do to improve relations with the black community.
Black leaders kept up the pressure, demanding that the Yankees trade or release Powell. When Powell returned to the field during a game at Griffith Stadium in Washington, spectators threw bottles at him. The Yankees kept Powell for two more seasons but played him sparingly. He was released in 1941.
Powell spent time in the minor leagues before joining the Senators, who then traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1945, his final season in the majors. The Phillies’ manager was Chapman, whose managerial career was best remembered for his vitriolic race-baiting of Jackie Robinson during Robinson’s rookie season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Shortly after Powell’s career in professional baseball ended in the minors in 1948, he was arrested for passing bad checks. While being questioned in a police station, Powell shot himself to death.
“He died in Washington, D.C.,” Powell’s obituary in The Dayton Daily News read, “not as a cop as he often dreamed of being, but as a man arrested on a bad-check charge, the last of a series of his madcap adventures.”
Chris Lamb is a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He is author of “Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training.
