Quote:
Originally Posted by byrone
Hank, is there much in the way of documented accounts of Cobb being racist?
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Great question, and one I would like to know the answer to myself. I would assume that whatever documentation has been found on the subject one way or the other would be recited in one or more of the several biographies, but I have only read the Alexander book and that was many years ago. My impression to that effect is based mostly on Sam Crawford's interviews with Ritter, which in other respects I found to be honest, accurate, and persuasive. I can't remember if Davy Jones addressed that aspect of Cobb's personality, which he also didn't have much good to say about in general. Those two interviews when it comes to Cobb can perhaps be discounted somewhat by the assumption of some jealousy on their part, but you'd be hard pressed to find two men who saw more of him in a baseball context and off the field as well, so their accounts have to be taken with a great deal of weight and seriousness. The other point I would make is that it would be most surprising, in a country that had so recently fought a civil war over the issue of the legal enslavement of blacks and was still virulently racist in every meaningful respect, to find someone from the deep south who was NOT a racist at that time. But if you can show me that Cobb was the exception that proves the rule, I would be eager to stand corrected.