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Originally Posted by Hankphenom
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.
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Cobb's grandfather, with whom he was very close, prided himself claiming he was the only person in his town who voted for Lincoln. Cobb's father was a Democrat but in his short time in government work showed many times to be a friend of the black man and was often at odds with those who were openly virulently bigoted. So Cobb came from a lineage of men who bucked the trends on the issue of race during their lifetimes.
To me Cobb had an equal opportunity temper. White men and black men were on the wrong side of it.
And the story of him beating on a black groundskeepers wife and also the groundskeeper himself may have been fictional as it may have been made up by a teammate who was working with new manager Hughie Jennings to find a way to get Cobb off the team as Jennings feared he was "bad for team harmony". There were no other witnesses to the event. The two who he allegedly beat up were never approached by the media of the time. Cobb immediately denied it ever happened.