A few days ago I became aware of new evidence that an icon of Old South bigotry has been misrepresented by history. Believe it or not, Ty Cobb, was not a racist. In fact, he was decidedly the opposite. This is a good lesson in how history can be distorted and how it takes diligent, primary source research sometimes to find out that a commonly held belief is wrong. Here are two short paragraphs from a recent New York Times review of Charles Leerhsen’s new book, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty:
“Leerhsen’s correctives are convincing, particularly his evidence against two of the more serious and persistent criticisms of Cobb: that he purposely endangered opponents by filing his shoe’s spikes to an extra-fine point before flying around the bases; and that he was notably racist, even for his time, with his many physical altercations often fueled by that animus.
“Cobb’s grandfather and great-grandfather were staunchly antislavery, Leerhsen notes, and his father could sometimes speak ‘a bit like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Cobb himself praised black players, including Roy Campanella and Willie Mays, and spoke out in favor of the sport’s integration. “The Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly,” he said in 1952. Leerhsen’s book makes a persuasive argument that at the very least, Cobb’s irascibility was not motivated explicitly by race, and that certain fabled brawls chalked up to fervent bigotry may never have happened in the first place.” (Full review:
http://tinyurl.com/hdg3ep5 )
Even more to the point here, a story based on a college speech given by Mr. Leerhsen printed in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, says the following:
“. . . Ty Cobb was the descendant of a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.”
The Imprimis article goes on to say that Cobb personally attended many Negro league ball games, sometimes was asked to throw out the first pitch, and often sat with the players in the dugout.
I don't know about you, but I'm glad to know that there's one less racist that our history books need to deal with. This whole scenario is also quite instructive about the need to go back and look at primary source material rather than just repeat material from secondary sources that may or may not bear much resemblance to reality.
I should add that our own Charles Alexander has had to admit that he engaged in shoddy scholarship on Cobb. He was, however, not alone. The whole baseball history establishment gets an "F" on this one.