There was a time when America’s pastime showed a weariness of Florida’s hostile approach to inclusiveness, which in some ways is being reconstituted by its current governor, Ron DeSantis.
It was not necessarily coincidental that the year was 1947, the same season the game allowed Jackie Robinson to be the first Black man to play in its major leagues in 60 years. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who famously signed Robinson, strategically opened spring training in Havana that year. Dodgers co-owner and general manager Branch Rickey, who directed the recruitment and signing of Robinson, wanted him to break in where Black baseball players had a more comfortable history.
But Rickey’s new peer in Cleveland, Bill Veeck, who had searched for a way to break the game’s color barrier earlier in the decade, decided to go a step further. He junked tradition. After buying the Cleveland franchise in 1946, Veeck decided in 1947 to detach the team from its Lakeland, Fla., spring training grounds, where it had been since 1922, and replant it in Tucson. He thought Arizona, which he had explored as a retirement home, would be more hospitable toward Black players than Florida. Florida was home to Jim Crow laws that made it difficult for even Black ballplayers, no matter how temporary their residency would be, to find hotels or motels for their stay, or restaurants and lunch counters at which to dine. The decrees were enforced by White vigilantes who made Florida home to three of the deadliest counties in the South in per capita lynchings of Black people.
Veeck convinced the New York Giants to join his move west, too. And that July, Veeck signed Larry Doby, orchestrating integration of the American League. The St. Louis Browns, who signed the next two Black players, briefly set up spring training in California.
Thus began the exodus of spring baseball from Florida, a sort of protest partly spurred by the state’s intransigence on race.
DeSantis cannonballs into America’s deep blue states for war on ‘woke’ ahead of 2024
If baseball is still concerned with as much, its 15 franchises that started spring training last month in Florida should consider making the annual exercise an all-Cactus League affair as long as DeSantis commands an attack on diversity. It has been the hallmark of his governorship, which many believe is a prologue to a presidential bid.
Just last month, DeSantis called a new Advanced Placement high school course in African American studies “indoctrination,” dismissed its educational value and threatened to replace the nonprofit College Board that approved it.
Earlier this year, he proposed a ban on state funding for any Florida college program that embraced the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion, or critical race theory. The latter is the higher-education scientific analysis of race and racism in society that has been purposefully disfigured by DeSantis, an Ivy Leaguer, and others of his reactionary ilk into a boogeyman for White citizens who believe they are losing this country that wasn’t theirs in the first place. When the Florida legislature opens Tuesday, state lawmakers will consider a cluster of new proposals that would dial back college studies on gender, end some diversity programs at universities and stifle pronoun courtesies, in the charge to hegemonize education in the state.
It was not necessarily coincidental that the year was 1947, the same season the game allowed Jackie Robinson to be the first Black man to play in its major leagues in 60 years. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who famously signed Robinson, strategically opened spring training in Havana that year. Dodgers co-owner and general manager Branch Rickey, who directed the recruitment and signing of Robinson, wanted him to break in where Black baseball players had a more comfortable history.
But Rickey’s new peer in Cleveland, Bill Veeck, who had searched for a way to break the game’s color barrier earlier in the decade, decided to go a step further. He junked tradition. After buying the Cleveland franchise in 1946, Veeck decided in 1947 to detach the team from its Lakeland, Fla., spring training grounds, where it had been since 1922, and replant it in Tucson. He thought Arizona, which he had explored as a retirement home, would be more hospitable toward Black players than Florida. Florida was home to Jim Crow laws that made it difficult for even Black ballplayers, no matter how temporary their residency would be, to find hotels or motels for their stay, or restaurants and lunch counters at which to dine. The decrees were enforced by White vigilantes who made Florida home to three of the deadliest counties in the South in per capita lynchings of Black people.
Veeck convinced the New York Giants to join his move west, too. And that July, Veeck signed Larry Doby, orchestrating integration of the American League. The St. Louis Browns, who signed the next two Black players, briefly set up spring training in California.
Thus began the exodus of spring baseball from Florida, a sort of protest partly spurred by the state’s intransigence on race.
DeSantis cannonballs into America’s deep blue states for war on ‘woke’ ahead of 2024
If baseball is still concerned with as much, its 15 franchises that started spring training last month in Florida should consider making the annual exercise an all-Cactus League affair as long as DeSantis commands an attack on diversity. It has been the hallmark of his governorship, which many believe is a prologue to a presidential bid.
Just last month, DeSantis called a new Advanced Placement high school course in African American studies “indoctrination,” dismissed its educational value and threatened to replace the nonprofit College Board that approved it.
Earlier this year, he proposed a ban on state funding for any Florida college program that embraced the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion, or critical race theory. The latter is the higher-education scientific analysis of race and racism in society that has been purposefully disfigured by DeSantis, an Ivy Leaguer, and others of his reactionary ilk into a boogeyman for White citizens who believe they are losing this country that wasn’t theirs in the first place. When the Florida legislature opens Tuesday, state lawmakers will consider a cluster of new proposals that would dial back college studies on gender, end some diversity programs at universities and stifle pronoun courtesies, in the charge to hegemonize education in the state.
