Branch Rickey Read Free

years before the armed forces were desegregated by Harry Truman, years before Brown v. Board , decades before the Civil Rights Act and the great American law, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and that is exactly how it should be printed in the books). On this day Martin Luther King, Jr., was a junior at an Atlanta high school.
    McLaughlin was not famous for working with or socializing with blacks. This was no surprise to Rickey, and so he looked right past it to find any strength that could get him home. Usually he judged a man’s ability to hit behind the runner; this time he was measuring a guy at a desk. Going in, his scouting report on McLaughlin was brief: a crackerjack. Where is he on civil rights for blacks? It doesn’t matter where he is when it starts. Look for where he’ll be at the finish.
    Rickey figured it would be best to let McLaughlin extol Democrats while he listened avidly. Keep low opinion of Roosevelt out of the conversation, he warned himself. At some point in the business talk, Rickey mentioned to McLaughlin that he wanted to make a large expenditure for scouts. These men would find good players who were too young to be drafted into the war now but would serve someday soon, and then, God willing, come home strong and swift and eager to play. Some of the prospects now were as young as fifteen and sixteen; there was this boy in Compton, California, everybody called him Duke, last name Snider. Rickey’s plan would bring all that young talent to play alongside returning Brooklyn veterans. McLaughlin was in favor.
    â€œBy the way, all these scouts would cost a lot of money,” Rickey said.
    McLaughlin still loved the idea. “We’ll get a march on all of them.”
    Rickey now made a careful choice of his words and tone. Be passionate. No, entirely inappropriate. Be nonchalant. Not that, either. Why not just try the truth? This is no coward we have here. This is a secure man. So he told McLaughlin that by looking for all this new talent, the scouts might come across “a Negro player or two.”
    McLaughlin showed nothing. Of course he knew exactly what this meant. Rickey was not just throwing out a casual idea. The man would bring a stranger under the roof, a black who should be mowing lawns and instead would be running bases in this white national sport.
    Then George V. started to count.
    His friend Bill Shea remembered: “He figured that at the least there were a million blacks who played baseball. He knew right there in that room that it was only sensible to look for players who could make the Dodgers. And fill seats at Ebbets Field and all over the league. The players who could do it were out there.”
    McLaughlin had an old style of reasoning that came from years in police stations and bank negotiations. “If you want to do this to get a beat on the other teams and make some money, then let’s do it,” he told Rickey. “But if you want to do this for some social change, forget it. We want to win and make money. Don’t try to bring principle into this. If this doesn’t work for money, you’re sunk.”
    Rickey tingled inside. He had found a man whose seemingly flat indifference to the enormity of the subject, reducing it from a religious calling to a way of making more money, gave hope. What these two men had just done was agree to put their hands into the troubled history of America and fix it, starting in a baseball dugout.
    As they were now partners in this undertaking, Rickey asked McLaughlin to get the other directors together and clear this sudden and large scouting expenditure. McLaughlin said sure, why not? He put together a luncheon with George Barnewall, a close friend of McLaughlin’s at the Brooklyn Trust, Joe Gilleaudeau, who represented the Ebbets family, and James Mulvey of the McKeever interest.
    The luncheon was at the New York Athletic Club, on the corner of Central Park South and Seventh