BY HARRY COVERSTON, GUEST WRITER TO THE TIMES
If I only read the headlines online, it would be tempting to believe the America I have loved and served all my life is drowning beneath a tidal wave of misanthropy. There are many mornings when I resist helping myself to a healthy slice of despair to go with my coffee.
My Black friends patiently remind me that while these times seem unprecedented to white males like myself, this is hardly the first time America’s worst tendencies have been expressed with abandon. I know they are right. The fact they are here to tell me that gives me hope. And it prompts me to dig into our history to find examples of people who made a difference along the way, modeling courageous resistance in the face of tyranny.
Many Floridians were unaware until recently that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947 here in Central Florida. Robinson played for the Montreal Royals, a farm team for the Dodgers headquartered in Brooklyn, NY. Manager Branch Rickey had bought the highly effective public relations spin that asserted that Florida, unlike its Deep South neighbors with their blatant racism, was a moderate state where everyone could enjoy the sun and fun.
But the folks in 1946 Sanford had other ideas. And Rickey had gravely underestimated the reality of Jim Crow.
When Robinson first took the field in 1946, an all-white crowd rose and walked out, the game thereafter cancelled. The second attempt resulted in Sanford’s chief of police escorting Robinson off the field. At this point, Rickey realized his players (Robinson was one of two Black players on the team) were in danger and relocated them to Daytona Beach.
Their move there was not by chance. Mary McLeod-Bethune had been able to create an institute of higher learning for Black students in Daytona. Her innovative spirit and courage convinced a coalition of Black and white residents – including wealthy winter residents such as oil magnate John D. Rockefeller – to offer safe haven to the Dodgers. Daytona agreed to become the first Florida city (St. Augustine, Sanford and Jacksonville had all previously refused the Dodgers) in which an integrated game was played. Jackie Robinson took the field there March 17, 1946.
Two years later Rickey would convince Vero Beach to offer his team a tract from the closed WWII Naval Air training site, part of which had become the municipal airport. Dodgertown would become the first integrated sports facility in the South. Spring training began there in 1947.
That sounds like a victory. But it’s also not the whole story.
While the Robinsons were able to live at the Dodgertown complex, they could not eat at restaurants in Vero Beach. Rachel Robinson soon discovered no white beauty salons in Vero would serve her. Players seeking night life were directed to Gifford, an impoverished Black suburb north of town. Because no cabs would take them there, the Dodgers had to provide them a car to insure their safe passage.
Three things are striking about these stories. First, these profiles in courage are not well known by most white Floridians. I lived in Vero for two years and taught at a middle school in Gifford. I never knew this history even as I attended spring training games at Dodgertown.
Second, these decisions occurred amidst a virulent post-WWII surge of Jim Crow resistance to racial equality. Yet, in the face of that pushback, some courageous souls decided justice would not be denied. As a result, in Daytona Beach and Vero Beach, the needle moved, if ever so infinitesimally, in that direction.
Finally, in every case, each of these small victories exposed more challenges yet unmet. The struggle for justice in America has always been a work in progress.
This is why we all need to hear these profiles in courage and the differences they made. We need to know our decisions here and now, in the face of our own overwhelming odds, can make a difference. And we need to remember that the decision to do the right thing is always ours. Even today.
