Baseball’s backslide on diversity shows how the work must continue | Opinion

In February for Black History Month, USA TODAY Sports is publishing the series “28 Black Stories in 28 Days.” We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation’s reckoning on race following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. This is the third installment of the series.

The 2023 baseball season will mark 76 years since Jack Roosevelt Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. This past October marked 50 years since nearly 3,000 mourners attended his funeral in New York City. Jesse Jackson gave the eulogy. Sportswriter Sam Lacy reported that the turnout of Major League Baseball players was “woefully lacking.”

In the aftermath of the turbulent decade of the 1960s and escalation of the war in Vietnam, the pioneering career of Robinson may have seemed like a distant memory when he died in 1972. But at least one star insisted on attending the funeral: Henry “Hank” Aaron.

“I just had to be here,” the Atlanta Braves slugger said before the service. “He meant everything to me as far as baseball is concerned. I don’t know anyone else who could have taken that kind of abuse.”

The modest Aaron might have rightly pointed to himself.

A lack of diversity

As a youngster in Mobile, Alabama, Aaron one day hid under his bed, as instructed by his mother, while the Ku Klux Klan marched through his segregated neighborhood, sometimes stopping to burn crosses. In the minor leagues, Aaron heard every slur known to humanity. Some Jim Crow-loving fans threw rocks and black cats onto the playing field.

Aaron entered Major League Baseball in 1954, seven years after Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but it was apparent that No. 42’s pioneering play had not cleared the field of racism.

By the time of Robinson’s funeral, Aaron was just 41 home runs shy of Babe Ruth’s career record of 714. As he surveyed the funeral crowd, Aaron was pleased to see Black players from Robinson’s era, but he was also “appalled by how few of the younger players showed up to pay him tribute.”

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Aaron took the slight as a challenge. As he put it, “When Jackie died, I really felt that it was up to me to keep his dream alive...I felt like he had been through so much on the field and did so many things that required me to be where I was. I just thought that there was absolutely nothing that would stand in my way to keep me from fulfilling my goal of trying to be the best ballplayer at that time that I possibly could.”

When Aaron made history by blasting home run No. 715 over the wall at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium on April 8, 1974, the interracial crowd of 53,775 erupted and fireworks exploded. In the days that followed, one commentator after another credited Aaron with improving race relations.

Today, the dearth of diversity in Major League Baseball is a somewhat stark reminder that what Robinson and Aaron fought for did not end with their trailblazing careers but requires a deeper commitment to racial equality that transcends sports.

Abysmal numbers

In the face of triumph, the danger of losing sight of the larger issues is always a threat. As Robinson warned and Aaron feared, Black participation in Major League Baseball declined from 24 percent to 18.2 percent (144 to 109 players) between 1973 and 1976. On the 75th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color line, MLB was forced to acknowledge that today the game has the lowest percentage of Black players in three decades: just 7.2 percent of the league.

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This, of course, is not only a Major League Baseball problem, but a corporate America problem, a university problem, a small-business problem. A commitment to diversity isn’t about hitting home runs and earning recognition in the short term, but rather building pathways to success embedded in diverse rosters that defy the easy solutions for the more complex but necessary commitment to roster-building for the future.

Yohuru Williams, the founding director at the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and Michael G. Long are co-authors of Call Him Jack: The Story of Jackie Robinson, Black Freedom Fighter (2022).

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Baseball’s backslide on diversity shows how the work must continue