Didn’t want the day to go by without a mention of Martin Luther King Jr. and his baseball connections.
Here’s a piece I posted on the last MLK Day. One from two years ago by The Baseball Sociologist. And another from 2008 by the popular and thoughtful Dave Zirin on King and Roberto Clemente in which he quotes from David Maraniss’ outstanding biography, Clemente: The Passion and the Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. In this case, give the sacrifice Clemente made, I think that the title is most accurate, and not hyperbolic, as many tend to be.
“When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the whole system of the American style. He put the people, the ghetto people, the people who didn’t have nothing to say in those days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that nobody listened to. Now with this man, these people come down to the place where they were supposed to be but people didn’t want them, and sit down there as if they were white and call attention to the whole world. Now that wasn’t only the black people but the minority people. The people who didn’t have anything, and they had nothing to say in those days because they didn’t have any power, they started saying things and they started picketing, and that’s the reason I say he changed the whole world…”
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