Baseball great and Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson wasn’t quite on Major League Baseball message when he showed up at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala to pay homage to the Negro Leagues and the recently deceased legend Willie Mays.
But it was quite possibly everything MLB and the rest of the world needed to hear as Jackson opened up while sitting on a Fox Sports panel about what it was like for him playing in the segregated South during the early 1960s. And it wasn’t nothing nice.
Jackson, now 78 and working as a senior advisor to the Astros, recalled the constant racist attacks he and a few of the other Black players who were playing the minor league Birmingham A’s had to endure during that time.
“Coming back here is not easy,” Jackson said with Rickwood Field, one of the oldest stadiums around, in the back drop. “The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled, fortunately I had a manager and players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.’’
Well before Jackson arrived in Alabama in the 1960s, Birmingham was already well known around the country for its severe mistreatment of Black people. It’s City Commissioner Bull Connor at the center of the racist movement in the deeply segregated city at that time.
“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say ‘The (N-word) can’t eat here,’” Jackson recalled. “I would go to a hotel and they would say ‘The (N-word) can’t stay here.’ We want to Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner, and they pointed me out with the N-word, ‘he can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. Finally, they let me in. He had said ‘We’re gonna go to a diner and eat hamburgers; we’ll go where we’re wanted.’
“Fortunately, I had a manager in Johnny McNamara, that if I couldn’t eat in the place, nobody would eat and we’d get food to travel. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay.”
Jackson, who would become known as Mr. October because of his outstanding play in the postseason and the five World Series titles he was a part of during 21 MLB seasons, attributes his making it through the pitfalls of the segregated south to his friends, family, and allies who helped keep him sane.
“I would have never made it. I was too physically violent. I was ready to physically fight – I’d have got killed here,” he said.
