“The Biz of Baseball” discusses a historical document proving that even as Jackie Robinson was preparing to make his color barrier-shattering debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946, an internal committee examining the race issue for Major League Baseball was arguing that integrating the teams at the time would be a mistake. Author Maury Brown concludes:

“As the 1946 steering committee document shows, there were those at the highest level of the sport that saw African-American players as beneath the quality of their White counterparts, and that they saw the influx of African-American fans as something that would lower franchise values. Take that in, as baseball takes credit for being at the front of the Civil Rights movement.”

Major League Baseball is engaged in just such a credit-taking exercise now, as it prepares to host its annual ” Civil Rights Game, “an  exhibition between the Cardinals and Reds in Cincinnati.

The document is important, both to show the strong opposition Dodger executive Branch Rickey faced as he sought to bring Robinson to the Major Leagues, and as a useful example of how rationalizations and double-talk can be used to make an indefensible policy seem reasonable when supported by entrenched bias. But the fact that the members of the committee, including Ford Frick, Sam Breadon, Philip Wrigley, William Harridge, Lee McPhail, and Thomas Yawkey, most of whom are now enshrined in Baseball’s Hall of Fame, were bigots, racists, and short-sighted (without seeing themselves as any of those things) and were still arguing against the revolution within society and their sport even as it was occurring doesn’t change the facts. Baseball did allow Jackie Robinson to break the color line, did integrate its teams, and in so doing, did serve as a vital catalyst for civil rights in America.

Because the sport did all that, regardless of what it was thinking or saying behind closed doors, Major League Baseball has every right to be proud of its role in advancing racial justice.

What does Brown expect? After seven decades of apartheid in the sport, while Jim Crow was still flourishing in America and most schools, hotels and public restrooms were segregated, did he think baseball executives suddenly should have awakened one morning with Martin Luther King’s dream in their heads? Cultural changes come slowly, with new ideas beginning as unpopular movements championed by an enlightened few. Branch Rickey was determined to integrate baseball, and whether they agreed with him or not, baseball’s brass didn’t stop him. One of those on the committee,  Boston Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, adamantly refused to integrate his own team for years, and his franchise and its fans paid a terrible price.  That is Yawkey’s shame, but it didn’t slow down the cultural shift begun by Rickey and Robinson. What the business-minded racists in baseball were thinking while they allowed their sport to be integrated literally doesn’t matter. They did the right thing. The sports can take due credit for the results.

Requiring pure motives from key individuals in societal changes sets far too high a standard for what constitutes ethical conduct. Some historians want to withhold praise from Abraham Lincoln for the Emancipation Proclamation, because it was motivated by politics and military considerations, and because it didn’t free the slaves in the Union, the only states over which Lincoln actually had power at the time. Still, the Proclamation changed moral and ethical consciousness on the issue of slavery forever; there would be no going back. Lincoln’s pure motivations, or lack of them, shouldn’t diminish his credit at all. Nor should an impotent, rationalization-filled memo by the leaders of Major League Baseball, that was obsolete before it ink was dry, tarnish the crucial role played by baseball in moving America toward a fair and equal society.