June 07, 2007 @ 11:09 am
Where Have All the African-American Baseball Players Gone?
"Baseball been berry, berry good to me," and thus were the words of "Chico Escuela," a fictional Dominican Major League baseball player, who was one of the most popular characters performed by Garrett Morris during his run as the only black actor in the first cast of Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the late 1970s. At the time some understood “Chico Escuela” as a caricature of so-called “Latin” baseball players, who were presumed to be docile and accepting of their status as second-class citizens both within the league and the larger society. Morris, who is African-American, could apparently make light of the Latino presence in baseball at the time—some thirty-years after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers—because African-American ballplayers were some of the league’s great resources as players like Bobby Bonds (late father of Barry), Dave Parker, Jim Rice, Reggie Jackson, Willie Stargell, Dusty Baker, George Foster, Joe Morgan, Eddie Murray, J.R. Richards, Ken Griffey, Sr. and Dave Winfield were at or close to their professional peak.
Read the rest in Critical Noir, Mark Anthony Neal's blog on VIBE.com.
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http://www.vibe.com/news/news_headlines/2007/06/chico_escuela/
Celeb of the Day
Will Smith
Government Name: Willard Christopher Smith Jr.
Hometown: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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Comments
1.
Tre says:
Some years ago I saw a special on cable that discussed way back then the reasons why Blacks were vanishing from baseball while Latinos were were literally taking over. Simply put the baseball leagues stop having baseball camps in the inner city and instead moved them to Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic and other Latin countries.
June 19, 2007 at 12:05 am