Four Guys from Birmingham: A Paradigm for Understanding the White Southern Response to Integration

Four Guys from BirminghamA Paradigm for Understanding the White Southern Response to Integration John N. Ingham (bio) Jackie Robinson broke into major league baseball in 1947, integrating what was then called the “national pastime,” as the first African American allowed to play at that level since Moses Fleetwood Walker in the late nineteenth century. This was a momentous event in the history of civil rights in America and has been covered in great detail in a number of books and articles over the years.1 Robinson’s entry into the major league ranks was not accepted with equanimity by everyone involved, and this, too, has been substantially chronicled by others. The intention in this article is to focus upon four young men from Birmingham, Alabama, the so-called “Johannesburg” of North America, who took various leadership positions in opposing Robinson’s entry in 1947. I will then chart the evolution of their lives and careers for the decades after that time. By examining that, I hope to provide a clearer picture of the way in which many other individuals in the Deep South accommodated themselves to the new world of integration that had been thrust upon them. My chief hypothesis is that the varying paths these four Birmingham ballplayers took concerning integration over the years provides a rough paradigm of the path taken by most other southern whites. Generally, the American South in the early years after World War II, and for several decades after, displayed an unyielding attitude regarding integrating African Americans into the mainstream of life on any level—residence, schools, workplace and so forth. Since the 1970s, national opinion polls, such as those conducted by the Gallup organization, show a steady increase in the South among whites in support of racial integration and equality. In 1956, white southerners were overwhelmingly opposed to school integration, while the white North had become broadly accepting of the idea (if not the practice). By 1985, however, only seven percent of whites in the South strongly opposed integrated schools. [End Page 57] Support for segregation in all parts of the United States has given way to substantial support for integration and equal treatment. In 1985, seventy-four percent of the white population nationally claimed to disagree with the statement that “white people have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods.” 2 By that point there was little difference between whites in the North and South on this question.3 As a recent article on racial attitudes has stated: “No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice.”4 By the 1990s it tended to resemble the rest of the country in its racial attitudes. Given how rabid were the negative attitudes toward integration in the South in the 1940s and up through the 1960s, it has never been made completely clear how and why the region was able to change such deeply held beliefs, and just how much practice, as opposed to attitudes, has actually changed. An investigation of the lives of these four men, both in and out of baseball, should provide some clues as to the nature of this transformation. In order to understand the nature of their reaction to Robinson’s introduction to major league baseball, it will useful to comprehend a little better the nature of Birmingham, their home town, in 1947. birmingham in 1947 Birmingham was Eugene “Bull” Connor’s town in 1947, just as it was in the late 1930s and throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. The most popular politician in the city, he was at the height of his powers in 1947. He was fifty years old, and he had served in the powerful role of Commissioner of Public Safety for ten years. Born in Selma, Connor had moved to Birmingham as a boy and in the 1920s gained popularity doing play-by-play action of away games of the local white baseball team, the Birmingham Barons.5 By 1932, the Sporting News called him “one of the most popular sportscasters in the South.”6 This recognition gave him the impetus to enter Democratic politics, and his election in 1937 as police commissioner was a turning point in...

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