Courtesy of the Washington Post, a report on a racist incident that shook baseball nine years before integration, highlighting baseball’s hypocrisy on race which helped build support for integrating the game:

On a midsummer day at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1938, a WGN Radio reporter asked an innocuous question to New York Yankees outfielder Jake Powell in a pregame interview: What did he do in the offseason?

The 30-year-old replied that he worked as a police officer in Dayton, Ohio, where he stayed in shape by cracking Black people over the head with his nightstick, using the n-word. WGN immediately terminated the interview and issued several apologies that night, but the outrage quickly spread beyond Chicago. Powell’s crude, racist comment led to a national backlash among African Americans that put the game on its back foot on race nearly a decade before baseball finally integrated.

The medium of radio helped escalate the controversy, said Chris Lamb, professor of journalism at IUPUI and author of “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball.” The book includes a chapter on “L’Affaire Jake Powell,” as the episode was called at the time.

“If Powell had said it to a print reporter, it wouldn’t have had the same impact,” Lamb said in a telephone interview. “But so many people heard this, at home, on the radio, and it just shook the heavens.”

It turned out that Powell lied about having worked for the police. (He had merely applied for the job.) But his comment helped organize Black Americans in protest — at a time when they had little political power, a full generation before the civil rights movement. As The Post summed it up in a story published two days later: “Powell was cut off the air immediately upon the uncomplimentary sentence, with a vague notion of being funny. Five minutes later the large Negro population of Chicago was seething in indignation.”

Black Chicagoans poured complaints into WGN, the Chicago hotel where the Yankees were staying and the commissioner’s office, which was based in Chicago at the time. The day after Powell’s comment, a delegation of Black leaders marched to home plate to present a request to umpires that Powell be banned from baseball for life.

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Instead, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a former federal judge in Chicago, suspended Powell for 10 days, even as a statement from his office made it sound like a reluctant decision:

“Jake Powell of the New York Yankees made an uncomplimentary reference to a portion of the population. Although the commissioner believes the remark was due more to carelessness than intent, player Powell is suspended for 10 days.”

But the punishment was viewed as rank hypocrisy, given the sport’s long-standing color barrier.

“Judge Landis, who tried the case and imposed the penalty, would thus placate the colored clientele of a business which trades under the name of the national game but has always treated the Negroes as [Adolf] Hitler treats the Jews,” conservative syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote.

Landis presided over baseball for a quarter-century as the sport maintained its color barrier. In 2020, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America took his name off its MVP awards, following calls to do so by several former MVPs and members of Congress.

A checkered past
Powell was born in Silver Spring, Md., and began his career with the Washington Senators after the team’s owner, Clark Griffith, scouted and signed him. Powell displayed his prejudice in his second full season, crashing into Detroit Tigers Jewish star Hank Greenberg in 1936 and breaking the first baseman’s wrist in a move many viewed as antisemitic, ending Greenberg’s season after just 12 games. “Learn how to play the position before you come up to the big leagues,” Powell reportedly snarled at the future Hall of Famer.

“I hated Washington,” Greenberg would write in his autobiography. “They had played a lot of dirty tricks on me over the years, like Jake Powell running into me for no reason and breaking my wrist.”

After 53 games that year, Powell was hitting .295, but the Senators traded him to the Yankees — ironically for another notorious racist, Ben Chapman, who had mocked Jewish fans at Yankee Stadium with Nazi salutes. (The Jackie Robinson biopic “42” depicts Chapman as the race-baiting manager of the Philadelphia Phillies viciously taunting Robinson in his rookie season.)

Powell became part of a contender in New York, joining future Hall of Famers such as Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey, and he helped the Yankees win the first of four straight World Series titles by hitting .455 in the 1936 Fall Classic.

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When Powell made the racist remarks in the summer of 1938, the Yankees were on their way to the third of those titles, and Manager Joe McCarthy seemed more irritated about the distraction that the incident caused during a pennant race than the comment itself.

“I don’t know what Powell said, but whatever it was, I’m pretty sure he meant no harm,” McCarthy said. “Probably just meant to get off a wise crack. So the radio people ran out cold with apologies and I’m out a ballplayer for 10 days in the thick of a pennant race.”

Meanwhile, the suspension did little to mollify Black Americans, especially in Washington, where Powell returned to play when his forced timeout ended, in the second game of a mid-August doubleheader. Twenty-three thousand fans came out that afternoon — a large crowd for the Great Depression and more than triple the average Senators attendance that season. Powell, batting third and playing left field, went 0 for 4 with two walks.

Black fans booed him and threw soda bottles in his direction. One bottle flew right behind him when he was at first base, and a tin pail nearly hit him. “Take him out! Take him out!” fans chanted from the Black section of Griffith Stadium.

As the New York Times described it:

“The Washington folks did not approve of Jake Powell, making his first start in the second game since his unfortunate radio interview and suspension. They booed him the first time he came to bat and in the sixth, when the Yanks gained a 3 to 1 lead, the pop bottles began to fly toward Jake in his left field post. The game had to be halted several minutes while five Negro ground attendants gathered the glassware in baskets.”
— The New York Times

Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich wrote that McCarthy “might have been wiser than to start Jake Powell in the Southernmost city in the league” in his first game back from the suspension.

“In Washington, unlike other league cities, colored fans are congregated chiefly in one sector of the park,” he noted. “They could have been expected to work up a fury against Powell. They did, too. Powell’s return to the Yankees’ line-up might easily have been delayed until the Yankees were in another park.”

McCarthy was defiant in using Powell, a platoon player, declaring: “I had to send him out there to face the music. Once Powell got in the game, I wouldn’t have taken him out if we’d all been killed.” But the skipper wound up keeping Powell out for the rest of the series.

Building the case for integration

The 1936 New York Yankees won the World Series. Jake Powell is fourth from the left in the third row. (AP)
After the Powell incident, Black newspapers threatened a boycott of the Yankees, who apologized. The team’s general manager, Ed Barrow, wrote in a letter to the New York Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper, that he thought Powell and the Yankees had done everything they could to atone for the player’s “blunder.”

“I have personally discussed the Powell matter with several of my colored friends,” Barrow wrote, “as well as the two colored servants in my own home, and all of them seem to feel that it was just an unfortunate mistake that cannot happen again.”

In his book, Lamb quoted a Black newspaper sports editor telling the Yankees in a telegram that as long as Powell remained a Yankee, the team would be “just a bunch of mugs named ‘Cracker,’ regardless of how many pennants the team had won.”

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When the Yankees returned to New York, they forced Powell to do an apology tour of Black establishments, and he visited Harlem, where he bought drinks for patrons at Black bars. As New York Times columnist Red Smith recalled in his book, “To Absent Friends”: “He worked down from north to south, stopping in every saloon he came across. In each, he introduced himself. He said he was Jake Powell and he said that he had made a foolish mistake and that he was sorry. Then he ordered drinks for the crowd and moved on to the next joint.”

The tour “turned into a show for Powell to go in, buy drinks, yuk it up and then go on his way,” Lamb said in the interview. Meanwhile, the controversy put the sport’s greatest franchise on the defensive.

“It forced the mighty Yankees to backpedal, and they’re apologizing and begging the Black community, ‘How can we fix this?’ ” Lamb said.

(In 1952, Jackie Robinson publicly called out the Yankees for their failure to have any Black players on their roster, five years after he had broken baseball’s color barrier. The Yankees would be one of the last teams to integrate, in 1955.)

By the time of the 1938 incident, Powell’s playing time had begun to diminish, and it continued to drop the next season. In 1940, he appeared in just a dozen games, and the Yankees sold him to a minor league team. He bounced between the majors and minors the next few years, including another stint with the Senators. In a twist, Powell finished his career in 1945 with the Phillies, playing for Chapman, the player he had been traded for a decade earlier. That same year, Branch Rickey signed Robinson to a minor league contract, paving the way for him to break the color barrier in 1947.

In autumn 1944, Powell finally did become a police officer — in Maryland’s Montgomery County, where the county commission voted, 2-1, to approve his hiring. The dissenter was Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson, who had been Powell’s manager in his first season in D.C.

Powell, who had gained so much notoriety by pretending to be a police officer, wound up dying at a D.C. police station as a criminal suspect in 1948. While being questioned on a charge of writing bad checks, he took his own life by pulling out a revolver and shooting himself.

Lamb said the unwanted attention that Powell brought to baseball’s hypocrisy on race helped build support for integrating the game.

“It was a couple of hammer blows on the wall of segregation,” he said. “It didn’t knock it down because that would take a world war and Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey. But by itself, it had an impact because it served as a catalyst — it galvanized Blacks and Communists and even Westbrook Pegler, who was a right-wing conservative.”