Opinion: Silence derails recognition of Louis Sockalexis
It’s great that MLB has finally accorded recognition to Black players from the Negro Leagues. Now when will it do the same for Native American players?
by Ed Rice
Special to the Maine Sunday Telegram
June 9, 2024
At the end of May, Major League Baseball announced it would finally recognize all the records, the statistical achievements, of the players from the Negro Leagues.
Hallelujah!
This from MLB, after falling all over itself for years now, trying to find ways to solely celebrate Jackie Robinson. Ultimately, that exercise proved a pretty sorrowful expression of white guilt, an attempt to essentially cover everyone of color who suffered discrimination. At long, long last MLB has finally moved on to appropriately recognizing and celebrating players like Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Pop Lloyd, the flesh-and-blood Satchel Paige in his prime, et al.
This development is long overdue and totally warranted.
Forgive my snarky cynicism, but I’m wondering when MLB, the Cleveland professional baseball organization and the National Baseball Hall of Fame are finally going to get around to recognizing the real, sadly unrecognized and heretofore totally ignored pioneer players in their room: the Native American players.
So far, silence.
For me and those of us who believe Maine’s Louis Sockalexis, directly followed by Charley Bender, John Meyers and Jim Thorpe, all deserve credit, all deserve celebration – for which they receive none – it’s been more than 25 years of railing about this. The response? On the national level, it’s all fallen on deaf ears.
Fortunately in Maine, our activism on a related cause – the campaign to end Maine school use of Native American nicknames and mascots – succeeded beautifully.
In 2010, I partnered with John Diffenbacher-Krall, then-executive director of the Maine Indian Tribal State Commission, and we arranged a symposium in Bangor drawing significant spokespeople from Maine’s four tribes to speak with Maine school representatives still clinging to the practice. At that time there were only six (there had been as many as 34 schools around the year 2000, with most deciding to end the practice on their own). In March 2019, the last of these schools changed nicknames.
Today, Maine is the only state in the nation to have completely eradicated this abuse.
Yes, there were some pretty heated words in several Maine communities in response to the effort. But putting the issue front and center won the day. And today I recognize that sometimes there is little more troubling, more formidable, more outright evil than … silence.
Silence from MLB, with the exception of a directive to all of its major league and minor league franchises: no acknowledgement or recognition for any Native American player unless there is a direct descendant present. Memo to MLB: Louis Sockalexis does not have any direct descendants.
Silence from Cleveland.
You thought (some of you, anyway) that Cleveland might finally be “free” to recognize Sockalexis for his legacies: the first known – first known – Native American to play; the man directly responsible for the team’s longest-lasting nickname; and a man subjected to extreme racial prejudice the likes of which only Jackie Robinson has truly ever been subjected to. You may have thought this because the team had finally torn itself free of its inappropriate nickname and its insidious, racist caricature of a logo and mascot, Chief Wahoo.
And yet what we got from Cleveland is what we should have expected all along: silence.
Cleveland is, today, a team free to resume ignoring Sockalexis because he now “represents” the team’s own ignorance, moral failure and ignominious history.
And finally, silence from the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Baseball Hall of Fame presidents Dale Petroskey, Jeff Idelson, Tim Mead and now Josh Rawitch have heard the clamor over the years and ignored it. Their public relations spokespeople have disavowed the issue. The permanent exhibits department continues to maintain that the hall has no room for such a tribute and no need to change its policy.
This from the Baseball Hall of Fame, despite the fact that members of its own research department have overwhelmingly supported the idea of a permanent exhibit to recognize the pioneer Native American players.
I know this because in both 2005 and 2009 I was invited to speak at the hall, for its annual June symposium, about Sockalexis and about this very issue, supported by members of the Giamatti Research Center at the Hall.
Tragically, on this issue all we ever seem to get from MLB, the Cleveland professional baseball organization and the Baseball Hall of Fame is, yes, a shameful, deafening silence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A retired Maine journalist and adjunct college instructor, Ed Rice is the author of “Baseball’s First Indian” and now lives in St Andrews, New Brunswick