Exhibit celebrates Negro League players
‘Barrier Breakers’ opens at Emerson
Luis Tiant’s father didn’t want his son to play baseball. Throughout Tiant’s childhood in Cuba and early pro career in Mexico, the future Red Sox great didn’t understand why.
Luis Tiant Sr. played professionally for more than twenty years, making his final appearance for the New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues in 1947, the same year Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier.
When the younger Tiant began his United States career with the Cleveland farm system in 1962, he finally understood. He and Tommy Harper, his teammate in Cleveland and later in Boston , remember staying at dilapidated boarding houses during spring training while their white teammates slept at segregated hotels.
“The only time I [saw] any white players was on the field,” Harper recalled.
The Red Sox Hall of Famers, both 82, were on hand Monday at the opening of a new exhibit, “Barrier Breakers: From Jackie to Pumpsie,” curated by the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and hosted by Emerson College.
The opening was held on Juneteenth, which commemorates the emancipation of slaved people in the US and became a federal holiday in 2021.
Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy — joined at the ceremony by his father, Rev. Tom Kennedy, who led an opening prayer, and mother Joanna — addressed more than 200 attendees. The Red Sox are sponsoring the exhibit in conjunction with the City of Boston, Meet Boston, the Boston Public Library, the Office of the Arts at Emerson College, and other community partners.
The exhibit, which details the efforts to integrate professional baseball, is free to view for the public until Aug. 4 at 118 Boylston Street by Boston Common.
A panel is devoted to the first Black player for each major league club prior to the 1961 expansion, including Robinson (with the Brooklyn Dodgers), Monte Irvin (New York Giants), and Ernie Banks (Chicago Cubs).
The Red Sox were infamously the last team to integrate, a fact Kennedy called “the true curse which plagued the Red Sox organization.” Pumpsie Green became the first Black player to take the field for Boston on July 21, 1959, more than 12 years after Robinson’s debut.
“Our organization knows that we have perhaps the most shameful past with respect to race relations of any professional sports team in history,” Kennedy said.
Harper experienced this troubled legacy. After retiring in 1976 following a 15-year career in which he led the league in stolen bases twice (including with the Red Sox in 1973), Harper returned to the team as a coach in 1980 and moved to a front-office role in 1985.
Harper recalled speaking out against dinner invitations that arrived from the Winter Haven, Fla., Elks Club during spring training. Only white players received them.
Harper remembers asking teammate Reggie Smith about their invites. Smith said they didn’t get invited. Harper asked why.
In telling the story Monday, Harper mimicked Smith pointing toward his wrist, in reference to the color of their skin.
“That’s how I found out,” Harper said. “And it lasted and lasted until I finally got tired of it.”
Harper was fired in December of 1985 after months of being ostracized by the team, according to a biography from the Society for American Baseball Research. He filed a complaint of race discrimination to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which ruled in his favor.
After spending the 1990s coaching with the Montreal Expos, Harper returned to the Sox in 2000. He’s pleased with the direction of organization, particularly its willingness to engage with unsavory elements of its past, since John Henry (who also owns the Globe) and Tom Werner acquired the team in 2002.
“I’ve learned more about our beloved game from those two gentlemen than anyone else,” Kennedy said of Harper and Tiant. “I’ve learned more about life and what really matters and what is important from those two guys.”
Frank Jordan, a special advisor to the Red Sox and a co-founder of the Boston Area Church League, which aims to introduce baseball and provide mentorship to underserved children, was key in bringing the exhibit to Boston for Juneteenth. He has a personal connection: He said his father played for the Augusta Bears of the Negro Leagues.
Jordan urged young people, including those who packed two buses from St. John Paul II Catholic Academy to visit on Monday, to encounter the history of the game’s Black pioneers beyond Robinson.
Tiant hopes many more visitors will have the opportunity to learn and reflect on the obstacles he and other Black players have faced, as well as their many triumphs.
“Let the people see what was going on, what we had to go through,” Tiant said.