Rooting Against Jackie Robinson

WHEN I WAS A CHILD in the nineteen sixties, I was a junior news junkie, and preferred Huntley-Brinkley, although Walter Cronkite was a good option. Every night, year in, year out, 1964-1970, we watched the Viet Nam War on fuzzy black and white TV, like a deranged soap opera, and once a week we were given the body count. Usually the totals were roughly a couple hundred dead Americans each week, maybe a thousand dead South Vietnamese, and about two thousand dead North Vietnamese. I recall thinking that at that rate, we might be able to run out the clock, and kill them all, or so many of them that they ran out of soldiers, before they killed all of us. The casualties were presented on the screen, like a scoreboard, so I turned it into one. Why not? Only in 1968 did it begin to occur to me that the "enemy" would never run out of soldiers, but that we Americans would run out of patience, because after the war news came the anti-war protest news. All across America, on college campuses and in cities, the left wing hippies were unpatriotically protesting the Viet Nam war, and gaining momentum. Then came the race riots on the nightly news, and racial injustice protests on camera. American cities were being burned to the ground, as the African-Americans living in slums had finally, after nearly four hundred years of subjugation, lost patience with progress. Watching Martin Luther King walking through the streets with his fellow peaceful racial injustice protestors, being harassed and hounded by right wing white racist civilians and cops with police dogs and fire hoses was the most peaceful part of the news. I grew up in an explosive, volatile country, assuming that it was normal, and would always be the same way. In essence, I was correct. I rooted for the war protestors, and the African-American rioters, and for MLK, but only secretly, in the closet, almost like being gay, because I was surrounded by a patriotic, conservative family and circle of friends, who thought the war protestors were anti-American traitors, the negro rioters criminals, and Dr. King and his followers trouble making ingrates. The pattern was obvious: those who protested the war, and rioted in the streets, and walked with MLK were left wing, radical, outcasts, fighting for change, and those who hated them were conservative, patriotic, establishment, love it or leave it Americans, and their number included my parents, my sister, and most of my friends. Now, of course, in 2019, our right wing fellow Americans acknowledge the King holiday, and generally seem to accept that the war in Viet Nam was a huge mistake, if not an actual crime committed by the USA. Imagine that, conservatives, admiring King, or at least allowing liberals to do so without insulting them. Now all the old protesting hippies and blacks are either old or dead, but they were right then, and they are right now. History moves from right to left, from tradition to progress, from established culture to change. My father, who hated blacks, Indians, Germans, Japanese, Texans, and heaven only know who else, used to watch major league baseball with my mother in St. Louis, in the nineteen fifties, Cardinals versus Dodgers. In racist St. Louis, all the blacks sat together way out in the outfield bleachers, and they rooted for Jackie Robinson, but otherwise, for the cardinals. Daddy said he booed Jackie, like all the lilly white Cardinal fans, but not because of his skin color, but because he played for the Dodgers. To this day, I don't entirely believe that.