Legacy Of Shame `46 Racial Views Of Owners Exposed

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Jackie Robinson's story is being told nonstop at the Baseball Hall of Fame these days, endless summer reruns of an episode acting commissioner Bud Selig has proudly called baseball's greatest.

Last week, in conjunction with an academic symposium here on the ex-Brooklyn Dodger's lasting impact, the museum unveiled ``Pride and Passion,'' a Robinson-related exhibit on the history of African Americans in baseball.

Robinson's familiar face appears continuously on TV monitors throughout the museum, in its bookstore, gift shop and display areas. On the 50th anniversary of his historic debut, a library exhibit room has become a Robinson shrine. You can read his hate mail, see his college letter sweater, view the interior of his boyhood home in Pasadena, Calif.

There is, however, one artifact from that saga you won't find in the Hall - or virtually anywhere else: The Report of the Major League Steering Committee for Submission to the National and American Leagues at Their Meeting in Chicago, a 1946 document as remarkable in content as it is blandly titled.

In the midst of this year's Robinson fanfare, the long-buried document shows the prejudice and twisted logic in baseball boardrooms a half-century ago.

Drafted eight months after the Dodgers' Branch Rickey had signed Robinson - and just nine months before the black athlete's historic first big-league appearance in April 1947 - the report was, in the words of author Gerald Scully, ``the last official racist statement from organized baseball.''

But for nearly 51 years after it was written by New York Yankees owner Larry MacPhail and quickly destroyed by owners, no one but the most dedicated researcher was ever likely to read the report. Copies existed in only two obscure places - as Exhibit 32-A in the middle of a 1,600-page 1951 Congressional report on an unrelated topic, and in the University of Kentucky Archives, where then-Commissioner Happy Chandler's papers are stored.

``Nobody recognized the historical importance of this report in reproducing the mind-set of major-league owners at the time of integration,'' said Robinson biographer Jules Tygiel, who recently published the document's brief section on integration in The Jackie Robinson Reader.