On December 6, 1986, a sad chapter in Sox history finished. An article by Larry Whiteside went this way: “Tommy Harper’s racial discrimination suit against the Red Sox ended in an out-of-court settlement…a potential federal court challenge was avoided over the firing of Harper, who filed a complaint January 30 alleging that his dismissal was the result of his speaking out against club activity at the racially segregated Elks Club in Winter Haven, Florida.”
Howard Bryant’s well-known book Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston tells of a story written by the Globe’s Mike Madden in 1985. The Elks Club in Winter Haven where the Sox then trained, many years after baseball desegregated, still invited white Sox players, but not blacks. Madden quoted a man named Bill Carter explaining why no blacks from the Red Sox had ever been inside the Winter Haven Elks Lodge. “Simple,” he said.
“Because we don’t allow any n_______’s in here.”
The history of racism on the Red Sox is well known. By the 1970’s, largely through the efforts of GM Dick O’Connell, things had changed, but not completely. O’Connell, fittingly enough, was fired by Jean Yawkey after her husband died. By the 80’s, rumors of racism returned. Numbers of minority players in the organization again decreased. The busing crisis in Boston, though not the team’s fault, certainly did not help.
The front office’s reaction to Harper’s charges should have been to immediately sever all ties with the Elks. They did not. Owner Haywood Sullivan said that Harper was merely stirring up trouble. Will McDonough, who had for a long time denied that Tom Yawkey was a racist, dismissed the story as “making something out of nothing.” GM Lou Gorman said only that it was “something that the Sox kidded each other about.”
According to Bryant, Peter Gammons had inquired years earlier about the Elks racial policies but was told by Sox PR men that they had been stopped. But neither Gammons nor Whiteside, who also knew the story, pressed the issue, to both of their later regret. In March of 86, Harper, as he had predicted to many, had been let go by the Sox organization. Tommy had been a fine player in Boston in the early 70’s, setting a Sox seasonal base stealing record in 1973. He had returned to the team as a coach in 1980, but quickly saw that little had changed. Finally, he spoke up and gave the story to Madden, who did run it.
Though Sullivan was not as much a racist as Yawkey or Mike Higgins, he was also a Southerner. Unlike O’Connell, he seemed to lack a real understanding of racial issues, such as the makeup of his teams. Gorman was certainly no racist, but, like Sullivan, was an old-fashioned baseball man who failed to truly understand the actions of a Harper.
The team should have realized what would happen. All over baseball, stories of the “Sox klavern” returned. According to the settlement, the Sox made many promises, including “a pledge to make greater use of minorities, and minority vendors who service the ballclub during the season.” But little really changed until Dan Duquette took over as GM in the early 90’s.
As Bryant points out, the organization were not the only ones to blame here. Like team officials, few writers, even famous ones like Gammons, were willing to rock the boat. For years fine players like Tim Raines would shy away from even talking about coming to Boston. Bryant states that “Gorman was always negotiating with black free agents with two strikes against him.”
The story has a happier ending, as Duquette brought Harper back as a coach in 2000. But it is too bad that things took so long to change.
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