Although the Red Sox have struggled this season, winning four World Series since 2004 transformed the team’s identity from lovable losers to league champions. But the Red Sox have a racist past, and even now, relatively few fans of color go to games at Fenway Park.
University of Rhode Island professor of English David Faflik explores this history and the Red Sox’s role as a cultural institution in Southern New England in his recent book, Segregation Games: Boston, Busing, and the Making of Red Sox Nation. Faflik spoke with Ocean State Media political reporter Ian Donnis.
Interview Highlights
On how the Red Sox of the 1970s reflected some of the racist events happening around the Boston Busing crisis happening at the same time
David Faflik: It’s really a story about popular culture, the way that, naturally, something like a professional sports team would have a large presence within a popular culture, particularly within an urban setting like Boston.
The more uncomfortable part of the book, really the argument of the book, is about the way that what’s happening with the busing crisis is also becoming part of popular culture, and the way that sports enthusiasm, the kind of rallying, affects the kinds of demonstrations that people make. Particularly with the anti-busing protests, (people) are using sports as a kind of mechanism for voicing their feelings about what’s happening in the public school system. So there’s a playful element in both, and that’s really an uncomfortable sort of truth to have to reconcile.
On the comparisons between anti-busing protests and sports fandom
Faflik: The world is watching as, on the first day, as school buses with African American students pulling up from Roxbury to South Boston High School, having not just rocks thrown at them, but hate to say it, having bananas thrown at them, and people making monkey chants.
And this is happening even later during the first weeks and months where teachers at Boston High School are sort of lecturing students on the connections between an N-word I won’t use and monkeys on an evolutionary level, with African American students present. I mean, that’s the darker side.
On a lighter side, if that’s the right word, there’s things like chants of “Let’s Go Boston” being enunciated by protesters at anti-busing marches, waving and wearing, sort of maroon red windbreakers, in loose homage to the Red Sox. There’s all these kinds of sporting connections. People behaving in ways as if they were going to the ballpark, when what they’re really demonstrating about is their feelings about having desegregated schools in Boston, which they’re adamantly opposed to, and using sport as a kind of touchstone for manifesting those feelings.
How a cultural institution like the Red Sox can impact something as complex as race relations in southern New England
Faflik: The lesson of busing can be overstated to an extent. People might say that busing was a failure given what’s happened to the public school system, the number of people enrolled and to the racial demographics of the people that are in the school system now. But I think about in recent years, the school system in Providence – having the control of the schools being taken over by a larger entity. There’s a sort of a precedent that’s being followed in terms of a kind of close oversight of what’s happening at the administrative levels of school systems at the public level.
On Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, who was known as an eccentric, and an outspoken advocate for civil rights
Faflik: He was the one player during the 1970s we know from the Red Sox who actually went on record having something to say about the busing crisis. Not just supporting Judge Garrity, but really sort of taking a hard-line stance in terms of the shortcomings of the Boston public school system to address this issue.
On what has changed with the Red Sox since the 1970s
Faflik: I will say that the (owners) Fenway Sports Group has made at least some overtures towards the African American community in Boston. During the time of the George Floyd crisis, the team did actually place a Black Lives Matter banner inside and outside of Fenway. The team has made an effort in recent years to recognize the Negro Leagues of the pre-war period, and so they’ve been instrumental in that as well. But the Red Sox, like all of baseball really, still continues to have a noticeable absence of African American players. And that continues to be a problem, not just with the Red Sox, but really all of baseball.
