Matthew 22:39
It was 1945 and two men were eating lunch in a small diner in Brooklyn, New York. One was Branch Rickey, General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers; the other was Red Barber, the radio voice of the team. Rickey knew that most people identified with the team through the voice of Barber as they listened on the radio. He felt that Red Barber was the most important PR tool of the Dodgers. He had something important to share with Barber over lunch.
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He said, “I’m going to share something with you that even the Board of Directors don’t know about. My wife knows about it. My sons know about it and all my family is dead set against it but I’m going to do it. By now you’ve heard that the scouts are all out looking for black players so that we can enter a team in the Negro National League called the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. But I’m telling you it’s all a sham. There will be no Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. I’m telling you today that a black player is coming to the Dodgers. I don’t know who he is, I don’t know when he’s coming, but he’s coming.”
That was all he said. He didn’t ask for any feedback. He didn’t ask his opinion or even if he had any questions. He simply laid it out on the table and Barber was in shock.
Red Barber had been raised and educated in the Deep South, in places like Mississippi and Florida. He couldn’t fathom the idea of a black player playing Major League baseball alongside white players. He went home that day and told his wife what had transpired. She asked what he was going to do. “I’m going to quit,” was his reply.
It’s hard for us to fathom this kind of response as we look back 60 years ago. It’s hard to imagine that a man was going to quit such a lucrative position simply because one player on the field would be of a different color. But Red Barber was a product of his time and truthfully, many would have thought the same thing. Fortunately, things changed before Barber carried through with his threat. God began to work on his heart. Being a disciple means one is always open to God’s leading, whenever and wherever that might take us.
Red was called upon to address several civic groups about rising racial tensions directed toward local Jews. He was, after all, a highly respected member of the community. As a Christian, he pointed out that the second greatest commandment says we are to “love our neighbor as ourselves.1 And as he spoke to various groups it began to dawn on him that somehow he had failed to apply that verse to his attitude toward those of another color. Somehow he had blinded himself toward his own prejudice.