‘Sports Illustrated had shattered a great taboo’

How a magazine cover reflected baseball’s long, hard breaking of the colour barrier

Few things are as simple as a hand on a shoulder, unless the hand is white, the shoulder black, in a baseball park, in 1955.

The very idea was “disgusting,” wrote one man, appalled at a picture taken by Sports Illustrated photographer Hy Peskin that showed three happy-looking people, two with light skin and one with dark skin, in front of an outfield fence.

The people in the image had no say or control over their skin colours. Your epidermis is your epidermis — a protective covering you’re born with and die with — but the fallout is tucked into an armload of Sports Illustrated magazines I recently acquired from their first two years of publication, 1954 and 1955.

A man named Edward F. Webb caught my attention, because of a letter he wrote to the editor in the April 25, 1955 edition — tucked in behind stories on trout fishing, gardening, baseball, the scaling of Mount Everest.

“To tell you that I was shocked at SI’S cover would be putting it mildly,” wrote Webb, from Nashville, referring to the April 11 issue. “The informative note inside the magazine tells me that this is Mrs. Leo Durocher, a white woman, with her arm affectionately around the neck of Willie Mays, a Negro ballplayer.

“Let me say to you, Sir, the most appalling blow ever struck at this country, the most disastrous thing that ever happened to the people of America, was the recent decision of the Supreme Court declaring segregation unconstitutional.”

The cover in question shows Willie Mays and his New York Giants manager, Leo Durocher, posing with actress Laraine Day — Leo’s wife — in the middle. She has one hand on her husband’s shoulder, and the other on Mays.

It’s an innocuous and affectionate shot; three smiling people, one in a dress and two in baseball uniforms, standing for the camera.

The feisty Durocher made no secret of his love and admiration for Mays, both as a person and as a player. But for the likes of Webb, this image was an abomination. Willie Mays, with his dark skin, was an untouchable — not fit for the kind of human affection that would place a white hand on his shoulder.

“Sports Illustrated,” wrote Mays biographer James S. Hirsch, “had shattered a great taboo: a white woman was touching a black man, surely a first for the front of any mainstream national magazine. White supremacists had long raised the spectre of predatory black ‘savages’ deflowering helpless white women as grounds for segregation, incarceration, and violent oppression.”

Jackie Robinson had integrated baseball eight years earlier, in 1947, but the Jim Crow era was still very much alive in the southern U.S. Even at this point, Robinson and Mays could not check into some hotels as casually as their white teammates.

“In St. Louis,” wrote Robinson biographer Arnold Rampersad, “the Chase Hotel (in 1954) finally agreed to permit the black Dodgers to register, if they did not loiter in the lobby, or use the dining room, or swim in the pool.”

Baseball’s race history is painstakingly documented, as is the tough, unrelenting, stubborn bravery Robinson — he, most conspicuously — displayed throughout his career and his life.

New York Post columnist Jimmy Cannon called him “the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.”

Phillies manager Ben Chapman unleashed such a vile barrage of racial taunts at Robinson during a game against the Dodgers in 1947 that the city of Philadelphia formally apologized in 2016.

“Chapman,” wrote thendodgers publicist Harold Parrott, “mentioned everything from thick lips to the supposedly extra-thick Negro skull, which he said restricted brain growth to almost animal level compared to white folk. He listed the repulsive sores and disease he said Robbie’s teammates would become infected with if they touched the towels or the combs he used.”

It was, Robinson later said, the closest he ever came to snapping on a ball field.

The fear and loathing ran from players to managers to hotels to fans, who penned angry missives to Sports Illustrated about Laraine Day’s arm and Willie Mays’ shoulder. The rants demonstrated just what the likes of Mays, Robinson and Roy Campanella were up against. They flowed from living rooms in Louisiana into subscribers’ homes in Saskatchewan.

“Such disgusting racial propaganda is not fit for people who are trying to build a stronger nation based on racial integrity,” wrote A.C. Dunn of New Orleans.

“Please cancel my subscription to SI immediately,” wrote T.B. Kelso of Fort Worth. “This is an insult to every decent white woman everywhere.”

“Up until now,” wrote F.M. Odom of Shreveport, “I have not found anything of particularly bad taste in SI, but by golly, when you print a picture on the cover in full colour, of a white woman embracing a negro (with a small letter) man, you make it evident that even in a magazine supposedly devoted to healthful and innocent sports you have to engage in southbaiting …

“I care nothing about these three people as individuals, but I care a heck of a lot about the proof the picture gives that SI is part of the giant plan to flaunt all decency, so long as the conquered of 1865 can be reminded of their eternal defeat. This is the kind of sporting instinct SI has!”

It made for disheartening, and informative, reading. These writers literally spelled it out: Irrational hate and belligerent evil had to be pushed back, like a bulldozer working a muck pile, while a handful of abused men demolished baseball’s colour barrier.

The string of letters ended with one final, simple missive, from Cleveland’s Albert Taborn. Sports Illustrated editors gave him the final say for the day. “In regard to your April 11 cover,” he wrote, “it is the best yet.”

And the following week, came a barrage of mail — written not to disparage the cover, but to tear into letterwriters Webb, Dunn, Kelso, Odom.

Norwood Pope wrote that he was “embarrassed beyond words and infuriated to the point of battle, concerning those letters …”

“I have never written to a magazine before,” wrote Steve Kraisler, “but I consider it my duty to do so at this time. I was disgusted at the letters concerning the cover of Willie Mays and Mrs. Leo Durocher. I may be only 15 years old but I have more common sense than any adult with those ideas.”

Durocher, the man on the right in that photo, had been Brooklyn’s manager the spring Robinson joined the team and shattered the colour barrier, creating a path for Mays and the others.

Durocher famously called a late-night meeting with Dodgers players — some who were formulating a petition to protest the presence of a Black man on their team — and laid down the law: Robinson’s here, he’s going to make the squad better, and anybody who doesn’t like it will no longer play for the Dodgers.

Durocher’s blunt warning, and his early support at a delicate time, made the road smoother for incoming Black ballplayers. The abrasive manager, nicknamed “Leo the Lip”, didn’t always get along with Robinson — Mays was more to his liking — and they ended up as fierce rivals on opposing teams.