[News] Common Bond for Uncommon Men: Roberto Clemente and Martin Luther King

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Common Bond for Uncommon Men: Roberto Clemente and Martin Luther King

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17107

April 09, 2008 By Dave Zirin
Source: <http://edgeofsports.com/2008-04-06-334/index.html>Edge of Sports


As we remember the 40th anniversary of that dark day of April 4th 
1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, 
it's worth recalling the reaction by Pittsburgh Pirates All-Star 
Roberto Clemente.

Clemente was devastated by the news of King's assassination but 
didn't suffer in silence. Instead, he led a charge to prevent the 
Pirates and Astros from opening their season on April 8th, the day 
before King's burial. He convinced his teammates on the Pirates, 
which included 11 African Americans, to stand with him. Opening Day 
was moved to April 10th, and Roberto Clemente had put sports in its 
proper perspective.

It might seem odd that Clemente, a proud Puerto Rican national, would 
have led such an extraordinary action. But Clemente, who had a 
passionate belief in social and economic justice, considered King a 
personal hero. He had even met face to face with Dr. King, spending a 
day together on Clemente's farm in Puerto Rico.

David Maraniss quotes Clemente's feelings about King in his 2005 
biography of the Hall of Fame outfielder:

"When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the 
whole system of the American style. He put the people, the ghetto 
people, the people who didn't have nothing to say in those days, they 
started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that 
nobody listened to. Now with this man, these people come down to the 
place where they were supposed to be but people didn't want them, and 
sit down there as if they were white and call attention to the whole 
world. Now that wasn't only the black people but the minority people. 
The people who didn't have anything, and they had nothing to say in 
those days because they didn't have any power, they started saying 
things and they started picketing, and that's the reason I say he 
changed the whole world..."

Clemente's affinity for King and the civil rights movement was rooted 
in his own experience with racism in the United States. Clemente 
played from 1954 to 1972, years that saw profound change in both 
Major League Baseball and U.S. society. His career spanned the 
entirety of the black freedom struggle from the Montgomery Bus 
Boycotts to the urban ghetto rebellions; from Rosa Parks to the Black 
Panthers. Being raised in a proud Puerto Rican household did not 
prepare Clemente for the racism he encountered in the U.S. Even as a 
dark-skinned Puerto Rican, Clemente never knew of the existence of 
racism before coming to the U.S. mainland. He would tell reporters 
that he learned that dark skin "was bad over here."

The first half of his career, the Pirates held their spring training 
in the still-segregated south. The Pirates' spring games were in Ft. 
Myers, Florida, which even by the standards of 1950s Florida was 
deeply segregated. Years later, Clemente's only memories of his first 
spring training consisted of eating on the bus with other players of 
color while his white teammates dined inside at both fancy 
restaurants and greasy spoons.

For someone who had never heard of Jim Crow, these were painful 
times. Clemente's friend Vic Power, a highly skilled Puerto Rican 
player for the Kansas City Athletics, was dragged off his team's bus 
one spring by the local authorities for buying a Coke from a 
whites-only gas station. Speaking together later, Clemente seethed at 
the humiliation, feeling it as if it were his own. Power tried to 
calm Clemente down. His approach was humor. Power liked to tell the 
story of a waitress telling him, "We don't serve Negroes," and 
responding, "That's OK. I don't eat Negroes."

But Clemente just couldn't handle it that way. In Maraniss' 
biography, Clemente was quoted thusly: "They say, 'Roberto, you 
better keep your mouth shut because they will ship you back.' [But] 
this is something from the first day I said to myself: I am in the 
minority group. I am from the poor people. I represent the poor 
people. I represent the common people of America. So I am going to be 
treated like a human being. I don't want to be treated like a Puerto 
Rican, or a black, or nothing like that. I want to be treated like any person."

Clemente had a profound social conscience and drive for justice, 
colored by a belief that he would die before his time. This came to 
pass when he died on December 31, 1972 after he boarded a ramshackle 
plane, attempting to fly to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua with 4,000 
extra pounds of relief materials. His wife Vera remembered, "He 
always said he would die young, that this was his fate."

Dr. King shared this personal fatalism. On April 3, 1968 King gave a 
speech saying, "I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its 
place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's 
will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked 
over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. 
But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the 
promised land."

We aren't yet at any kind of promised land, but Clemente and King 
both helped chart a path in the right direction. It's critical to 
remember them not as superhuman icons, but as ordinary people who 
sacrificed to do extraordinary things. As the Black Panther Party 
newspaper Panther Speaks wrote in their obituary of Clemente, "It is 
ironic that the profession in which he achieved 'legendry' [status] 
knew him the least. Roberto Clemente did not, as the Commissioner of 
Baseball maintained, 'Have about him a touch of royalty.' Roberto 
Clemente was simply a man, a man who strove to achieve his dream of 
peace and justice for oppressed people throughout the world."


[Dave Zirin is the author of "Welcome to the Terrordome:" 
(Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by 
emailing <mailto:dave at edgeofsports.com>dave at edgeofsports.com Contact 
him at <mailto:edgeofsports at gmail.com>edgeofsports at gmail.com. Comment 
on this article at <http://www.edgeofsports.com/>www.edgeofsports.com]




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