BY JAY BRYANT
The old ‘massahs’ of the antebellum South were Democrats. So were their whip-toting overseers. So were the post-bellum white supremacists, the KKK, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, separate but unequal schools and racism in all its hideous manifestations: lunch counters, bus seats, rest rooms and, well, everything.
The Chicago Cubs’ Cap Anson, the greatest baseball player of the 19th century and a hateful bigot, personally saw to it that the National League was a whites-only operation by refusing to play against any team that had a black player, as some did in the 1880’s; But for his racial intransigence, Jackie Robinson’s heroism might have been unnecessary.
When Anson hung up his cleats, he ran and won, as a Democrat, the office of City Clerk of Chicago. (The greatest Cub of the 20th Century, by the way, was Ernie Banks, a black man, and like Robinson a Republican. Banks was defeated in a race for Chicago City Council.)