The Boston Red Sox announced Thursday that they will be asking the city of Boston to change the name of Yawkey Way, the public street that leads to Fenway Park and is named after the team\u2019s former owner, Tom Yawkey, a notorious racist.<\/p>\n
In an email to the Boston Herald, current team owner John Henry said the question of renaming the street had come up a \u201cnumber of times\u201d in conversations with the administration of the previous mayor, Thomas Menino, but officials ultimately passed, fearing a political backlash. \u201cThey did not want to open what they saw as a can of worms,\u201d Henry said.<\/p>\n
Henry added that \u201cDavid Ortiz Way\u201d and\/or \u201cBig Papi Way,\u201d would be his choice for a new name. But even though the Red Sox themselves can\u2019t make this decision, the reason he\u2019s pressing for a change now is that he remains \u201chaunted\u201d by the legacy of Yawkey\u2019s pervasive racism.<\/p>\n
Via the Boston Herald:<\/p>\n
\nCurrent Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement that he agreed with Henry. Representatives from both the Boston NAACP and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce offered words of praise and support, with the latter saying that even if renaming the street was just a symbolic\u00a0gesture, it was a long-overdue one that could lead to a \u201cturning point\u201d in Boston finally overcoming its pervasive and long-standing racial issues.<\/p>\n
As the Herald noted, the Red Sox were the last Major League Baseball team to add an African-American player to the roster, in 1959 \u2014\u00a012 years after Jackie Robinson\u2019s debut. The Red Sox brought Robinson in for a tryout prior to his signing with the then-Brooklyn Dodgers. Per an obituary published by the Boston Globe, Yawkey was in the stands that day and told his chief scout, “All right, get those n——s out of the ball park.”<\/p>\n
Yawkey also scuttled an opportunity to sign another all-time great:\u00a0Willie Mays. According to ESPN\u2019s Howard Bryant, the author of \u201cShut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston,\u201d Mays told him:\u00a0\u201cThat [Tom] Yawkey. Everyone knew he was a racist. He didn’t want me.”<\/p>\n
The street name has always been a consistent reminder that it is our job to ensure the Red Sox are not just multi-cultural, but stand for as many of the right things in our community as we can.<\/p>\n
Racial tensions between Bostonians and the athletes who play there persist\u00a0to this day. In May, Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones said he\u2019d been pelted with both peanuts and racist epithets. When Boston media personalities began questioning whether the incident took place at all, multiple current players backed Jones, with New York Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia saying he too had been subjected to racist taunts. \u201cWhen you go to Boston, you expect it,\u201d Sabathia said.<\/p>\n
While Henry never explicitly referred to last weekend\u2019s horrific act of terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia, it\u2019s hard to imagine that the murder of 32-year-old activist Heather Heyer and subsequent decision by municipalities and cities across the United States to begin removing statues and monuments honoring the Confederacy wasn\u2019t on his mind.<\/p>\n
Two large-scale \u201cfree speech\u201d rallies organized by neo-Nazis and white supremacists are scheduled to be held this weekend in Boston.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Share image by Eric Kilby\/Flickr.<\/p>\n
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The Boston Red Sox announced Thursday that they will be asking the city of Boston to change the name of Yawkey Way, the public street that leads to Fenway Park and is named after the team\u2019s former owner, Tom Yawkey, a notorious racist. In an email to the Boston Herald, current team owner John Henry…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}