Font Resize
A historic moment in baseball and civil rights history was commemorated by the El Cerrito City Council this week when it honored Elijah "Pumpsie" Green.
Green, who grew up in war worker housing in Richmond and graduated from El Cerrito High School in 1952, was honored in a proclamation as "the first African-American ever to play for the Boston Red Sox, the last team in the major leagues to integrate."
The proclamation, which Mayor Bill Jones described at Tuesday's meeting as Hot Stove League (offseason baseball) fodder, comes during Black History Month and the start of baseball spring training.
Jones noted that the major leagues had only 16 teams and 400 roster spots when Green made his debut. "In 1959, if you were an African-American player, you had to be exceptionally good," he said.
Green, a two-sport star at El Cerrito High, had his contract purchased by the Red Sox in 1955 and went on to be named the Most Valuable Player with Stockton in the California League that year.
Baseball at the time remained slow to integrate after the groundbreaking debut of Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, with some teams dragging their feet for years.
The New York Yankees didn't have an African-American player until 1955, the Philadelphia Phillies until 1956 and the Detroit Tigers until 1958.
By 1959, the Boston Red Sox were under intense scrutiny as the final holdout, and the pressure increased when Green was a
"Green should stick with Sox as reserve infielder" was the spring training headline in one Massachusetts newspaper. Another paper noted the discrimination he endured in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the young black shortstop was not allowed to stay in the same living quarters as his teammates and was denied access to other amenities they enjoyed.
An outcry arose when Green was designated for the minors at the end of training, with the NAACP saying it would launch a probe of the hiring practices of the Red Sox.
Newspapers noted that there were pickets outside Fenway Park after Green was sent to the minor league Minneapolis Millers.
By summer, Green's hitting was hot enough that he was summoned to join the Red Sox in Chicago, and he made history when he entered the game as a pinch runner on July 21, 1959.
"Few of us are history," Jones said in making the proclamation. "History found Elijah Green in Minneapolis in 1959."
Green, now 78, was in the starting lineup the next day, and in a postgame interview told the Associated Press it was "the biggest thrill I ever had."
At the same time, he acknowledged that "I was scared stiff. I was nervous and shaky."
Some of those nerves may have stemmed from the uproar that had followed him since spring training, but there was another reason. "You've got to remember," he told the AP in 1959, "that Tuesday when I was put in as a pinch runner was not only the first time I've been in a major league game, but also the first such game I've ever seen, except on television."
The press noted that Green got a strong ovation from the crowd of 21,000 when he came to the plate for the first time in Boston in the second game of a doubleheader against the Kansas City Athletics on Aug. 4. Green responded with a drive off the Green Monster and legged it to third for a triple.
The Red Sox added a second African-American player, future 20-game winner Earl Wilson, later in July, but Green was the groundbreaker who endured the public magnifying glass in breaking the color barrier in Boston. He spent four seasons with the Red Sox before finishing his major league career with the Mets in 1963.
Green came back to El Cerrito, where he and Marie, his wife of more than 50 years, raised their family while Pumpsie worked as a coach, teacher and supervisor for the Berkeley school district.
"He came back home and for the next 25 years he devoted himself to his community, the greater community," Jones said Tuesday. "We are honoring more than a baseball player tonight."
