By Jack Sommers
“The Negro Leagues are the platform from which Jackie Robinson could stand in order to make his jump into the major leagues and have the success that he had “
~Dr. Ray Doswell~
As a kid growing up in the 60’s and early 70’s in a 98% white suburban Long Island neighborhood, I had no clue what the Negro Leagues were. I knew about my little league team and my school teams, and the National League and the American League. There were no black children in my elementary school at all. When I got to middle school there were less than 10. None of them were my friends. They mostly kept to themselves and I never reached out. It’s just the way it was. This is how I grew up. There was a divide, and as a kid I didn’t even think to cross it (until I was 15, but that’s another story). We learned about slavery and Lincoln and the civil war in school of course. But that was “all in the past now” and not something I needed to be concerned about in the present tense, according to both my teachers and my parents.
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