Summary
Kudos to Red Sox owner John Henry for being open to renaming Yawkey Way, which was named after former Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, who blocked African Americans from playing in Boston until well after every other team integrated.
Not until 1959 did the Red Sox include an African American on the roster, and this was years after scout George Digby recommended a teenager named Willie Mays of the Negro Leagues’ Birmingham Black Barons.
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William B. Gould IV, Stanford Law School professor emeritus and a Red Sox fan since he was 10 in 1946, first wrote in the Boston Globe in the mid-’80s about changing the name and got criticized, including by a Globe columnist claiming Yawkey didn’t have a racist bone in his body.
Said Gould, an African American, of Yawkey, “Not only was his conduct immoral, but also impractical in that it was a primary factor in the losing records of the Sox between 1952 and the early ‘60s.”
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