Dixie Walker - Integration

Integration

When the Dodgers broke baseball's color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson, Walker became a figure of some controversy. In 1947, during spring training, the club announced that it was bringing up Robinson from the minors. Walker thereupon wrote a letter to Branch Rickey, the club president, asking to be traded. The letter did not mention Robinson by name, but Walker acknowledged later that he had been under pressure from Alabama people not to play with Robinson. Several other Dodgers from the U.S. South who had also grown up in conditions of strict racial segregation made similar requests of Rickey. Walker denied, nevertheless, that he had been in the forefront of a move to block Robinson. Reportedly, Robinson would look the other way rather than try to shake Walker's hand on the field, to avoid mutual embarrassment. Walker was soon defending Robinson and giving him pointers, and added that he came to respect Robinson for the way he handled the abuse hurled at him, and called him "as outstanding an athlete as I never saw." Walker finished the year at .306 and 94 RBIs.

Whatever his opinion might have been at the time about integration, Walker saluted Robinson the baseball player when the 1947 pennant was won: "He is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal." And with time, and as baseball welcomed more black and Latin players into its ranks, Walker's position about integration surely evolved as well. He managed integrated teams in the AAA International League in the late 1950s, coached for the St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Braves and made clear to reporters that he was not the same Dixie Walker as he was in 1947. His support of Jim Crow during Robinson's rookie season sprang partly from concerns for his home and businesses in his native Alabama – “I didn't know if people would spit on me or not ," he once said. Indeed, his final years in baseball in the late 1960s through the 1970s were as the minor league batting instructor for one of the game's most diverse organizations, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

When writing his memoir of baseball in the New York 1950s, The Era, Roger Kahn included a footnote that quoted Walker directly about the Robinson issue and about the pressure against his off-season business, from a conversation the two men had after Walker finished giving batting tips to a pair of players, one white, the other black: "That's why I started that thing. It was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life. Would you tell everybody that I'm deeply sorry?"

Sent to the Pirates in 1948, Walker led his team with a .318 average (topping the .300 mark for the tenth time in 12 years) and ended his playing career the next season. Following his retirement as a player, he managed several minor league teams for most of the 1950s, including the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1957 to 1959, winning the International League pennant in his first season with the team. He served as a batting coach with the St. Louis Cardinals, and coached and scouted both for the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers.

Walker died in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1982 at the age of 71. He was buried next to his father in Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery.