Racism is as American as Baseball?
You have no idea.
This is what we are dealing with...
As could be expected, injuries resulting from this “game” were common, especially when baseballs were used instead of eggs. In 1887, the
New York Sun recounted a bad day at the Westchester County Fair by noting that “Everything seemed to go wrong. The African Dodger was disabled. A very hard ball had explored a very soft region of his cranium and he was laid up for repairs.” The
Sun also reported, with no apparent concern for the injured man, that “another negro was procured to do the African Dodger’s act.”
Based on newspaper reports, it appears that some African-American men may have been killed during the course of these games. In 1908, for example, an “African Dodger” named William White was the target of carnival-goers in Hanover, Pennsylvania, where a squad of baseball players took turns throwing hard balls at his head. White, according to the
Philadelphia Record, was “subjected to a fusillade of balls” but “took the punishment courageously.” Almost as an afterthought,
the Record observed later in the piece that “He was compelled to retire soon afterward with internal injuries which may prove fatal.”
Notwithstanding the horrific brutality of the game, we did not find any evidence of actual infants being used as targets, despite what the name of the game suggests.
We asked Franklin Hughes, a digital media specialist who works with the Jim Crow Museum, about whether toddlers were subjected to being human targets, and he told us that “In many cases, the ‘dodger’ would holler things out to the carnival attendees trying to bait them into playing; I can’t really see how a toddler could do this on the same level … However, I would not put it out of the question.”
In the not-so-distant past, white carnival goers threw eggs or balls at African Americans in a game popularly known as "Hit the N----- Baby."
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