Juneteenth Merch

(A year late, and about $400,000 short…)

Juneteenth has a double-edged significance. The one-day happy ending is now celebrated as a federal holiday, while the extension of slavery by the diehard racists running the Great State of Texas is either erased from memory or actually excused! A typical version of the prevailing history was emailed to constituents by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Almeda): "Juneteenth originates from June 19, 1865, when news of Union victory in the Civil War, and enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Galveston, Texas. The next year, freedmen in Texas held the first annual celebration of 'Jubilee Day' on June 19, which continued to grow into the Juneteenth celebration we know today."

Bonta says she is "proud to join communities across Assembly District 18 to celebrate Juneteenth, a historic holiday that recognizes the end of slavery, and offers a moment to appreciate the contributions of abolitionists, activists, and African American communities who fought for equality and freedom across the United States of America."

If anyone should know the bitter truth about Juneteenth, it's Mia Bonta. Her parents were Puerto Rican and at least one of her forefathers was brought over from West Africa in chains. Her husband is Attorney General Rob Bonta. Maybe she knows the truth but she's "a glass-is-half-full person." (That's how Dennis Peron once described himself. Your correspondent is a glass-is-half-empty person who suspects the water is so full of artificial sweeteners and "forever chemicals" that it's unfit to drink.)

The Emancipation Proclamation, the federal order freeing slaves in states that were “in rebellion,” was signed by Abe Lincoln on September 22, 1862, and took effect on January 1, 1863. It was ignored, of course, by the Confederate states until Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomatox on April 9, 1865. Then implementation began state-by-state. Texas held out the longest, not because the governor, the big plantation owners, the state legislators, the newspaper publishers –slaveholders all– didn't know about the Confederate surrender, but because they didn't want to free their slaves and the Union Army hadn't arrived to enforce federal law. The news had reached most of the slaves, too. So why was June 19 different from all other days?

On that day in Galveston, Gen. Gordon Granger, who commanded the District of Texas for the Union, posted a "Military Order" asserting that "in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free." What caused jubilation was not NEWS of the Emancipation Proclamation but the FALSE IMPRESSION that the Union Army had come to enforce it.

This year, supposedly to celebrate Juneteenth, the San Francisco Giants will play the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field, where Willie Mays once played center field for the Birmingham Black Barons. Major League Baseball (MLB) began hyping this game a year ago. The New York Times turned MLB’s initial press release into a 20-inch story hedded “In Homage to Mays and the Negro Leagues, MLB Heads to Birmingham.” The subhed added “Baseball Returns to the ‘Hallowed Grounds’ of a Negro Leagues Stadium.” Expect to hear many variations on this sanctimonious lie in the days ahead.

MLB is a consortium of capitalists who see the Negro Leagues as a revenue stream that has hardly been tapped. All those great players’ and legendary teams’ caps and jerseys awaiting buyers: Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, The Homestead Grays, The Detroit Wolves, the Newark Eagles…

As part of its Juneteenth merchandising campaign, MLB announced May 29 that eminent historians had integrated the two leagues’ record books, establishing that Gibson, not Ty Cobb, had the highest lifetime batting average. Also, Gibson’s slugging percentage surpassed Babe Ruth’s. The Times turned MLB’s press release into a news story, and then ran an opinion piece entitled, “Inclusion of Negro leagues statistics in MLB records only enhances baseball history.”

How much money do MLB teams make selling merchandise? With my knowlegable sources dead or long retired (or I criticized them in a leaflet for which I was never forgiven), I signed up for ChatGPT. Their Intelligence provided in a few seconds may be Artificial but it seems plausible:

Merchandise sales typically account for around 10-15% of a team's total revenue. This percentage can vary based on factors such as team popularity, market size, and the success of the team in a given season… For a team with a strong fan base and good performance, annual revenue might be in the range of $400 million to $500 million or more… Thus, the annual revenue from merchandise sales for the San Francisco Giants could be estimated to fall within the range of approximately $40 million to $75 million.

[Flash forward to 1996. Abolitionists in California end marijuana prohibition by passing Prop 215 and are soon reminded that "enactment" of a law by the voters does not guarantee implementation by politicians or enforcement by the police.]

John Lardner was a great sportswriter who, like his famous father, Ring, drank too much and died too young. In a 1953 piece about spring training he noted that the Brooklyn Dodgers “could sell out towns where Jackie Robinson has not been seen before. This spring there is a game scheduled in New Orleans, 1,000 miles out of the homebound line, to pick up exploited Robinson dollars from Negro fans there. Robinson is the greatest single baseball drawing card of the last five years, as Babe Ruth was before him. It never increased the happiness of Ruth or Robinson, or their teammates, as their clubs wandered about the land beating the bushes for virgin funds, to reflect that neither the ‘gate attractions’ nor the players were paid, in salary or percentage for those wearisome and sometimes physically dangerous junkets.”

Getting back to the Times’s reworking of the corporate media advisory: “MLB said that the date of the Rickwood Field game was intended to coincide with Juneteenth and that the game would feature a variety of activities to celebrate the history of the Negro leagues and Mays, the game’s greatest living player.”

Juneteenth, indeed! I watched the news that day, oh boy, and didn’t hear a single mention of the fact that the great state of Texas held back news of the Emancipation Proclamation for two years!

The Times “homage” story by David Wallstein was not devoid of information: “With a seating capacity of almost 11,000, Rickwood Field was built by the Birmingham industrialist Harvey Woodward, who was known as Rick, and it was modeled after Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. When it opened, on Aug. 18, 1910, businesses in Birmingham were shuttered to celebrate the grand occasion.

“In its early years, the park hosted exhibition games with teams from the American and National Leagues, including the Yankees, but Rickwood was home to the Barons, a Southern League institution that featured stars like Pie Traynor and Burleigh Grimes. In later years, Bo Jackson played for the Barons at Rickwood, as did Michael Jordan during his 1994 sojourn into baseball.

“A great deal of the most significant history at the park, however, came from the Black Barons, a Negro leagues team that featured stars like Mule Suttles and Satchel Paige, who won more games for Birmingham than he did for any other professional team. “In 1948, the Black Barons — with Mays in tow — faced the Homestead Grays in the final Negro World Series. While the Grays won that Series, William Greason, who went on to be the first Black pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, picked up Birmingham’s lone victory. Greason, 98, still lives in Birmingham and is the pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, less than two miles from Rickwood Field.”