Yes Cobb is widely and falsely painted as a bigot. The first man elected to the Hall of fame.
“Yes Cobb is widely and falsely painted as a bigot.”
All due to sportswriter Al Stump. Al would have fit right in with ESPN, CNN, MSNBC.
Charles Leerhsen wrote a good piece for Imprimis defending Cobb’s reputation; “Who Was Ty Cobb? The History We Know That’s Wrong”, which includes this:
“But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.
“Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought. “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/