Ban on Women in Combat Lifted: Is the Military Ready?

This week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the military’s ban on women in combat will be lifted.  According to the Department of Defense, 14.6% of the nation’s military is made up of women; according to The N.Y. Times and Huffington Post, more than 280,000 of them were deployed during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  While those women were banned from combat, they often saw combat action nonetheless, as they were attached to battalions in positions that sometimes came under fire.  Of the more than 6,600 troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 152 of them have been women. 

There may still be some combat positions that women will not be allowed to fill; however, the presumption seems to be that all combat positions are open to women unless a particular branch of the military requests an exception and presumably has the burden to prove why women should not be so allowed.  Previous opposition to women in combat often revolved around concerns about women’s strength and whether their presence might hurt unit cohesion.  Clearly, not all women will be physically capable of certain assignments. But then again, neither are all men.  At least now, those women who are capable and who want to fill those assignments will have the opportunity to do so.  The argument about unit cohesion is also one that had long been made against allowing gays—and African Americans before them—to serve in the military.  That argument, too, has been debunked, and since 2012, LBGT soldiers can serve openly.    

Allowing women in combat opens up hundreds of thousands of new jobs for women and allows women the opportunity to climb the ranks in the military.  Without combat leadership experience, military advancement, regardless of the soldier’s gender, is limited.  In the past, this limitation disproportionately stifled women’s military careers.  No longer. As The New York Times reported, General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in a letter that the lifting of the ban ensures “that women as well as men ‘are given the opportunity to succeed.’”

Despite the public support for allowing women in combat, there are those who oppose the idea, with one retired army general calling it “a vast social experiment in which hundreds of thousands of men and women will be the guinea pigs.” The decision, he maintains, is ideologically based and not militarily based.

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The “Feisty” Secretary Clinton—An Object of Media Bias?

Regarding the recent Senate committee hearings on the September 2012 attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, several major media outlets described Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as, among other things, “feisty.” Strictly from a definitional standpoint, the media’s characterization appears unobjectionable. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, for example, most relevantly defines “feisty” as “quarrelsome, aggressive, belligerent, etc.” and these words arguably capture at least some aspects of Secretary Clinton’s remarks.

A modest examination of American English usage suggests that “feisty” is commonly used to refer to the behavior or character of people in a group (e.g., “the candidates had a feisty debate” or “it sure is a feisty crowd”) or to an animal, particularly a small rambunctious animal (e.g., “that there is one feisty critter”). Indeed, the word’s proximate origins concern the temperamental nature of mixed-breed dogs, and its earliest origins concern the malodorous passing of gas—hence a “fisting hound” in late 17th-century England was an undesirably flatulent dog.

The term “feisty” can also be used, of course, to describe the demeanor or behavior of an individual person. When used in that way, however, it seems more frequently to describe the elderly (“feisty octogenarian” retrieved 17,200 Google hits), the relatively young, and—it appears—women, or at least certain women.

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What Does It Mean To Be A “Former Negro Leagues Player”?

For the past several years Georgia-native Roosevelt Jackson has been making appearances across the country at baseball parks and at public events commemorating Negro baseball.  At these events, the now 95-year old African-American is usually hailed as the “oldest living former Negro Leagues player.”

Moreover, in 2010, the Georgia State Senate adopted a resolution praising Mr. Jackson for his contributions to baseball, to civil rights, and to African-American culture.

Though by all accounts, Jackson is a gracious, intelligent, and compassionate individual who devotes much of his public remarks to the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Barrack Obama, and the Civil Rights Movement, a number of individuals knowledgeable about the history of the African-American baseball have pointed out that there is no record that Roosevelt Jackson ever played in the Negro Leagues.

Is there merit to such charges?  Well, yes and no.

There is no doubt that Jackson (pictured below) played and managed in a number of black-only professional and semi-professional baseball leagues in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  That much is uncontested.

What Jackson did not do was to play in any of the all-black leagues traditionally thought of as the Negro “Major” Leagues. So the “problem” of whether Roosevelt Jackson is a veteran of the Negro Leagues is really one of semantics.

(This terminology problem is not limited to the history of the Negro leagues.  Even today, many baseball fans use the terms “professional” baseball” and “Major League” baseball interchangeably, although “professional” baseball is logically a much broader category that includes the Minor Leagues of Organized Baseball as well as independent professional leagues.)

The “Major Leagues” of black baseball are usually viewed as those leagues which contained teams drawn from a wide geographic area and which included most of the top African-American baseball players.  The seven leagues widely viewed as “major leagues” are listed below:

  • Negro National League I (1920-1931)
  • Eastern Colored League (1923-1928)
  • American Negro League (1929)
  • East-West League (1932, folded mid-season)
  • Negro Southern League (major league, 1932 only, otherwise a minor league)
  • Negro National League II (1933-1948)
  • Negro American League (1937-1960)

Most of the historical accounts of Negro League baseball focus upon the above leagues, hence, the frequent assumption that “Negro League” and “Negro Major League” are synonyms.

To his credit, Roosevelt Jackson has never claimed to have played in any of the above listed leagues.  His career was spent almost entirely playing in all black minor or semi-pro leagues, most of which were located in southern Florida.  The list of teams with which he played includes the largely forgotten Miami Globetrotters, Hollywood Redbirds, Miami Red Sox, Belle Glade Redwings, Florida Cuban Giants, the Lucky Stars, the Danny Dodgers; Ft. Lauderdale Braves, Pompano Beach Yankees, Ft. Lauderdale Lucky Stars, Ft. Lauderdale Gray Sox, and the Buffalo Red Sox (a travelling team that appears to have played many of its games in West Virginia and Pennsylvania).

Jackson is a survivor of an era in which even baseball was rigorously segregated, and even if he did “only” play in the Negro “minor leagues,” his accomplishments, memories, and character are clearly worthy of remembrance.

Milwaukeean Dennis Biddle has for many years claimed to have been one of the younger veterans of the Negro Leagues, and has even presented statistics he supposedly compiled as a pitcher for the Chicago American Giants in 1953 and 1954.  He also has claimed to have been signed by the Chicago Cubs in 1955, only to suffer a career ending injury in spring training.

The problem with Biddle’s story is that the team he supposed play for, the Chicago American Giants of the Negro American League, went out of existence after the 1952 season, before the time that Biddle allegedly played for the team.  The Chicago Defender, the Windy City’s leading African-American newspaper reported in the spring of 1953 that the American Giants might be revived for the second half of the 1953 season, but no revival was forthcoming.

It is possible that Biddle could have played for some semi-pro team in Chicago that took up the name Chicago American Giants in 1953, but Biddle’s version of his story clearly indicates that he played in the Negro Major Leagues.  (There also appears to no independent evidence of his signing by the Cubs.)

Although a number of Milwaukeeans, ranging from Marty Greenberg to the Brewer upper management to Tom Barrett, have in the past uncritically accepted Biddle’s story, others in the baseball world have questioned its veracity, including the National Sports Law Institute, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and the Black Athlete Sports Network.

Whatever the merits of Biddle’s claim, the existence of veterans of black baseball, whether they played at the major, minor, or semi-pro level, is an important reminder of an unpleasant aspect of our society’s past.  It is profoundly sad that a country founded on the premise that “all men are created equal” could exhibit such a degree of racism in the sport that was for a long time the “National Pastime.”  However, it is also a reminder of the true resilience of African-American culture in the age of Jim Crow, and the history of the Negro Leagues is clearly worth preserving.

Jackson player

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