Facts, Trivia, Memories and More about Jake Powell

During a pregame interview at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 29, 1938, the WGN Radio announcer Bob Elson asked Powell, a Yankees outfielder, what he did during the off-season. Powell replied that he was a policeman in Dayton, Ohio. When Elson asked him how he stayed in shape, Powell, using a common racial slur, replied that he cracked blacks over the head with his nightstick.

Hundreds of outraged listeners called the station. Others called the Chicago office of the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Before the next days game, a delegation of black leaders presented a petition to umpires demanding that Powell be barred from baseball for life.

Although Major League Baseball had turned a deaf ear to criticism of its color line, it could neither dismiss nor deny the outcry over Powells slur. Landis suspended him for 10 days. The Sporting News reported that it was the first time that a major league ballplayer had been suspended for a racist remark.

Public Slur in 1938 Laid Bare a Games Racism
by CHRIS LAMB
Published: July 27, 2008
The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/sports/baseball/27powell.html?_r=1)