How Ty Cobb was wrongly portrayed as a racist

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Yeah but how WAS he wrongly portrayed, if so? Like how did that whole thing go down

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In 1908, among many other brawls Cobb participated in, he ignored an order from a black man laying asphalt in Detroit to stop walking, then after the two argued, Cobb started a vicious fistfight and was overheard to use the N-word against the road paver.

Today that behavior would certainly brand you as a racist, but racial slurs were commonplace then, even published in the papers.

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It was the culture back then.

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5. He hated African Americans Ty had his prejudices toward minorities, having grown up in the south he inherited the plantation mentality that blacks had their place in society and it wasn’t the same as the place for whites. That’s deplorable, but it was essentially the de facto attitude among most whites in the south and many in America at the time. It’s important to note that Woodrow Wilson was president and had the exact same attitude toward minorities. It was an institutionalized concept in many ways. Cobb didn’t hate all blacks, however. He had several friends who were African American, and he helped many blacks in Georgia by paying their hospital bills and college tuition. He was an admirer of Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe. Unfortunately, Cobb has been held up as the ultimate racist of the early 20th century, when many, many Americans, including many athletes, held his same views. Hall of Fame outfielder Tris Speaker, for example, was a member of the KKK. Cap Anson’s racist views towards blacks are credited by some historians as being one of the main reasons minorities were unable to integrate major league baseball sooner. I’m not apologizing for Cobb’s attitude toward minorities, nor for the handful of incidents in which he accosted African Americans, but it’s important to put them in context to better understand them Cobb will never be able to shake the black cloud that hangs over his character. It was largely formed in the last few months of his life and years after his death. But shedding light on some of these untruths can hopefully help resuscitate his legacy.

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