AUNT JEMIMA, LITTLE BLACK SAMBO AND THOMAS A. YAWKEY

How on earth could any food item with Aunt Jemima’s name on it be suspect or subject to recall?

I can still see that red box with Aunt Jemima’s comforting face and bright smile in the upper left corner under which is proudly noted, “Since 1889.”

Well, Pinnacle Foods Inc. announced plans to stop selling certain AJ breakfast products including waffles, one week after a recall because of potential Listeria monocytogenes contamination.

The brand which today describes its pancakes as “…[standing] for warmth, nourishment and trust — qualities you’ll find in loving moms from diverse backgrounds who want the very best for their families,” will likely never again be thought of in the same way.

And I bet you don’t still own that little figurine. The black-faced lantern-holder in the shiny red jacket or vest throwing light on your front lawn in the night’s pitch darkness willfully extending a warm greeting.

Am I right?

I believe this one-time popular ornament was widely referred to and identified as a ‘lawn jockey’ shortened to “Jocko,” its genesis found in the tale of one Jocko Graves, an African-American youth who served with General George Washington when he crossed the Delaware to launch his surprise attack on Hessian Forces at Trenton, N.J.

The apocryphal story describes the General’s reluctance to take the boy along as he thought him too young. Instead, he left him on the Pennsylvania side with the express instructions to tend the horses and to keep a light on the bank to aid in his and the troops’ return.

The youngster, faithful to his post and his orders, froze to death on the river bank during the night with the lantern still in his hand. The General was so moved by the boy’s devotion to his duty that he had a statue sculpted and cast of him — holding the lantern, naturally — and it was prominently displayed for all to see at his Mount Vernon estate.

Historically, lawn jockeys were viewed as a welcoming gesture to guests as well as more practically providing those traveling on horseback with a somewhat novel hitching post.

Somehow Jocko became “Little Black Sambo” with its own rich lore back in the godforsaken day. Today our heightened sense of awareness and political correctness — all relative of course — has demanded that this heretofore ‘decorative (and functional?) piece’ migrate from your basement or attic to a landfill or a recycling center/operation elsewhere.

A section of Boston’s Jersey Street bordering iconic Fenway Park was renamed Yawkey Way in 1976 honoring the memory of Thomas Austin Yawkey. Yawkey, Red Sox team owner from 1933–1976 and the sole team owner for 44 seasons — longer than anyone else in baseball history — was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1980.

But he earned the reputation in baseball circles and far beyond as a plantation-slave-owner- mentality racist due to his undeniably conscious, calculated, premeditated and intolerable reluctance to sign and employ black players for his club.

Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker has recounted the unfortunate and indisputable history, nauseatingly gut-wrenching to fathom.

“On April 16, 1945, the Red Sox reluctantly did something the team had previously resisted. They held a tryout for three Negro leagues stars — Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams — who wanted to integrate Major League Baseball. They auditioned before the Sox brass of the day, including owner Tom Yawkey, general manager Eddie Collins, and manager Joe Cronin. The moment that gave the day its lasting juice came as the players were finishing up. As later reported by Clif Keane, a sportswriter for The Boston Globe, a voice from the grandstand rang out: “Get those niggers off the field!” Who actually said it has never been established, though Keane believed it to be Yawkey, according to Howard Bryant’s book “Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.” Needless to say, none of the players were signed.”

Walker goes on to point out that while Robinson integrated baseball in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers becoming an American icon and legend, it was Sam “The Jet” Jethroe who integrated baseball in Boston, winning the 1950 National League Rookie of the Year award as a member of the Boston Braves.

The Red Sox under Yawkey however, went the other way, earning the dubious distinction of becoming the very last team in all of baseball to integrate. The club finally signed its first black player, Elijah “Pumpsie” Green in 1959.

Yawkey, an industrialist from Detroit who owned plantations in South Carolina, defended his position rather weakly in a variety of statements made on the issue of race and his and the Red Sox’ position.

In a 1965 Sports Illustrated story he tried to explain.

“They blame me and I’m not even a Southerner,” he said. “I’m from Detroit. I have no feeling against colored people. I employ a lot of them in the South. But they are clannish, and when that story got around that we didn’t want Negroes, they all decided to sign with some other club. Actually, we scouted them all along, but we didn’t want one because he was a Negro, we wanted a ballplayer.”

Like Willie Mays you mean?

Not long after the Robinson-related debacle, Yawkey remained true-to-form when the Sox decided against signing the young Mays upon scouting him in Birmingham, Alabama.

Walker notes that “decades later, a still-bitter Mays would often tell Ted Williams, ‘we should have played together.’”

In spite of the fact that Yawkey was regarded at the time as a kind and benevolent owner as well as a big-time philanthropist — see the Jimmy Fund and the Yawkey Foundation — his racist leanings and tendencies as described by his apologists was in reality full-blown racism, a fact hardly lost on baseball historians, archivists and present-day ownership.

Current Sox owner John Henry to his credit neither denies nor scurries away tail between his legs from Red Sox history referring to it as “the shameful past.”

And he’s not alone.

In fact, Teddy Ballgame himself, a bit of a curmudgeonly, loud-mouthed blowhard and the greatest hitter who ever lived by his (and others’) reckoning was “racially enlightened,” according to Walker, a notion widely shared.

Walker recounts that “at his 1966 Hall of Fame induction, he [Williams] famously and successfully called for the inclusion of Negro League legends in Cooperstown when he proclaimed, ‘I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.’”

Pretty prophetic.

Aunt Jemima, Little Black Sambo and Thomas A. Yawkey have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

The sordid past, the open-to-question present and the uncertain future bind us all together, however.

As one.

All of us. Together.

Will we ever tire or rid our souls of racism, if not completely than enough so that peaceful coexistence rules and venomous ignorance is kicked to the curb for good?

Or does this thinking represent the height of naivete?

Is it nothing more than a fool’s errand to consider the prospect of a racist-free mentality?

Been around forever and will be around forever?

I hope not. I don’t know.

But I do know that we must stop being afraid of our differences and instead start to embrace and celebrate them.

How do you do that?

By being secure, open-minded, fair, honest, compassionate and willing to learn and understand, that’s how.

By throwing off the shackles of unfounded hate and prejudice and thinking for yourself, that’s how.

By being a decent, caring, kind and good human being.

Period.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in May 2017.]