JD Crowe: Reggie Jackson ripped the cover off the ball in Birmingham

This is an opinion cartoon thing.

Somebody had to do it.

It’s baseball, man. It can be beautiful and poetic one moment. And in one swing of the bat, it can break your heart. Most of life’s truths can be told through this kid’s game.

Reggie Jackson, Mr. October, stepped up to the microphone at Rickwood Field on a magical June night in Birmingham and let it rip. This Reggie Jackson spoke as a wounded spiritual warrior. Not a brash, violent one.

“Coming back here is not easy,” Jackson said during Fox’s pregame show for “MLB at Rickwood Field: A Tribute to the Negro Leagues” between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals. He was here to honor Willie Mays.

“The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled,” he said. “Fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

“I would never want to do it again,” he said. “I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and they’d say, ‘n—–, can’t eat here.’

“I would go to a hotel and they would say, ‘the n—– can’t stay here,’” Jackson said.

Earlier in the day at a luncheon hosted by AL.com colleague Roy S. Johnson and Roy Wood Jr., Jackson expressed his gratitude.

Johnson writes: “He called some of his times with teammates “wonderful”, and credited Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, Dave Duncan, as well as a myriad of “white friends” in the city for helping make it so.

“At the end of our conversation, we asked for questions from the audience. A man rose and recounted a few games at Rickwood when Jackson achieved magnificent feats with his bat, then asked Jackson who shared his most memorable moment.

“Again, Jackson paused. He began talking about a game where he hit a couple of triples. Paul (Bear) Bryant was in the stands that day, he remembered. After the game, Jackson said the Alabama coach came into the locker room and spoke with him.

“He put his hand on my shoulder,” Jackson began and placed his hand on my left shoulder. “He said, ‘This is the kind of n….. we need to beat…” Bryant began naming other top college football coaches of that era.

“He meant it as a compliment,” Jackson said. “I didn’t take it as such.”

“Roy Wood, Jr. was in the room, serving as co-host for the luncheon. Later, the comedian and Birmingham native told me: “It says a lot about our country when you can ask a Black person when was a really good day in Alabama in the 60s and within their reply, they were still called the N-word.”

Read all of Johnson’s column here.

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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix. Give him a holler @[email protected].