As part of Major League Baseball’s upcoming event at Rickwood Field, AL.com and The Birmingham News will be producing weekly stories that showcase the history of Rickwood Field, and history of baseball in the state of Alabama.

“Rickwood: The legacy of America’s oldest ballpark” takes a deep dive into stories from the Negro Leagues to MLB icons playing at the historic venue, and how things are progressing as “MLB at Rickwood Field” takes place on June 20, 2024, between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.

Between them, they have more than 5,000 hits in the major leagues, played in 11 All-Star Games and seven World Series, and managed a total of 20 years.

All four are members of the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, certifying them as baseball legends in their home state.

But the legacies of Ben Chapman, Dixie Walker, Harry Walker and Bobby Bragan are complicated. All four men, all of them white and lifelong Birmingham residents, played a role (or have long been alleged to have played a role) in the leadup to and the fallout from the most-important moment in baseball history — the sport’s integration by Jackie Robinson in 1947.

Bragan and Dixie Walker were teammates of Robinson’s on the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers; Chapman and Harry Walker opponents on other National League teams. Each man met that moment — and others to follow — in a different way, though only one emerged with his reputation and legacy clean.

The first of four parts in this series confronts the actions and legacy of Ben Chapman, the Philadelphia Phillies manager who terrorized Robinson during his rookie season with the Dodgers in 1947.

Ben Chapman — ‘The symbol of the opposition’

Say this for Ben Chapman, he never denied he said all those vile things to Jackie Robinson. Then again, he did so in such a brazen and public way, it’s too difficult for him to plead otherwise.

Chapman — born in Nashville on Christmas Day 1908 but raised in Birmingham — had been a 4-time All-Star outfielder with the New York Yankees in the 1930s, a .302 lifetime hitter who was one of the best base-stealers of his era. In addition, he was known as one of the all-time “bench jockeys” in baseball history, hurling insults at opposing players from the dugout in an attempt to throw them off their game.

But Chapman had been accused in 1933 of intentionally spiking Washington second baseman Buddy Myer, whom he believed to be Jewish. And in 1934, after making repeated anti-Semitic comments to fans, 15,000 New Yorkers signed a petition asking the Yankees to trade him.

By 1947, Chapman was 38 years old and had retired as a player but was in his third season as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. On April 22 of that year, the Phillies paid a visit to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to face the now-integrated Dodgers and Robinson, their rookie first baseman.

“Figuratively, (Chapman) was still fighting the Civil War,” Phillies pitcher Howie Schultz told Robinson biographer Jonathan Eig more than 50 years later. “He was just embittered when Robinson joined the league.”

As famously dramatized in the 2013 film 42, Chapman began firing racial epithets at Robinson almost immediately. According to a 1997 Associated Press story commemorating the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers, these were among Chapman’s choices of words:

“Hey n****r, why don’t you go back to the cotton fields where you belong?”

“They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!””Hey snowflake, which one of the white boys’ wives are you dating tonight?”

Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ traveling secretary and a close lieutenant of team president Branch Rickey, recalled the incident in his 1976 book “The Lords of Baseball.”

“At no time in my life have I heard racial venom and dugout abuse to match the abuse that Ben sprayed on Robinson that night,” Parrott wrote. “Chapman mentioned everything from thick lips to the supposedly extra-thick Negro skull … and the repulsive sores and diseases he said Robinson’s teammates would become infected with if they touched the towels or the combs he used.”

Chapman would insist to his dying day that his comments to Robinson were merely gamesmanship of the kind he and some of his peers had utilized in the past against other players (such as Italian-American Joe DiMaggio or Jewish-American Hank Greenberg) — and that he himself had incurred as a young player due to his Southern heritage. Sportswriter and author Allen Barra, a Birmingham native, said he interviewed Chapman “three or four times” beginning in 1979, and Chapman’s story varied little.

“I had a shock when I saw the movie 42,” Barra told AL.com. “The actor who played Chapman has a scene where he says to these reporters ‘I don’t know why you make a fuss about it. We called Joe DiMaggio a ‘dago’ and we called Hank Greenberg a ‘kike.’ And that’s exactly what he said to me in 1979 for the Birmingham Reader, a little weekly that we put out. And then I realized that must have been his standard spiel, except as the years went along, he would censor himself and just say ‘those words.’ So I guess that shows a little bit of improvement.”

As others noted, Robinson had been instructed by Rickey not to fight back, fearing that a combative or confrontational African American player would not be accepted by white fans. They maintained Chapman had crossed a line.

One of those was reportedly Robinson’s teammate, Eddie Stanky. The Dodgers’ second baseman — a long-time Mobile-area resident who had by many accounts not been thrilled with the idea of having a Black teammate — is said to have confronted Chapman directly, calling him a “coward” and telling him to “pick on somebody who can fight back.”

Many fans in attendance that day at Ebbets Field reportedly wrote to baseball commissioner Happy Chandler, insisting that Chapman be disciplined by the league. Famed gossip columnist Walter Winchell attacked Chapman in his syndicated column and on his radio show, lobbying that Chapman “be thrown out of baseball.”

Eventually, Phillies owner Robert Carpenter told Chapman that “harassment of Robinson must cease.” When the Dodgers visited Philadelphia for the first time in early May, the racial taunts had stopped, though the Phillies’ players invoked death threats Robinson had been receiving by pointing their bats at him and making “machine gun-like noises.”

Robinson and Chapman also posed together for a photograph, holding a bat between them (but NOT shaking hands, as has been reported over the years). Parrott wrote in 1973 (shortly after Robinson’s death) that the photo op was Chapman’s idea — he hoped the gesture would save his job — but Chapman later insisted the directive came from the Phillies’ front office.

Robinson — who said the initial confrontation with Chapman “brought me nearer to cracking up than I have ever been” — participated only begrudgingly.

“I can think of no occasion where I had more difficulty in swallowing my pride and doing what seemed best for baseball and the cause of the Negro in baseball than in agreeing to pose for a photographs with a man for whom I had only the very lowest regard,” Robinson wrote in his 1972 memoir, I Never Had it Made.

All the while, Chapman was also telling reporters — including those from Black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier — he would be “glad to have a colored player” on the Phillies (he reportedly was enamored with Goose Tatum, a Birmingham Black Barons outfielder who later went on to basketball fame with the Harlem Globetrotters). He also came to admire Robinson’s ability on the field, calling him a “major leaguer in every respect” while also continuing to insist there were only baseball reasons behind the verbal abuse.

“Robinson can run, he can bunt, he is a good fielder,” Chapman said in June 1947. “He is dangerous. We want to see if he can take it. Our job is to see that he doesn’t get to first. We will put him through the same paces they put everyone else through in the big leagues.

“If Robinson has the stuff, he will be accepted in baseball.”

Robinson and the Dodgers went on to play in the World Series that year, and Robinson was named the first National League Rookie of the Year. Chapman’s Phillies finished 62-92, tied for last place in the eight-team NL.

By mid-season 1948 Chapman had been fired, though by most accounts it was due to his poor record and not as punishment for his treatment of Robinson. He never managed in the big leagues again but did serve as a coach with the Cincinnati Reds in 1952 and managed for many years in the minors and later coached on a part-time basis with the baseball team at Samford University in his hometown.

Upon Chapman’s death in 1993, longtime friend Bubba Church — a Birmingham native who pitched for the Phillies and Reds in the early 1950s — told The Birmingham News that he believed Chapman was made a scapegoat. He’d said and done nothing different in regard to Robinson than many other opponents — and even some of his teammates — had, Church argued.

“Most of the others were doing the same thing, but Ben was from Alabama,” Church said. “He became the symbol of the opposition. It cost him a place in the Hall of Fame.”

Church’s last comment is a refrain repeated by Chapman and many others through the years, though his National Baseball Hall of Fame case is rather flimsy. His high batting averages came in an era of inflated offense in the American League, and though he stole many bases, he also led the league in times caught stealing several times.

By the objective measure of Wins Above Replacement, only Lloyd Waner’s career total of 29.8 WAR is lower than Chapman’s 42.1 among Hall-of-Fame center fielders who did not play primarily in the Negro Leagues (for whom the statistical record remains incomplete). And Waner is widely considered a questionable selection for Cooperstown, having been elected largely due to his association with older brother and Pirates teammate — and fully qualified Hall-of-Famer — Paul Waner.

Nevertheless, Chapman remained well-regarded in his hometown, among both the general public and the local media. He was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1971, and when Hoover Metropolitan Stadium — longtime home of the Birmingham Barons and current site of the annual SEC baseball tournament — opened in 1988, the road leading into the facility was named “Ben Chapman Drive” in honor of “one of Alabama’s most-loved citizens and greatest athletes,” in the words of then-mayor Frank S. Skinner.

Bill Lumpkin Jr., longtime sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald, often repeated in his columns a story about a visit Robinson paid to Birmingham to speak at 16th Street Baptist Church in 1962, after his playing days had ended. Robinson was interviewed by Post-Herald sportswriter Clettus Atkinson, who supposedly asked about Chapman.

The word “supposedly” appears here because Chapman is not mentioned in the story Atkinson wrote for the Feb. 17, 1962, edition of the Post-Herald. However, in the version Lumpkin wrote in multiple columns years later, Robinson said of Chapman “I always knew where Chapman stood. He said it to my face. He never went behind my back like some of my teammates.”

Chapman continued to insist his actions against Robinson were not personal. In 1973, he told Wayne Martin of the Birmingham News “I can truthfully say I never hated another man in baseball.”

But did Chapman’s views on race evolve over the years? Barra said it’s possible, recalling an encounter with Chapman during the production of one of the various baseball movies that shot scenes at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field in the early 1990s.

“I looked and saw Ben over there talking to a Black guy,” Barra said. “I didn’t recognize him, but it turned out to be (Black Barons legend) Piper Davis. They were about the same age, and they were laughing and talking and swapping baseball stories. I thought ‘those two could have been teammates, easily, on some team.’ It was very pleasant to have seen that. So my guess would be that Ben mellowed quite a bit. I guess there’s no reason in living that long if you don’t want to change a little bit.

“I think he lost a lot of his anger as he grew older. … Why was Ben Chapman talking and laughing with Piper Davis? Well, he probably hadn’t spent a lot of time around Black ballplayers and he just didn’t know them. So maybe he deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

In 2016, the Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the treatment of Robinson by Chapman and the Phillies team in 1947. Chapman never did apologize himself, though he told New York Times sportswriter Ray Robinson in 1992 (a year before his death at age 84) “maybe I’ve changed a bit.”

“A man learns about things and mellows as he grows older,” Chapman said, noting that his son, Bill, had more enlightened views on race. “… Maybe I went too far in those days. But I always went along with the bench jockeying, which has always been part of the game. Maybe I was rougher at it than some players. I thought that you could use it to upset and weaken the other team. It might give you an advantage.

“The world changes. Maybe I’ve changed, too. Look, I’m real proud that I’ve raised my son different.”

And yet, Chapman’s ultimate legacy might be that he galvanized the 1947 Dodgers. Even those who were lukewarm — or outright opposed — to the idea of a Black man joining the team closed ranks around Robinson.

“When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified 30 men, not one of whom was willing to sit by and see someone kick around a man who had his hands tied behind him,” Rickey said, according to the Associated Press in 1997. “Chapman made Robinson a real member of the Dodgers.”

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has written about sports for a variety of publications since 1994. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.