But I want you to know that what I'm doing here I'm doing as a ballplayer, a major league ballplayer.
Whatever I contributed to the unique morale of the Cardinals was part of this growth, and so, of course, was my decision to have it out in public with the owners of organized baseball.
If you destroyed the underpinnings of this great American sport, you are a hated, ugly, detestable person.
I was told by the general manager that a white player had received a higher raise than me. Because white people required more money to live than black people. That is why I wasn't going to get a raise.
I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution.
Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.
The baseball establishment is permissive about revelry.
I'll also say, yes, I think the change in black consciuosness in recent years has made me more sensitive to injustice in every area of my life.
