I am listening to WGBH this morning hearing a friendly debate on the issue pertaining to renaming Yawkey Way by Fenway Park. I am writing because I just heard the jaded argument by a white woman who, in a reasonable-sounding voice argued that getting rid of all of the Yawkey references is an attempt to change the history, which would prevent the teaching of the “real” history.

This argument has been applied to the removal of statues honoring confederate war heroes in the South, and the argument is often strident and self-righteous, and completely turns the tables, accusing the statue removal advocates of being anti-intellectual, neo-fascists.

The Boston Red Sox, under Yawkey’s leadership, was the last team in major league baseball, to integrate. Jackie Robinson called Yawkey “one of the most bigoted guys in baseball”. The team was accused of many other instances of unprofessionalism and violations of affirmative action law, as evidenced by this article in the Boston Globe detailing Tommy Harper’s experience: https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2014/09/20/tommy-harper-still-haunted-time-with-red-sox/Tw0RLaFinaqTqkt8jLsYeP/story.html.

As if racial discrimination were not bad enough, Yawkey was also accused of protecting a sex offender, club house attendant Donald Fitzpatrick, who eventually plead guilty to multiple accounts of sexual battery.

Those quick to accuse activists of revisionist history would do well to consider that their exalting him to hero status is a gross revision of history, too.

The case could be made that having Yawkey’s name plastered over many Boston institutions is far more of an attempt to redo the actual history, just as the statues of confederate traitors, murderers, human traffickers and mass rapists were an effort to redefine civil war history.

Yawkey wouldn’t even allow black people to perform menial tasks at Fenway Park, let alone sign black ball players. He may well have donated money to Dana Farber and other important community charities, but a hero? Who is rewriting the history here, trying to portray Yawkey as a community-supportive guy.

A black novelist wrote a line that has always stuck with me: Historians are the keepers of the lies. The debate about the extent to which we’re going to acknowledge and exalt Yawkey, and how much lying is going to go on historical record, is at the heart of this debate.

A side bar to this subject is that I wish white folks, the “regular” fans throughout Red Sox history, had some opinion on this, especially the older ones, as they sat through decades of boring, lazy overpaid Red Sox teams while their ticket prices went up constantly.