He has been dead for 42 years now, this South Carolina plantation owner, this man who once owned the Red Sox for 43 years.


 


But he's still one of the biggest stories hovering over the Red Sox in this soon to be summer of 2018, due to the small street that runs alongside the third-base side of Fenway Park in Boston, the small street that was named for him in 1977.


 


Jersey Street had been renamed Yawkey Way in homage to the man who owned the [...]

Bill Reynolds

He has been dead for 42 years now, this South Carolina plantation owner, this man who once owned the Red Sox for 43 years.

 

But he's still one of the biggest stories hovering over the Red Sox in this soon to be summer of 2018, due to the small street that runs alongside the third-base side of Fenway Park in Boston, the small street that was named for him in 1977.

 

Jersey Street had been renamed Yawkey Way in homage to the man who owned the Red Sox from 1933 to 1976. But his name has become a constant reminder of the Red Sox' haunted past, the obvious symbol of the Red Sox being the the last team in Major League Baseball to integrate, the unfortunate past that's always seemed to follow them around like an afternoon shadow that never goes anyway, the baseball version of Original Sin?

 

Or as William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never over. In fact, it's not even past."

 

So the question for some time was: What to do with Yawkey Way? At the bequest of John Henry, the current Red Sox owner, the City of Boston announced on April 26 that it would be changing the name of Yawkey Way back to Jersey Street.

 

But who was Tom Yawkey?

 

This is the question Bill Nowlin, who has been the vice president for the Society of Baseball Research since 2004, and has written roughly 35 related books on the Red Sox, sets out to answer in his new book "Tom Yawkey: Patriarch of the Boston Red Sox," a wonderful portrait of Yawkey, who was so shaped both by the time and place he came of age in, and crippled by them, too.

 

Was he racist, or just a product of the times he lived in?

 

Or was it both?

 

These are the questions, and they are complicated. The Yawkey name is all over Boston if you know where to look. Massachusetts General Hospital has a 10-story Yawkey Center for Outpatient Care. Boston Medical Center has the Yawkey Ambulatory Care Center. There is the Yawkey Center for Children and Learning.

 

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

 

But in the summer of 2015, Adrian Walker, an African-American columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote a column in which he suggested Yawkey Way should be renamed.

 

"It's past time for that ill-fitting tribute to go," he wrote.

 

So began the discussion for a new era.

 

For by that time Yawkey had been dead for nearly 40 years. You all but had to be a baseball historian to know the Red Sox' sad history, but now the issue was front and center again, what with Yawkey Way being back in the news.

 

The issue came to the forefront again last summer, back when one of the big stories was the removal of some of the confederate monuments in the South. That was when Henry said that the Red Sox would lead the charge to change the name of Yawkey Way.

 

"I am still haunted by what went on here a long time before we arrived,” he said.

 

So what did go on?

 

Nowlin's book has an entire chapter on race, one in which he writes: "It seems unavoidable that we revisit the question of Yawkey and race."

 

No doubt.

 

What emerges is a man of the South whose attitudes about race were, no doubt, shaped by that experience. Call it racism. Call it growing up in the moneyed white world of the southern aristocracy in the first half of the 20th century. Call it indifference. Call it anything you want. But as late as 1958 the Red Sox didn't have any black employees, never mind players, the kind of legacy that never goes away. The kind of history that never goes away.

 

That always has been the franchise's Original Sin, of course, even now, so many years later.

 

Especially in these rigid, black and white times we now live in, where everything is seen as either right or wrong, no gray, and we often judge the past like jurors who who can't wait to go home for the day.

 

Or as Glenn Stout, who has written extensively on the Red Sox throughout the years, says in "Tom Yawkey," "Yawkey took pains to avoid addressing the question at all ... at every opportunity, Yawkey foisted the issue off on a collection of sycophants, yes-men, and cronies he employed."

 

And, ultimately, to the great detriment of the Red Sox, the franchise's enduring badge of shame.

 

And, ultimately, Yawkey's too, fair or not.

 

So farewell Yawkey Way.

 

The past has been officially exorcised.