MSNBC on Friday featured a segment with Washington Post sports columnist Kevin Blackistone who, in a column titled “Baseball can no longer ignore Ron DeSantis’s culture wars,” noted how some baseball teams in the 1940s moved spring training out of Florida because of the Jim Crow laws.
Anchor Lindsey Reiser cited all the awful policies Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has enacted or favors, before cuing up Blackistone: “You outlined Major League Baseball’s move out of Florida for spring training in yesteryear -- late ‘40s, a state with some of the harshest Jim Crow laws as the league was introducing black players to the league.”
Blackistone, who also teaches journalism at the University of Maryland, urged baseball to use its economic power to protest DeSantis, recalling how “in 2021 they moved the All-Star game out of the state of Georgia in protest to some of the election laws that a lot of people in the state of Georgia felt were burdensome on black voters” and so baseball “should express if it has some uncomfortableness with the things that are going on in the DeSantis campaign, in the way that he’s run the state of Florida, and in some of the other legislation that has been passed there that they should speak out.”
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