Walter Dean Myers Quotes

I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.

We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing. We played with a round ball, and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms, and we thought that we were making a contribution to baseball. We loved the game, and we liked to play it.

When Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican player in the majors, his nationality was barely noticed. What the press and fans talked about was his skin color. He was the first black player on the Detroit Tigers, and a great deal of attention was paid to him as someone who crossed the color line.

We used to have an all-Black baseball team, all Black stars and when White folks took Jackie Robinson and brought him into the major league that was the beginning of the crushing of Black baseball teams and leagues.

Mr. Rickey, I'll put more people in the park than anybody since Babe Ruth.

When I went to Brooklyn in 1948 Jackie Robinson was at the height of his brilliant career.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

Many of the greatest black athletes of all time played baseball for no money and no recognition. I'm just sorry many major league fans never got to see them play, because many of them were awesome.

I guess what really made me a Dodgers fan from the beginning was that the team had Jackie Robinson, the first 'Negro' in the major leagues.

Desegregation is a joke.

Integration would lead to miscegenation, which will destroy our white race eventually.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

The story of Jackie Robinson is also the story of Branch Rickey. He had many reasons for doing what he did, but he stood up against his own people.

It was a breaking period for black people coming into baseball, and how many followed depended on Jackie's conduct. But that's not the case now. What and how I do doesn't mean nearly as much as what and how Jackie did.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

In the Negro Leagues, I played every day.

I don't think baseball owes colored people anything. I don't think colored people owe baseball anything, either.

I was glad to play in the Negro Leagues. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

When the 14th Amendment, equal protection clause was enacted, the galleries in the Senate were segregated. Now we have integration.

Robinson was important to all blacks. To make it into the majors and to take all the name calling, he had to be something special. He had to take all this for years, not just for Jackie Robinson, but for the nation.

As I look out there and see the culture of baseball, a lot of blacks and Latins, it's given me a lot of joy to know that Jackie started that. If Jackie hadn't come in '47, me and Ron Santo wouldn't have played in Double-A and all those years in the big leagues.

It will have to be a universal movement, and that will never be... because the big-league game, as it is now, is overrun with Southern blood. These fellows would have to stop at the same hotels, eat in the same dining rooms, and sleep in the same train compartments with the colored players. There'd be trouble for sure.

The Army is not out to make any social reforms. The Army will put men of different races in different companies. It will change that policy when the Nation as a whole changes it.

The military didn't want blacks in integrated units, or women, and now it doesn't want gays.