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Still A Shame

7 July, 2009

Wonderful article on Satchel Paige in the Boston Globe on what would have been his 103 birthday.

But there is more to Satchel’s legacy than eye-popping records. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit if not an Uncle Tom, he was something else entirely - a quiet subversive, defying Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. He refused to play in a town unless it supplied lodging and food to him and his teammates, a defiance for which young civil rights workers later would get arrested.

He never got a fair shot to be remembered with his fellow greats.