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Dick Allen, the Phillies, and Racism

From the days of the Negro Leagues up to the present battles over merit-based excuses for the absence of blacks in management positions, baseball has long served as a barometer of the nation's racial climate. Nowhere is this more true than in Philadelphia, where the Phillies have suffered for their reputation as a racially segregated team in a racially segregated city. The case of Dick Allen is most often cited as the prime example of this inglorious history of race relations. Allen, the first African-American superstar to don the red pinstripes, was at the center of controversy in the 1960s and mid-1970s when he played in Philadelphia. He exploded onto the scene in 1964, winning the Rookie of the Year Award for his .318 average, 29 homers, and 94 RBI. It was a performance that kept the Phillies in the pennant race for most of the summer until their infamous collapse in the final two weeks of the season. Over the next seven years Allen established himself among the ranks of the game's superstars, becoming a consistent .300 hitter and averaging 30 homers and 90 RBI a season. Those statistics, along with a 1972 MVP performance with the Chicago White Sox, earned him a hero's welcome when Allen returned to Philadelphia in 1975. Phillies management and the fans were convinced that his time away from the city had given him the maturity and experience needed to win the pennant for a budding contender. They were wrong. While Allen's tape-measure home runs and exceptional speed gained for him the tremendous admiration of fellow players, his unexcused absences, candid opinions, and pregame beer drinking earned him some of the harshest press in the city's sports history. Through it all the specter of racial prejudice hung over Allen's relationship with the owners, the team, the press, and the city's fans. For some he was the quintessential rebel who did as he pleased when he pleased, with little regard for team rules or his teammates. For others he exemplified the emerging independence of Major League baseball players as well as growing black consciousness in the game. The controversy has made Dick Allen the greatest player not enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he became eligible in 1982, his candidacy has been tainted by the scathing opinions of baseball writers like Bill James, who claims that Allen "used racism as an explosive to blow his own teams apart." James specifically cites Allen's 1965 fight with Frank Thomas, a popular white veteran who was subsequently traded, and the slugger's threat not to play in the 1976 postseason if the Phillies didn't make room on the roster for Tony Taylor, an aging Hispanic player, as examples of Allen's manipulative nature. James dismisses Allen's eligibility for the Hall on the grounds that he "did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball" [1] This essay argues that Dick Allen was both a victim and a manipulator of racism on a team that had a poor history of race relations, but a team that was making an earnest effort to distance itself from that inglorious reputation during the 1960s. The tragedy of Dick Allen's relationship with the Philadelphia Phillies is that there always existed a fundamental level of distrust between the two that inevitably expressed itself--sometimes willingly, at other times quite unwittingly--in racial terms. That distrust has cost Allen a place in the Hall of Fame and the Phillies the opportunity to acquit themselves of an infamous reputation as a racist organization. DEFINING RACISM At the root of the Allen controversy is a basic misunderstanding of racism. Too often society confuses racism with prejudice. Racial prejudice refers to individual beliefs and attitudes that frequently manifest themselves in psychologically or physically abusive actions toward people of color. Racism, on the other hand, cannot be fully explained as an expression of prejudice alone. …