Post by Christian Trudeau on Feb 18, 2014 23:53:56 GMT -5
Décès ce mois-ci d'Ernest Burke, un vétéran des Negro Leagues et de la Provinciale originaire de la région de Baltimore, qui a une histoire très particulière.
Article sur son décès: articles.baltimoresun.com/2004-02-05/news/0402050136_1_burke-elite-giants-war-ii
Jeune adolescent, alors qu'il est orphelin, il se retrouve au Québec!
Revoici un texte de Bill Young datant de quelques années:
Celebrating Black History Month: Remembering Baseball’s
Ernest Burke
Bill Young
February 2008
Sherbrooke Record
How fitting is it that through some happy accident of fate, Quebec
Black History Month and baseball’s spring training rituals overlap? For
you see, both share elements of a common past.
These days, under Florida suns, a multi-hued mosaic of players
have begun to swing bats and stretch arms in preparation for the
season ahead. No one pays much heed to anybody’s nationality or
colour: all that really counts is performance.
But it was not always so.
In fact, for most of history professional baseball was a
segregated sport, with its ‘white’s only’ policies rigidly applied. Not
until Jackie Robinson took the field in Newark, New Jersey on April
18, 1946, wearing the colours of the Montreal Royals, did the door to
integration finally open, even if just a crack.
It would still take years before the game became truly colour
blind – but Robinson’s appearance was a significant first step. From
that day forward, while it would never be easy, talented black players
began to find a place in the organized game. Their story is one of
heartache and courage and in some cases great triumph.
It is also a story of Quebec – for it was here, in this province,
and across the Eastern Townships that many of baseball integration’s
early chapters were written.
Quebec already had a history of welcoming black athletes, and
as the Jackie Robinson venture demonstrated, a black player could
gain acceptance and fame among the white population here. In due
course a significant number of African-American ballplayers began
heading this way, many seeking out the Provincial League.
For most, Quebec was a new experience. But for Ernest Burke of
Maryland, it was more like coming home.
* * *
Ernest Burke was a pitcher and outfielder who had enjoyed some
success with the Negro National League Baltimore Elite Giants during
the late 1940s. In 1950 he signed on with the St-Jean Braves of the
Provincial League, where he put in perhaps the best season of his
career.
St-Jean was not new to him: he had lived in the area before.
Just why he ended up there, and how this experience shaped his
ability to meet life’s challenges is a tale worthy of Horatio Alger.
Burke was born in 1924 in the small upper Maryland town of
Havre de Grace where his was the only non-white family and a number
of neighbours were French Canadian.
“We all got along like two peas in a pod,” he recalled fondly in
an oral-history interview he provided just weeks before his death in
January, 2004. “Really, I didn’t know too much about discrimination.”
When he was ten his mother died, leaving him to fend for
himself. He had never known his father and with the Depression at its
height his older siblings could barely look after themselves. He was in
dire straits, practically starving.
“So when the French Canadians [neighbours]went back to
Canada,” he recounted, “they packed me up and took me back to
Canada with them, and that’s where I stayed till …the second World
War broke out, and I came back and volunteered for the Marine
Corps.”
The French Canadian family – we are never told their name –
settled in Iberville, just across the Richelieu River from St. Jean. Life
there was good.
According to Scott Owens, one of Burke’s biographers, “it truly
sounded that they loved him and accepted him as one of their family,
equal to any other member.” This point is underscored by several
warm family snapshots that Burke still possessed.
“In fact, “noted Owens, “these photos appeared quite a contrast
to the racial tension that was throughout most of America, and the
tension that Ernest would soon experience.”
We know very little about those years except that it was a happy
time. Presumably Burke learned French and went to school in that
language. Apart from recalling that “when I went to Canada I was a
great skier, I skied a lot,” his reminiscences make few references to
play and none at all to baseball or hockey.
As Christian Trudeau notes – he is the Quebec sports historian
who first brought this story to our attention - it is a fascinating tale,
but one which raises as many questions as it answers.
Burke returned to Maryland in 1942 to enlist in the Marines and
for the first time suffered the agony of discrimination’s brutal cudgel.
When his interviewer asked, “If you would have stayed in Canada
and fought for the Royal Army (sic) do you think you would have
experienced any discrimination there?” Burke answered emphatically.
“No, No, No way. No way.”
In the Marines discrimination was harsh, and punishment severe.
“You stood for hours enduring the pain,” he said of one especially
nasty “basic training” exercise, “for fear that the consequences of
dropping …would be worse.”
Burke was introduced to baseball shortly before he left the
service in 1946. “I had never played ball before in my life,” he said.
“They needed a pitcher, and I could throw hard and had control, and
that’s what I did, I was a pitcher.”
Following his discharge he showed enough natural talent in
sandlot games to be picked up by the Baltimore Elite Giants of the
Negro National League. Conditioned by his experiences in Iberville
Burke considered the whole notion of segregated baseball an
anathema. Still, it was professional baseball and he was “getting paid
for it.”
The Elite Giants cut him in 1949 and it was while looking around
for other places to play that he focused on Quebec and St. Jean. It is
only a guess but one would assume that his choice of a club perched
just across the river from Iberville, his childhood nirvana, was carefully
considered.
* * *
St. Jean fielded a championship team in 1950, and Burke had
a career season. His 15 wins were tops on the club and third-best in
the league. He shared pitching duties with future New York and San
Francisco Giant, Ruben Gomez, and together they combined for 29
victories against only 7 defeats. Burke often played right field when
not pitching and put up a .308 average, with two home runs and 22
runs batted in.
Granby catcher Jerry Cotnoir remembers Burke. “He and Gomez
were both very good pitchers, the best 1-2 punch in the league that
year,” he says today. “And it was a strong league.”
Although Gomez went on to the major leagues where he won
80 games over his 10-year career, including one in the Giants World
Series sweep in 1954, Burke would not taste such success again.
The Provincial League was at its height in the early 1950’s.
Now operating under the umbrella of organized baseball it had shed
its former outlaw ways and was extremely popular throughout the
Townships.
Many of its stars players were either young African-Americans
on their way to the majors or Negro Leagues veterans experiencing
integrated baseball for a first time. Rosters included such names as
Vic Power, Bob Trice, Carlos Bernier, Silvio Garcia, and future Hall-of-
Famer, Ray Brown.
The atmosphere was carefree, the baseball was good and if
tensions sometimes emerged, they involved nothing more threatening
than winning or losing a ball game.
St-Jean finished the season in first place, easily handled
Farnham in the semi-finals and then fought off Sherbrooke to win the
league championship at home in seven games, St-Jean’s first title
since 1947.
According to press reports celebrations were immediate and
enthusiastic, continuing well into the night. Following the game the
St. Jean community brass band led a victory parade through the
downtown, accompanied by local fire trucks which “were anything but
stingy with their sirens.”
St. Jean was not quite as strong in 1951, and neither was Burke.
His record dropped to 8-8, albeit in the face of another bumper crop
of players. Once again the African-American community was well
represented with both aspiring youngsters and seasoned veterans –
individuals like Terris McDuffie, Humberto Robinson, Connie Johnson,
Valmy Thomas, Al Pinkston, Hector Lopez, John Davis, and Bill Cash.
That winter it appears Burke followed a number of Provincial
League veterans to the Panama League where he pitched for the Spur
Cola team.
In 1952 the Provincial League structure began changing as local
teams became farm clubs of major league organizations, and many
older players, including Burke, were released. Loathe to leave the
province, he signed instead with Thetford Mines of Quebec Senior
League, along with fellow Negro Leagues alumnus, Ray Brown.
The Miners were managed by Roland Gladu (he had piloted
Sherbrooke to the Provincial League title the previous year) and he
brought them to another league championship, Burke’s second in three
years. Burke’s season included 6 wins against 7 losses and a .297
batting average, with 4 homeruns and 42 runs batted in.
Thetford seems to have been Burk’s last baseball stop, both
here and as a career, although there are suggestions that he hooked
on with other teams, perhaps even in Quebec, through 1956 - before
retiring to Baltimore.
* * *
Back home in Maryland and with baseball behind him Burke
became a heavy equipment operator. “You see these big earthmovers
when you go along the road with big wheels, that what I used to
operate on…” The he added, “After I retired at 62 I went to school to
learn how to teach tennis.”
According to his obituary, in retirement Burke kept a very busy
schedule as a lecturer for school and community organizations, urging
young people to stay off drugs and pick up sports.
Described as “widely known throughout the American sports
scene, particularly in the Maryland region, for his enthusiasm and
passion and strength,” Burke was featured as the keynote speaker
at the Smithsonian Institute's 50th anniversary celebration of Jackie
Robinson's "Breaking the Color Barrier in Baseball.”
Did Ernest Burke’s years in Quebec shape the man he became?
Probably so. “It’s a difference of night and day,” he said of growing up
in Canada.
In 1999 he put his philosophy of life down on paper. “I learned
this very valuable lesson early in life," he wrote. “I would often be
asked, ‘Are you a Negro or Black or African-American? Who are you?’,
and I replied, ‘I am a human being, just like you, just like all of us.
And then I am an American or an African American.’”
He certainly could have added – “I am also a Quebecer.”
Bill Young is co-author, with Danny
Gallagher, of the book “Remembering the Montreal Expos.”
Article sur son décès: articles.baltimoresun.com/2004-02-05/news/0402050136_1_burke-elite-giants-war-ii
Jeune adolescent, alors qu'il est orphelin, il se retrouve au Québec!
Revoici un texte de Bill Young datant de quelques années:
Celebrating Black History Month: Remembering Baseball’s
Ernest Burke
Bill Young
February 2008
Sherbrooke Record
How fitting is it that through some happy accident of fate, Quebec
Black History Month and baseball’s spring training rituals overlap? For
you see, both share elements of a common past.
These days, under Florida suns, a multi-hued mosaic of players
have begun to swing bats and stretch arms in preparation for the
season ahead. No one pays much heed to anybody’s nationality or
colour: all that really counts is performance.
But it was not always so.
In fact, for most of history professional baseball was a
segregated sport, with its ‘white’s only’ policies rigidly applied. Not
until Jackie Robinson took the field in Newark, New Jersey on April
18, 1946, wearing the colours of the Montreal Royals, did the door to
integration finally open, even if just a crack.
It would still take years before the game became truly colour
blind – but Robinson’s appearance was a significant first step. From
that day forward, while it would never be easy, talented black players
began to find a place in the organized game. Their story is one of
heartache and courage and in some cases great triumph.
It is also a story of Quebec – for it was here, in this province,
and across the Eastern Townships that many of baseball integration’s
early chapters were written.
Quebec already had a history of welcoming black athletes, and
as the Jackie Robinson venture demonstrated, a black player could
gain acceptance and fame among the white population here. In due
course a significant number of African-American ballplayers began
heading this way, many seeking out the Provincial League.
For most, Quebec was a new experience. But for Ernest Burke of
Maryland, it was more like coming home.
* * *
Ernest Burke was a pitcher and outfielder who had enjoyed some
success with the Negro National League Baltimore Elite Giants during
the late 1940s. In 1950 he signed on with the St-Jean Braves of the
Provincial League, where he put in perhaps the best season of his
career.
St-Jean was not new to him: he had lived in the area before.
Just why he ended up there, and how this experience shaped his
ability to meet life’s challenges is a tale worthy of Horatio Alger.
Burke was born in 1924 in the small upper Maryland town of
Havre de Grace where his was the only non-white family and a number
of neighbours were French Canadian.
“We all got along like two peas in a pod,” he recalled fondly in
an oral-history interview he provided just weeks before his death in
January, 2004. “Really, I didn’t know too much about discrimination.”
When he was ten his mother died, leaving him to fend for
himself. He had never known his father and with the Depression at its
height his older siblings could barely look after themselves. He was in
dire straits, practically starving.
“So when the French Canadians [neighbours]went back to
Canada,” he recounted, “they packed me up and took me back to
Canada with them, and that’s where I stayed till …the second World
War broke out, and I came back and volunteered for the Marine
Corps.”
The French Canadian family – we are never told their name –
settled in Iberville, just across the Richelieu River from St. Jean. Life
there was good.
According to Scott Owens, one of Burke’s biographers, “it truly
sounded that they loved him and accepted him as one of their family,
equal to any other member.” This point is underscored by several
warm family snapshots that Burke still possessed.
“In fact, “noted Owens, “these photos appeared quite a contrast
to the racial tension that was throughout most of America, and the
tension that Ernest would soon experience.”
We know very little about those years except that it was a happy
time. Presumably Burke learned French and went to school in that
language. Apart from recalling that “when I went to Canada I was a
great skier, I skied a lot,” his reminiscences make few references to
play and none at all to baseball or hockey.
As Christian Trudeau notes – he is the Quebec sports historian
who first brought this story to our attention - it is a fascinating tale,
but one which raises as many questions as it answers.
Burke returned to Maryland in 1942 to enlist in the Marines and
for the first time suffered the agony of discrimination’s brutal cudgel.
When his interviewer asked, “If you would have stayed in Canada
and fought for the Royal Army (sic) do you think you would have
experienced any discrimination there?” Burke answered emphatically.
“No, No, No way. No way.”
In the Marines discrimination was harsh, and punishment severe.
“You stood for hours enduring the pain,” he said of one especially
nasty “basic training” exercise, “for fear that the consequences of
dropping …would be worse.”
Burke was introduced to baseball shortly before he left the
service in 1946. “I had never played ball before in my life,” he said.
“They needed a pitcher, and I could throw hard and had control, and
that’s what I did, I was a pitcher.”
Following his discharge he showed enough natural talent in
sandlot games to be picked up by the Baltimore Elite Giants of the
Negro National League. Conditioned by his experiences in Iberville
Burke considered the whole notion of segregated baseball an
anathema. Still, it was professional baseball and he was “getting paid
for it.”
The Elite Giants cut him in 1949 and it was while looking around
for other places to play that he focused on Quebec and St. Jean. It is
only a guess but one would assume that his choice of a club perched
just across the river from Iberville, his childhood nirvana, was carefully
considered.
* * *
St. Jean fielded a championship team in 1950, and Burke had
a career season. His 15 wins were tops on the club and third-best in
the league. He shared pitching duties with future New York and San
Francisco Giant, Ruben Gomez, and together they combined for 29
victories against only 7 defeats. Burke often played right field when
not pitching and put up a .308 average, with two home runs and 22
runs batted in.
Granby catcher Jerry Cotnoir remembers Burke. “He and Gomez
were both very good pitchers, the best 1-2 punch in the league that
year,” he says today. “And it was a strong league.”
Although Gomez went on to the major leagues where he won
80 games over his 10-year career, including one in the Giants World
Series sweep in 1954, Burke would not taste such success again.
The Provincial League was at its height in the early 1950’s.
Now operating under the umbrella of organized baseball it had shed
its former outlaw ways and was extremely popular throughout the
Townships.
Many of its stars players were either young African-Americans
on their way to the majors or Negro Leagues veterans experiencing
integrated baseball for a first time. Rosters included such names as
Vic Power, Bob Trice, Carlos Bernier, Silvio Garcia, and future Hall-of-
Famer, Ray Brown.
The atmosphere was carefree, the baseball was good and if
tensions sometimes emerged, they involved nothing more threatening
than winning or losing a ball game.
St-Jean finished the season in first place, easily handled
Farnham in the semi-finals and then fought off Sherbrooke to win the
league championship at home in seven games, St-Jean’s first title
since 1947.
According to press reports celebrations were immediate and
enthusiastic, continuing well into the night. Following the game the
St. Jean community brass band led a victory parade through the
downtown, accompanied by local fire trucks which “were anything but
stingy with their sirens.”
St. Jean was not quite as strong in 1951, and neither was Burke.
His record dropped to 8-8, albeit in the face of another bumper crop
of players. Once again the African-American community was well
represented with both aspiring youngsters and seasoned veterans –
individuals like Terris McDuffie, Humberto Robinson, Connie Johnson,
Valmy Thomas, Al Pinkston, Hector Lopez, John Davis, and Bill Cash.
That winter it appears Burke followed a number of Provincial
League veterans to the Panama League where he pitched for the Spur
Cola team.
In 1952 the Provincial League structure began changing as local
teams became farm clubs of major league organizations, and many
older players, including Burke, were released. Loathe to leave the
province, he signed instead with Thetford Mines of Quebec Senior
League, along with fellow Negro Leagues alumnus, Ray Brown.
The Miners were managed by Roland Gladu (he had piloted
Sherbrooke to the Provincial League title the previous year) and he
brought them to another league championship, Burke’s second in three
years. Burke’s season included 6 wins against 7 losses and a .297
batting average, with 4 homeruns and 42 runs batted in.
Thetford seems to have been Burk’s last baseball stop, both
here and as a career, although there are suggestions that he hooked
on with other teams, perhaps even in Quebec, through 1956 - before
retiring to Baltimore.
* * *
Back home in Maryland and with baseball behind him Burke
became a heavy equipment operator. “You see these big earthmovers
when you go along the road with big wheels, that what I used to
operate on…” The he added, “After I retired at 62 I went to school to
learn how to teach tennis.”
According to his obituary, in retirement Burke kept a very busy
schedule as a lecturer for school and community organizations, urging
young people to stay off drugs and pick up sports.
Described as “widely known throughout the American sports
scene, particularly in the Maryland region, for his enthusiasm and
passion and strength,” Burke was featured as the keynote speaker
at the Smithsonian Institute's 50th anniversary celebration of Jackie
Robinson's "Breaking the Color Barrier in Baseball.”
Did Ernest Burke’s years in Quebec shape the man he became?
Probably so. “It’s a difference of night and day,” he said of growing up
in Canada.
In 1999 he put his philosophy of life down on paper. “I learned
this very valuable lesson early in life," he wrote. “I would often be
asked, ‘Are you a Negro or Black or African-American? Who are you?’,
and I replied, ‘I am a human being, just like you, just like all of us.
And then I am an American or an African American.’”
He certainly could have added – “I am also a Quebecer.”
Bill Young is co-author, with Danny
Gallagher, of the book “Remembering the Montreal Expos.”
