Decades After Robinson, Blacks Dismiss Baseball
April 15, 2007 — -- Jackie Robinson first broke baseball's color barrier not on Ebbets Field but on a diamond in central Florida.
On March 17, 1946, more than a year before he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson took the field in Daytona Beach with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' farm team.
Bethune-Cookman College is a historically black school, and its baseball team, the Wildcats, plays its home games at Jackie Robinson Ballpark, the very stadium where Jackie Robinson made history.
Today, Bethune-Cookman planned to start the same number of African-Americans that started on Robinson's team 61 years ago -- one.
Mervyl Melendez is in his eighth season as Bethune-Cookman's head coach. He says his foremost obligation is to recruit African-Americans, but that he sees few of them playing baseball.
"We went to a national showcase, it's actually a tournament, and I'm not lying to you if I tell you that I saw probably about 15 to 20 African-American kids out of about 2,000," says Melendez.
Bethune-Cookman has dominated the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, winning nine out of the last 11 conference titles and making six trips to the NCAA Division I tournament. Like most historically black colleges and universities, more than 95 percent of Bethune-Cookman's student body is black. But this season, 19 out of 30 players on the baseball team are white or Hispanic.
"The bottom line is that we must field the most competitive team that we can -- and we will not stop looking for kids from every ethnic background," says Lynn Thompson, Bethune-Cookman's athletic director. "We are a proud historically black college. We're historically black, but not exclusively black."
At Daytona Beach's Mainland High School, the football team reigns supreme, reaching the state semi-finals last season. As for basketball, every night a life-sized statue of alumnus and NBA star Vince Carter casts its shadow on the school gym, the Vince Carter Athletic Center.
But many of the school's black athletes say they have no interest in baseball.
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