Long read: "Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals."

Bud Selig is to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. That's actually more repulsive as Donald Trump being elected president.

As a corrective, this long but necessary survey, ranging from the early days to the present.

Out of Left Field, by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias (Jacobin)

Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals.

... Despite their courageous and pioneering efforts, neither (Marvin) Miller nor (Curt) Flood have been elected to the Hall of Fame. While Miller was alive, the baseball establishment blocked him from the Cooperstown shrine five times. The owners and executives who control the Hall of Fame kept changing the voting rules to keep him out.

Yet baseball experts overwhelmingly agree with Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber, who claimed that Miller is one of the three most important figures in baseball history, alongside Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.

Flood’s fifteen years of Hall of Fame eligibility ended in 1996 when he garnered just 15.1 percent of baseball writers’ votes. He died the following year at fifty-nine, which made him eligible to enter the Hall of Fame posthumously if the Veterans Committee voted him in. There’s been no effort to resuscitate his candidacy.

"Highway engineers dominated the decision-making. They were trained to design without much consideration for how a highway might impact urban fabric."

If we retained the public transportation infrastructure we possessed 100 years ago, Bulldog fans could have taken the train to Indianapolis and back for last night's championship game.

This article makes at least two points that we should never tire of emphasizing.

First, that "gas taxes have never fully paid for highways," even though we insist on believing it's true.

Second, "An unmistakable part of the equation was the federally supported program of 'urban renewal,' in which lower-income urban communities — mostly African-American — were targeted for removal."

That's history, folks.

Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them? by Joseph Stromberg (Vox)

... So why did cities help build the expressways that would so profoundly decimate them? The answer involves a mix of self-interested industry groups, design choices made by people far away, a lack of municipal foresight, and outright institutional racism.

Rachel Dolezal and minstrelsy ... or, the thoroughly depressing week that was, Part 4.

Ten years ago, I finished an informative book, and wrote these words in this space.

My friend Jon gifted me with “Where Dead Voices Gather,” by Nick Tosches, whom I consider one of the finest American writers of our time. Tosches specializes in biographical portraits of entertainers (Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin) and doomed outcasts (Sonny Liston), and he also writes novels.

In “Where Dead Voices Gather,” Tosches manages to top his own lofty standard, basing an entire volume of compelling historical, musical and cultural testimony around the almost completely undocumented life of one Emmett Miller, a stalwart of blackface minstrelsy in the 1920’s. As in all his non-fiction works, Tosches does not fail to address the simultaneously disturbing and exhilarating essence of what it means to be an American.

At some point on television last week, now perhaps almost quaint and nearly forgotten amid various other vile outrages occurring shortly afterward, Rachel Dolezal made a point.

"I don't put on blackface as a performance," Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane, Washington, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), told interviewer Matt Lauer. "I identify as black," she said.

The history of minstrelsy in America may or may not be relevant to any of this, but as a white male desperately trying to parse the nuance produced by the Dolezal case, notions of masks and disguises seem plausible in part. For a balanced overview of the genre, a History of Minstrelsy exhibition at the University of South Florida library looks very solid, indeed.

Also, earlier in the week that was, local free-lance writer and activist Erica Rucker pointed to this article.

Black Like Her, by Jelani Cobb (New Yorker)

I pass it along, unsure whether it matters at all. There was Dolezal unfinished, then the church shooting -- horrifying.

The past week was depressing and also frustrating, because I don't like the feeling that comes with the realization of knowing so very little about the whys and wherefores of our community, assuming it is even proper to continue viewing it as a community.

All that's clear to me is that I have a lot to learn.

"The Link Between Walkable Neighborhoods and Race."

File under: Things no one wants to talk about in New Albany, either.

The Link Between Walkable Neighborhoods and Race, by Richard Florida (City Lab)

African Americans are far more likely to live in the San Francisco Bay Area’s least walkable neighborhoods. Why?

Walkability is not only good for you: It’s a highly desired characteristic of housing and neighborhoods. I’ve written before about the connection between walkable neighborhoods and higher housing values, reduced rates of violent crime, obesity, premature death and long-term memory loss, as well as higher levels of creativity and civic engagement. But a recent study from California Polytechnic State University’s William Riggs reminds us that not all urbanites have the same kind of access to walkable streets and neighborhoods. The study, which focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, finds a considerable racial divide when it comes to access to walkability, with black residents much less likely to live in the area’s walkable neighborhoods.

Dunman: "Combating neighborhood divisions along racial lines."

On Monday, I started trying to come to grips with dissonance in my career choice -- and inside myself. If I knew where the effort was headed, I'd say so right now. Unexplored territories don't have maps.

The PC: If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.

 ... Note that this blanket condemnation, of which I’m sure there have been notable exceptions, includes my own “craft” brewery, so don’t assume I’m making an exception for my own inexcusable personal cowardice. I always thought I'd be the pro athlete, bass player or actor wearing the t-shirt nd standing up for the downtrodden, but right now, as a craft brewery owner, I'm being exposed as fraudulent. I've done done nothing, and at this precise moment, I hate myself for it.

Meanwhile, Joe Dunman keeps getting it right. If not for his commentaries and the food and drink team's advisories, all Insider Louisville would be is breathless business-fluff. I'm reprinting some of the meat below, but go there and read all of it.

Opinion: Combating neighborhood divisions along racial lines, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

 ... But as the Metropolitan Housing Coalition’s recently released 2014 State of Metropolitan Housing Report shows, the legacy of segregation persists today. African-Americans still are concentrated in the West End and the Newburg area, with minimal diversity elsewhere. The median wage in those areas remains suppressed, and educational achievement is low. Public housing is restricted (mostly by zoning laws) to four out of the 26 total Metro Council districts, with the rich and the poor kept far apart. The “de facto” segregation the busing plan was designed to alleviate still remains.

But make no mistake, as MHC director Cathy Hinko has pointed out, this is not some accident of history. It isn’t really “de facto” at all. Our divided city is the result of intentional policy decisions.

In the 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, the 50 years since the Civil Rights Act, and the 40 years since Milliken v. Bradley, our country has made strides toward racial equality and integration. But the growing temporal distance between the tumultuous Civil Rights era and the present day has perhaps led us to let down our guard, to assume the battle has been won. It has not.

Counterfactual history, part 1 ... Babe Ruth.

Who knew that Babe Ruth's daughter was alive? That's a story in itself.

Home, at the Other House That Ruth Built, by Peter Karasotis (New York Times)

Julia Ruth Stevens, 97, the daughter of Babe Ruth, joined the Yankees in St. Petersburg to celebrate the city’s 100-year anniversary as the birthplace of spring training in Florida.

Baseball fans know that Babe Ruth yearned to be a manager, but never was tapped for the job. His daughter offers a fascinating theory for why the Bambino was excluded from the managerial ranks.

Stevens said that what truly prevented Ruth from a shot at managing was the fear that he would have brought in black players, years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947.

“Daddy would have had blacks on his team, definitely,” Stevens said.

Might the legendary slugger have single-handedly shattered the color line during the late 1930s? It seems unlikely, and yet Ruth was an iconic figure beloved by all. Interesting, indeed.