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In his children’s book, A Home Run for Bunny, Western Mass author Robert Andersen tells the story of local heroes Ernest “Bunny” Taliaferro and Tony King, high school athletes from Springfield, MA. Taliaferro, an immensely gifted African-American athlete, and King, captain of their American Legion summer baseball team, were set to compete in a regional championship. The year was 1934, the region was the entire Atlantic seaboard, and the playoffs were held in Gastonia, North Carolina. A Gastonia band greeting the boys, none of whom had otherwise travelled further than Vermont, stopped dead when Bunny emerged from the train, and a confrontation with Southern apartheid began. Bunny, so nicknamed because of his jackrabbit running speeds, was forced to register as his coach’s valet and sleep on a cot rather than a bed in the team’s North Carolina hotel. His demonstrated prowess on the field during practice further enraged the local community, and the boys endured not only cat calls and an avalanche of projectiles but threats of violence, purportedly from the Ku Klux Klan. When teams from Florida and Maryland refused to play with Bunny on the field and it became clear that the local police would be unlikely to protect the Massachusetts boys from an angry mob if Bunny played, the youngsters were forced to choose between a championship they could likely win, even without Bunny, and loyalty to their teammate.  Captain Tony voted to abandon the playoffs, and his team members agreed without a single dissent.

For the locals, it wasn’t enough that the Massachusetts team had withdrawn. Refusing to honor their segregationist rules made the team a target, so the boys left town in the middle of the night, ferried to an abandoned railroad station in cars driven by sympathizers who left quickly, fearing for their own safety. A train headed north made an unscheduled stop and eventually deposited the young athletes in Springfield, where news of the incident had preceded their arrival. A huge cheering crowd greeted them with more fanfare and celebration than would have followed an actual victory.  Many years later one team member remarked on the quirks of history: “If we had gone ahead without Bunny, even if we had won the championship, no one would ever have heard of us.” Protesting the national organization’s indifference to racism, Springfield’s American Legion Post 21 disbanded its team in 1935. It was not revived until 2010.

Andersen’s picture book, illustrated by Gerald Purnell, received many plaudits when it was published in 2013 for reviving the story of Tony and Bunny, though I wonder if the subject matter isn’t too sophisticated for the Winnie-the-Pooh set, who know little of valets, the intricacies of regional sports competitions, or Jim Crow laws (as distinct from slavery or the bullying little ones are likely to be warned about today). A novella for older children, replete with more detail and fuller explanations as well as the imagined thoughts and feelings of the characters, the sights and sounds of each location, the thrill of train travel, the joy of playing sports and so on would be a more appropriate vehicle. Andersen is reportedly working on such a project, and I hope it finds a willing publisher.

Although Andersen makes Bunny the focus of his book, the story is not told from his point of view, and, given the current topicality of "white privilege," we should note that Tony King is the actual hero of the tale.  He is, in Biblical parlance, "a righteous man."  Tony and his white teammates have choices; Bunny has none, and his experience in Gastonia would shape his life.  Both Tony and Bunny remained in Western Massachusetts, but Tony just celebrated his 102nd birthday; Bunny would die at 50. Like many Holocaust victims and World War II vets, he never once told his children about his humiliating and terrifying encounter with race hatred and segregation in North Carolina. Referring to a newspaper picture her mother had kept of the crowd greeting the returning players, Bunny’s daughter Linda Taliaferro said, “Our grandparents were in that picture, and they had such anxious looks on their faces. I asked my mother why that was. ‘They didn’t know if their son would be coming home dead or alive,’” was the answer.  

Throughout his life Bunny continued to exhibit extraordinary skill in sports and played on some Triple A teams after high school, but he turned down college scholarships, including one to Dartmouth, married a local girl, raised six children and worked at the Springfield Armory and then a tire company.  As an African-American athlete he faced dubious alternatives in the late 1930’s. He could have accepted recruitment to a college team from which he would inevitably have been cut anytime the team ventured south of the Mason-Dixon line.  (Ivy League teams notoriously sidestepped the scruples of 15-year-old Tony King.)  He could have joined the poorly paid, roustabout, and ultimately frustrating world of the Negro Leagues or served in a segregated Armed Forces.  Jackie Robinson, two years Bunny's junior, would do all of these things and, in 1947, break the color barrier in major league baseball, but this was hardly a foregone conclusion.

The 1930’s were a progressive period fraught with inconsistencies in which Jesse Owens, fresh from his triumphs in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was feted with a ticker tape parade down Broadway and, that same night, refused a hotel room in New York City; a time when Hattie McDaniel, awarded an Oscar (the first and last black actress so honored until Whoopi Goldberg in 1990) for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, was compelled to sit at a segregated table in the back of the auditorium during the ceremony.  Even the lives of celebrated African-Americans, living outside the South, were rife with racist booby traps.

That Bunny chose to stay in Springfield, where he was known, loved, and celebrated, is understandable, but clearly the suppression of so much talent took a toll. He died in 1967, the same year Thurgood Marshall was elevated to the Supreme Court and a few years after major Civil Rights legislation was passed by Congress—all too late for the Springfield athlete. Tony King and other former team members carried his casket; the summer of '34 had forged lifelong bonds.  King would live to see Barak Obama serve two terms as President and his 1934 team remembered and honored in the first decades of the 21^st Century.  But it is probably Langston Hughes who, in 1951, evoked the ethos of Bunny’s story most poignantly:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Jackie Robinson did not outlive Bunny Taliaferro by many years.  Robinson lived his dream while Taliaferro shelved his, but both suffered under the burden of the era's unspeakable racism, and neither saw a ripe old age.