4 Jersey Street, The Fenway, Boston
Built in 1912, storied Fenway Park is the oldest Major League Baseball stadium in North America and home to the “Green Monster” (the nickname of its leftfield wall).
It is also the home of the Boston Red Sox, the last team in baseball to racially integrate. As late as 1958, Tom Yawkey, the then-team owner, did not employ a single African American at any level of the organization. It would not be until 1959 that the Red Sox fielded a black player, Pumpsie Green. Ironically, perhaps the biggest crowd in Fenway Park’s history assembled to protest racism, the type inextricably tied to colonialism. On Sunday, June 30, 1919, at least 50,000 people—with thousands more denied entry outside the stadium’s gates—gathered at Fenway to demand an end to British rule of Ireland. The crowd was three times larger than the number who had seen the Red Sox and Babe Ruth win the World Series the previous year.
The occasion was the visit of Eamon de Valera, president of the Irish Republic, the revolutionary government-in-waiting which had declared independence from the United Kingdom earlier that year. Valera had come to the United States to raise money for nationalist forces, and to win diplomatic recognition from the U.S. government. Of the gathering, the Boston Globe wrote, “To say that it was thrilling is putting it mildly — it was electric.” It went on to state, “In that vast audience you sensed this new dignity that has sunk into their consciousness, born of the knowledge that millions of men of Irish blood have been fighting the past four years for democracy as against autocracy and for the self-determination of Nations in the world.” Later that evening, Valera traveled to Lawrence, which became the first U.S. city to extend official recognition of the Republic of Ireland, and spoke to a huge crowd there. Valera’s visit and the reception he received manifested not only the size of the area’s Irish-descended community, but also the massive shift in political power that had taken place throughout much of Greater Boston in the late 1800s as Irish Catholics wrested local political control from Protestant elites.
Getting there:
Green Line to Kenmore Square Station. (0.2 miles, 5-minute walk)
To learn more:
Bryant, Howard. Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
Image: Fenway Park. Photo by Joe Nevins.