Cynics Unlimited

One of the more famous figures of American sports history was Roy Campanella. “Campy,” as he was known, served as catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1948 to 1957. He also boasted an impressive batting average. But his spectacular career as a baseball player was cut short in 1958 when a car accident left him permanently paralyzed. However, Campanella later returned to the Dodgers - who had since relocated to Los Angeles - as a coach. A picture of him in 1980 shows him seated in a wheelchair instructing the team’s rookie catchers. Roy Campanella died in 1993 at the age of seventy-one.
During the lifetime Roy Campanella wore many hats: as a baseball player, liquor store owner, coach, and disabled person who succeeded despite the odds. My interest in Campanella, however, lies in another aspect of the man: his biracial heritage and specifically his Italian ancestry. While Campanella’s mother was black, his father, a fruit vendor in Philadelphia, hailed from Sicily, an island off the south of Italy. I remember when I saw a picture of Roy Campanella my first thought was “He looks so Italian!” He had tightly curled hair and dark skin, but his facial features were, in my opinion, very Italian. He would not have looked out of place in Palermo (my father’s birthplace) or Rome.

Before I go on, I want to dispel any suspicion that I am trying to “steal” Roy Campanella from the black community the way some white supremacists have sought to attribute Martin Luther King’s success to his partial Caucasian ancestry (one such supremacist called King an “intelligent mulatto”). For example, Campanella began his baseball career in what were then known as the Negro Leagues; at the time, blacks and whites could not play on the same team. Given the so-called “one-drop rule,” American society undoubtedly considered Campanella black.

Another thing that placed Campanella in the black rather than Italian world may have been the fact his mother, not father, was black. In the book The Color Complex, authors Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson and Ronald Hall state that ethnic culture is generally transmitted through mothers rather than fathers. As a child, Campanella attended a black Baptist church with his mother, even though his father was a Roman Catholic.
Nonetheless, Campanella did not deny his Italian heritage, and he often acknowledged it with his characteristic quick wit. When spectators at a game once called him a “nigger,” he replied, “Hey, you know I’m a dago too.” I admit a certain pride in knowing that “Campy,” one of the greatest baseball players of all time, was in a way “one of my own.”

On the Internet there is a site dedicated to famous Sicilians (www.sicilianculture.com). Among the celebrities profiled is singer Lou Bega (best known for the 1999 hit “Mambo No. Five”), who like Campanella is of mixed black and Italian descent. It pleased me to see that at least some Sicilians are welcoming their mixed-race compatriots into the fold, so to speak. I am more comfortable in claiming Bega - who was raised in Europe by his Sicilian mother (and Ugandan father) - as Italian than I am in defining Campanella by his Italian heritage. Campanella, given the social environment of his time, was clearly a part of black society. Yet I think that just as the Sicilian community is now counting Lou Bega as a member, perhaps too we can remember Roy Campanella in some sense as one of our own.