[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 17248]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       RECOGNIZING MINNIE MINOSO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Cohen) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, yesterday there was a vote by the Major 
League Baseball committee on who should be inducted into the Hall of 
Fame from a particular area. One of the players who was up for 
consideration--and, unfortunately, wasn't chosen--was Minnie Minoso, 
and it reminded me of the debt I owe Minnie Minoso.
  Minnie Minoso was the first African Latin baseball player. And in 
1954, in Memphis, Tennessee--a town I was born in and a town in the 
Southern United States that was especially a part of the Jim Crow era--
I went to a baseball game, an exhibition baseball game. And I was on 
crutches because I had polio. I had a Chicago White Sox cap on and a 
Chicago White Sox T-shirt.
  A player came to give me a baseball from the opposing team, the St. 
Louis Cardinals. I thanked him. And I went and told my father. And we 
came down to thank him. And he said: ``Don't thank me. Thank that 
player over there.'' He was the blackest player on the field, number 
nine, Minnie Minoso. He didn't feel comfortable in 1955 to give me a 
baseball. Yet he was the player with the most compassionate heart and 
humility on the field because that was the segregated South.
  Minnie Minoso became my hero, and I followed his career and became 
friends with him. We exchanged gifts. He came to Memphis, and I went to 
Chicago.
  In 1960 when he came to Memphis, he was staying at the Lorraine 
Motel--the segregated African American hotel in Memphis--because 
African Cuban Latin players, African Americans weren't allowed at the 
Peabody Hotel, where the other players were.
  I couldn't believe that my baseball hero, a great all-star, was 
staying at the Lorraine, which happens to be where Dr. King was 
murdered. But that is where he had to stay.
  I learned about segregation from living in Memphis and from being 
befriended by Minnie Minoso. The insanity of segregation and the 
separation of people by race, that period of Jim Crow and previous 
slavery--which existed in this country for 250 years of slavery and 
100-and-some-odd years of Jim Crow--still pervades this country.
  There are lingering consequences which must be dealt with. The 
gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) well addressed them. Much must 
be done in law enforcement and criminal justice but also in education 
and opportunities for jobs, which people don't have today in the South 
and many other places, in inner cities.
  So as I think about Minnie Minoso, and I think about segregation and 
the effect that it has had on America--America's original sin was 
slavery. We haven't overcome it.
  Some write about it and get recognition. People read their books. Ta-
Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic. Edward Baptist has written a book 
about the benefits that America got from the slave trade and how many 
people made money from it shipping cotton, making clothes, insuring the 
slave trade. It was the great economic benefit of this country and made 
this country great, all on slavery. Edward Baptist writes it well.
  Michelle Alexander writes in ``The New Jim Crow'' about the 
incarceration rate of African Americans, that it is wrongfully high. If 
you are African American, the likelihood that you are going to be 
arrested and incarcerated is so much greater than a Caucasian for 
living in the same society and doing the same things.
  We must put an end to discrimination in all its forms and fashions. 
In the criminal justice system, sentencing reform needs to take place. 
In the criminal justice system, we need to see that law enforcement 
agencies and prosecutions of law enforcement officers are done 
transparently and fairly and justly.
  We need to be sure that Americans continue to have faith that this is 
the land of the free and the home of the brave, and that our Nation is 
one in which people get equal justice, as was planned by our Founding 
Fathers but was never quite implemented.

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