One of the more famous figures of American sports history is Roy Campanella. "Campy," as he was known, served as catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1948 to 1957. He also boasted a good 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 taken 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 his lifetime Roy Campanella wore many hats: as a ballplayer, a liquor store owner, a coach, and a disabled person who succeeded despite the odds against him. 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 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 explain Martin Luther King's genius by referring to his partial Caucasian ancestry (one such supremacist called King an "intelligent mulatto," implying that if the civil rights leader had been of unmixed African origin, he would not have been the brilliant man he was). Campanella was first and foremost a "black" man. For example, he began his baseball career in what were then known as the Negro Leagues; at the time, blacks and whites could not play baseball on the same team. Given the so-called "one-drop rule," American society undoubtedly considered Campanella black, and that is probably how he saw himself as well.

Another thing that placed Campanella in the "black" rather than Italian world was the fact that his mother, not father, was "black." As authors Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall note in the book The Color Complex when discussing the case of a young woman who chooses to identify with her Asian mother as well as her African-American father, ethnic culture is generally transmitted through mothers rather than fathers. As a child, for example, 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. For instance, when spectators at a game called him a "nigger," he replied "Hey, you know I'm a dago too." I admit to 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 (sicilianculture.com/people). Among the celebrities profiled is singer Lou Bega (best known for the 1999 hit song "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.

Note:
The information on Roy Campanella's life was obtained from the book Roy Campanella: Baseball Star (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996) by Norman Macht.

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