WICHITA — The cowards rolled into McAdams Park in Wichita, Kan., in a grayish-silver pickup truck in the dead of night, because these types of criminals, like cockroaches, don’t like the light. They left with what they had come to steal: the Jackie Robinson memorial statue that stood near the baseball fields where the kids of League 42 play.
The cowards cut the statue off at the ankles, leaving nothing but two shoes on a base the shape of home plate.
Compounding the hurt inflicted on the community, the bronze statue was found a few days later in a nearby park, dismantled and burning in trash can.
Heinous. Heartless. Hateful.
League 42 is a youth baseball league that makes the sport affordable to all, and Robinson is its towering beacon.
“This is a sacred place,:” league administrator Bob Lutz said. “This is a place where we honor a man who broke down barriers and did things that had never been done before.”
The symbolism of the crime was jarring, blatant as a cross burning in a front yard — an in-your-face reminder that the racism problem that a Brooklyn Dodgers ballplayer stood up to in 1947 remains an American disease still looking for a cure 77 years later.
Jackie Robinson’s birthday was Wednesday. The man who broke baseball’s color barrier in ‘47 would have turned 105. Major League Baseball honors Robinson and his number, 42, in perpetuity.
Black History Month, with Robinson forever a vital figure in it, begins Thursday, Feb. 1.
The park where the crime was committed is less than a three-hour drive from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., where that city’s Monarchs team, for whom Robinson played, was the Negro League’s longest-running franchise.
You wonder if those dates and that proximity were on the minds of the bigot-cowards — whether they timed the crime with intent. Although that might be giving too much benefit of doubt to assume they were capable of reading a calendar or processing historical dates.
“Intelligent racist” has to be near the very top of the oxymoron list.
Wichita police identified the thieves’ truck via surveillance video. It is just a matter of time before the cowards are caught and charged. Before the soulless cretins are shown in court as our latest national symbols of hatred and bigotry.
“It’s disheartening to see the remnants of the statue, the disgraceful way it’s been disrespected,” said Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan. “This is a direct indication of the pressure our investigators are putting on the perpetrators that committed this act.”
We can’t know yet what their punishment will be once caught, only that it probably won’t feel like enough. Because this was not mere vandalism; it was a hate crime.
