Ty Cobb, baseball’s first superstar, is remembered for being the worst racist and dirtiest player ever to take the field. But was he? A new PragerU video by Cobb biographer Charles Leerhsen provides compelling evidence to the contrary:
How could a man born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? Well, as it turns out, Ty Cobb descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for his troubles. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate Army because of the slavery issue. And his father, an educator, once broke up a lynch mob.
In researching Cobb’s legacy, Leerhshen found that nearly every accusation against the baseball legend found its roots in the same source: Articles and books that were not fact-checked and published after Cobb’s death by a bitter, opportunistic journalist named Al Stump, whom Cobb had once threatened to sue for making up stories about him.