In 1947 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jackie Robinson broke through the color barrier of American professional baseball.
In 1996 in Honolulu, Billy Blanchette ran smack-dab into the color barrier of the state's premier amateur baseball league.
The issue is essentially the same.
Robinson was an African-American who overcame a prejudicial rule established by white team owners. Blanchette is a Franco-American who tried unsuccessfully to overcome a prejudicial rule established in a league run by Americans of Japanese ancestry, the AJA.
It is a matter that Blanchette is willing to lay to rest, but I won't.
This is the United States of America, and I have no sympathy for any organization that argues to maintain ethnic purity in its membership.
Especially not when that organization is using public parks funded by my tax dollars.
Consider what might happen if Blanchette organized a Franco-American baseball league in Hawaii's parks and barred Japanese-Americans because only men of French-Canadian ancestry were welcome?
With the numbers of outstanding Japanese-American baseball players in Hawaii, I seriously doubt it would be long before the Franco-American league was hauled into court.
Blatant exclusion, based upon race or ancestry, is no longer tolerated in other states and should not be permitted to fester here.
I can think of no sports or social organization today that would venture the notion that it could exclude Japanese-Americans from its rolls.
I know of no organization administrator in his right mind who would or should fight to restrict membership to one race or nationality.
(That, of course, excludes hate organizations, but I don't consider their leaders to be in their right minds.)
What reasonable argument could be used?
African-Americans created the Negro League because they were not accepted by the white baseball world at that time. The league remained African-American for that reason.
Why do Japanese-Americans need a pure AJA?
SHELDON said he wants to maintain "culture and tradition." That's fine. Preserving cultural identity in a melting-pot society like ours is important.
But if many American players have not been able to alter the cultural integrity of pro baseball in Japan, one Billy Blanchette is certainly not going to damage the cultural integrity of AJA baseball in an American state.
Virtually no one in the United States with an ounce of respect for the Constitution would be bold enough to try to keep an organization with the visibility of AJA baseball ethnically pure.
The representatives of the AJA's 10 teams apparently weren't real proud of their exclusionary vote last month because they didn't reveal it to the media, and they didn't even bother to reveal it to the man who prompted the vote.
League president Homer Sheldon's most conciliatory remark in the wake of the vote was that the league might change some time in the future.
Whoa, Mr. Sheldon!
We're long past the days of giving organizations all the time in the world to get in step with the era of civil rights.
A court test - and I'm sure there's some enterprising lawyer or rights organization out there who'd like to pick up a can't-lose case - would pry open the AJA like a can of tuna.
For now, if the AJA wants to continue denying ethnically diverse baseball players the right to join its league, the state had better tell Sheldon that tax money in Hawaii will not support the concept of racial segregation.
In other words, Mr. Sheldon, either desegregate your baseball league or remove it from our public parks.