Coming Back to Quebec: Ernest Burke's Return to the Provincial League

Article by BILL YOUNG (Published on May 24, 2008)

These days, as baseball moves past the foolishness of spring and into the full swing of summer, we all start paying more attention. Now, all the elements are studiously considered. Except for one, ethnicity. No one pays much heed anymore to a player’s nationality or colour: all that really counts is performance. But it was not always so. In fact, for most of history professional baseball was a segregated sport, with its ‘white’s only’ policies rigidly applied. Not until Jackie Robinson took the field in Newark, New Jersey on April 18, 1946, wearing the colours of the Montreal Royals, did the door to integration finally open, even if just a crack.

It would still take years before the game became truly colour blind – but Robinson’s appearance was a significant first step. From that day forward, while it would never be easy, talented black players began to find a place in the organized game. Their story is one of heartache and courage and in some cases great triumph.

It is also a story of Quebec – for it was here, in this province, and across the Eastern Townships that many of the early chapters of baseball integration were written.

Quebec already had a history of welcoming black athletes, and as the Jackie Robinson venture demonstrated, a black player could gain acceptance and fame among the white population here. In due course a significant number of African-American ballplayers began heading this way, many seeking out the Provincial League.

For most, Quebec was a new experience. But for Ernest Burke of Maryland, it was more like coming home.

*     *    *  

Ernest Burke was a pitcher and outfielder who had enjoyed some success with the Negro National League Baltimore Elite Giants during the late 1940s. In 1950 he signed on with the St-Jean Braves of the Provincial League, where he put in perhaps the best season of his career.

St-Jean was not new to him: he had lived in the area before. Just why he ended up there, and how this experience shaped his ability to meet life’s challenges is a tale worthy of Horatio Alger.

Burke was born in 1924 in the small upper Maryland town of Havre de Grace where his was the only non-white family and a number of neighbors were French Canadian.

“We all got along like two peas in a pod,” he recalled fondly in an oral-history interview he provided just weeks before his death in January, 2004. “Really, I didn’t know too much about discrimination.”

When he was 10, his mother died, leaving him to fend for himself. He had never known his father and with the Depression at its height his older siblings could barely look after themselves. He was in dire straits, practically starving.

“So when the French Canadians [neighbours] went back to Canada,” he recounted, “they packed me up and took me back to Canada with them, and that’s where I stayed till …the second World War broke out, and I came back and volunteered for the Marine Corps.”

The French Canadian family – we are never told their name – settled in Iberville, just across the Richelieu River from St. Jean. Life there was good. According to Scott Owens, one of Burke’s biographers, “it truly  sounded that they loved him and accepted him as one of their family, equal to any other member.” This point is underscored by several warm family snapshots that Burke still possessed.

“In fact, “noted Owens, “these photos appeared quite a contrast to the racial tension that was throughout most of America, and the tension that Ernest would soon experience.”

We know very little about those years except that it was a happy time. Presumably Burke learned French and went to school in that language. Apart from recalling that “when I went to Canada I was a great skier, I skied a lot,” his reminiscences make few references to play and none at all to baseball or hockey.

As Christian Trudeau notes – he is the Quebec sports historian who first brought this story to our attention - it is a fascinating tale, but one which raises as many questions as it answers.

Burke returned to Maryland in 1942 to enlist in the Marines and for the first time suffered the agony of discrimination’s brutal cudgel. When his interviewer asked, “If you would have stayed in Canada and fought for the Royal Army (sic) do you think you would have experienced any discrimination there?” Burke answered emphatically.

“No, No, No way. No way.” 

In the Marines discrimination was harsh, and punishment severe. “You stood for hours enduring the pain,” he said of one especially nasty “basic training” exercise, “for fear that the consequences of dropping …would be worse.”

Burke was introduced to baseball shortly before he left the service in 1946. “I had never played ball before in my life,” he said. “They needed a pitcher, and I could throw hard and had control, and that’s what I did, I was a pitcher.”

Following his discharge he showed enough natural talent in sandlot games to be picked up by the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League. Conditioned by his experiences in Iberville Burke considered the whole notion of segregated baseball an anathema. Still, it was professional baseball and he was “getting paid for it.”

The Elite Giants cut him in 1949 and it was while looking around for other places to play that he focused on Quebec and St. Jean. It is only a guess but one would assume that his choice of a club perched just across the river from Iberville, his childhood nirvana, was carefully considered.

*     *    *

St. Jean fielded a championship team in 1950, and Burke had a career season. His 15 wins were tops on the club and third-best in the league. He shared pitching duties with future New York and San Francisco Giant, Ruben Gomez, and together they combined for 29 victories against only 7 defeats. Burke often played right field when not pitching and put up a .308 average, with two home runs and 22 runs batted in.

Granby catcher Jerry Cotnoir remembers Burke. “He and Gomez were both very good pitchers, the best 1-2 punch in the league that year,” he says today. “And it was a strong league.”

Although Gomez went on to the major leagues where he won 80 games over his 10-year career, including one in the Giants World Series sweep in 1954, Burke would not taste such success again.

The Provincial League was at its height in the early 1950’s. Now operating under the umbrella of organized baseball it had shed its former outlaw ways and was extremely popular throughout the Townships.

Many of its star players were either young African-Americans on their way to the majors or Negro Leagues veterans experiencing integrated baseball for a first time.  Rosters included such names as Vic Power, Bob Trice, Carlos Bernier, Silvio Garcia, and future Hall-of-Famer, Ray Brown.

The atmosphere was carefree, the baseball was good and if tensions sometimes emerged, they involved nothing more threatening than winning or losing a ball game.

St-Jean finished the 1950 season in first place, easily handled Farnham in the semi-finals and then fought off Sherbrooke to win the league championship at home in seven games, St-Jean’s first title since 1947.

According to press reports celebrations were immediate and enthusiastic, continuing well into the night. Following the game the St. Jean community brass band led a victory parade through the downtown, accompanied by local fire trucks which “were anything but stingy with their sirens.”

St. Jean was not quite as strong in 1951, and neither was Burke. His record dropped to 8-8, albeit in the face of another bumper crop of players. Once again the African-American community was well represented with both aspiring youngsters and seasoned veterans – individuals like Terris McDuffie, Humberto Robinson, Connie Johnson, Valmy Thomas, Al Pinkston, Hector Lopez, John Davis, and Bill Cash.

That winter it appears Burke followed a number of Provincial League veterans to the Panama League where he pitched for the Spur Cola team.

In 1952 the Provincial League structure began changing as local teams became farm clubs of major league organizations, and many older players, including Burke, were released. Loathe to leave the province, he signed instead with Thetford Mines of Quebec Senior League, along with fellow Negro Leagues alumnus, Ray Brown.

The Miners were managed by Roland Gladu (he had piloted Sherbrooke to the Provincial League title the previous year) and he brought them to another league championship, Burke’s second in three years. Burke’s season included 6 wins against 7 losses and a .297 batting average, with 4 homeruns and 42 runs batted in.

Thetford seems to have been Burk’s last baseball stop, both here and as a career, although there are suggestions that he hooked on with other teams, perhaps even in Quebec, through 1956  - before retiring to Baltimore.

*     *    *

Back home in Maryland and with baseball behind him Burke became a heavy equipment operator. “You see these big earthmovers when you go along the road with big wheels, that what I used to operate on…” The he added, “After I retired at 62 I went to school to learn how to teach tennis.”

According to his obituary, in retirement Burke kept a very busy schedule as a lecturer for school and community organizations, urging young people to stay off drugs and pick up sports.

Described as “widely known throughout the American sports scene, particularly in the Maryland region, for his enthusiasm and passion and strength,” Burke was featured as the keynote speaker at the Smithsonian Institute's 50th anniversary celebration of Jackie Robinson's "Breaking the Color Barrier in Baseball.”

Did Ernest Burke’s years in Quebec shape the man he became? Probably so. “It’s a difference of night and day,” he said of growing up in Canada.

In 1999 he put his philosophy of life down on paper. “I learned this very valuable lesson early in life," he wrote. “I would often be asked, ‘Are you a Negro or Black or African-American? Who are you?’, and I replied, ‘I am a human being, just like you, just like all of us. And then I am an American or an African American.’”

He certainly could have added – “I am also a Quebecer.”

Sabr-Quebec member Bill Young (williamyoung@videotron.ca) is co-author, with Danny Gallagher, of the book “Remembering the Montreal Expos.”