Not sure how this helps his image

A New York Times story on the daughter of Dixie Walker paints a somewhat sympathetic portrait of the Brooklyn Dodgers star who tried to keep Jackie Robinson from breaking baseball’s color line in 1947.

Walker’s circulation of an anti-Robinson petition was unnerving to hear about, Susan Walker said, “because it didn’t fit the man I knew.”

The story quotes a passage from Roger Kahn’s 1993 book, The Era, in which Walker said, “I organized that petition in 1947, not because I had anything against Robinson personally or against Negroes generally. I had a wholesale business in Birmingham (Ala.) and people told me I’d lose my business if I played ball with a black man.”

So, Walker really wasn’t the virulent racist he was made out to be — just a gutless man worried about money.