|
Any team in Atlanta should be called the Crackers, period. The Atlanta Crackers were a great minor league franchise.
The origins of the team's name are unknown, according to Tim Darnell, who wrote The Crackers: Early Days of Atlanta Baseball [5].
There are several theories as to the origin of the word cracker:
* The name comes from the sound of whips used to drive cattle and oxen. Florida and Georgia cattlemen cracked whips to flush their stock out of the scrub while settlers used whips to spur on oxen that pulled their carts and wagons. Cracker has been used in this sense since the early 1800s. This is the most popular theory today. See Cracker Country
* The word also comes from the practice of "corncracking" or grinding dried corn for use as grits and meal, as in the lyrics of the folk song Blue Tailed Fly, "Jimmy crack corn." When used in this sense, a Cracker is somebody who can’t afford any other food. And, by the 1800s, the name "Cracker" wasn’t used to describe only impoverished settlers.
* It may have been a shortened version of the name of a 19th century professional baseball team, the Atlanta Firecrackers.
* It could be a reference to a then-colloquial term for someone who is quick and smart, a variant on "Cracker Jack ballplayer", for example.
While the "Georgia cracker" is the most obvious association, it raises a question as to why a Negro League ball club would have called itself "Black Crackers". Georgia history books once explained that stagecoach and wagon drivers, using whips to speed up their teams, would often respond "I'm a cracker from Georgia" when asked of their origin. This usage, extending to post-Civil War years, would have crossed racial lines and would not have had any derogatory connotation.
|