Othering at the Ballpark: Origins of the Atlanta Braves’ ‘Tomahawk Chop’

One of baseball’s most absurd semiannual rituals takes place when the Atlanta Braves advance in the playoffs and a national audience is reintroduced to the “tomahawk chop,” an impression of Native American “braves” striking with a foam reproduction of the eponymous weapon. The subsequent discussion often devolves into an accounting of who is offended and who is not, the argument being that if enough Braves fans like it and not too many Native Americans are offended, the team is good to go. Commissioner Rob Manfred said as much in 2021:

The Braves have done a phenomenal job with the Native American community. The Native American community in that region is wholly supportive of the Braves’ program, including the chop. For me, that’s kind of the end of the story. … Ours is an everyday game. You’ve got to sell tickets every single day to the fans in that market. And there are all sorts of differences between the regions in terms of how the teams are marketed.1

Manfred’s approving Native Americans remain obscure; as an NBC News story noted, while he claimed to have spoken to “local Cherokees,” none of the three federally recognized bands of Cherokees dwell in Georgia (in fact there are no federally recognized Native American tribes or nations in the state at all), the Cherokees having been forcibly removed from the state by the government in the nineteenth century. “The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians remains in nearby North Carolina,” wrote David K. Li and Graham Lee Brewer, “and Principal Chief Richard Sneed has said for years that the tribe doesn’t support the Braves’ cheer.” Added Jason Salsman, a spokesman for the Muscogee Nation, “I think for us, with the tomahawk chop, you’re not getting anything really authentic. You’re getting something that’s more of a caricature.” In a statement, the president of the National Congress of American Indians, Fawn Sharp, rejected Manfred’s remarks: “[T]he name ‘Braves,’ the tomahawk adorning the team’s uniform, and the ‘tomahawk chop’ that the team exhorts its fans to perform at home games are meant to depict and caricature not just one tribal community but all Native people. … Native people are not mascots, and degrading rituals like the ‘tomahawk chop’ that dehumanize and harm us have no place in American society.”2

This gets at the root of the “tomahawk” problem: If the gesture is meant to connect the Braves to the supposed actions of the Native Americans who, as we shall see, did not inspire the club’s name, then it invokes a traditional one-dimensional depiction of violence that is not only simplistic and overly broad, but doesn’t apply to Georgia’s history in particular: the Cherokees forced onto the “Trail of Tears” to Indian Territory by President Andrew Jackson and his successors were more likely to wield a plow than an ax; they were primarily farmers whose lands were coveted by White settlers, gold prospectors, and, like the Georgia governor who announced in 1821 that it was his intention to swap “all the red for a white population,” politicians who had a vision of an ethnically homogeneous state.3

Braves fans only began chopping in 1991, when outfielder Deion Sanders joined the team. Sanders had played college football with the Florida State Seminoles, a team with its own Native American-appropriated iconography whose fans did a version of the chop. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium organist Carolyn King legitimized the activity by adding a two-note “tomahawk song” both accompanying and prompting the fans to chop. “My music teacher would be real proud of me,” she said. “A and G: that’s my life.”4

The two-note chop is an example of an ethnic pastiche, a leitmotif that may bear limited resemblance to the actual music of the group it purports to signify, yet has been heard so often that it trains the ear to hear it as if it does. Consider the use of the instantly identifiable “Indian” musical trope that accompanies the opening titles of John Ford’s 1948 Fort Apache (composed by Richard Hageman) or the themes by Max Steiner that accompany the Comanche scenes in Ford’s The Searchers (1956), both of which bear similarities to the “chop” music and singalong. This use of this music is, if not overtly racist, then reductionist, because it isn’t the thing it purports to be, and it comes freighted with all of the imagery it has underscored – in the case of Native Americans, generally attacks on White settlers and soldiers.

As Timothy E. Scheurer wrote in Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer, the use of these themes displaces the Native American from the American community as a whole even as they serve another, more overt purpose (underscoring a dramatic scene or, in the case of the Braves, exhorting the crowd):

Kathryn Kalinak has astutely observed that because we always hear the main title when the stagecoach is traveling across the landscape, “it is the Indian music, ironically, that seems out of place in Monument Valley, and Native Americans who seem outside the natural order of things in Stagecoach [another Ford film]. Thus music positions Native Americans not only as Other, but as intrusive, as not belonging.” That sense of otherness, from a musical standpoint, is the result of the marked musical elements used to underscore the presence of the Native American in the Western.5

King, the ballpark organist, was not immune to the power of these “native” leitmotifs, which occur in countless other Westerns. Indeed, in 1991 she said she had been playing the two-note theme, “about two years ago, because it sounded as if it would go with a team called the Braves.” (Emphasis added.)6

Manfred’s comment seemed to suggest not only that there isn’t an objective standard of appropriate conduct when it comes to ethnic appropriation and parody (“Is there harm?”), but that Braves fans are so invested in the club’s Native American iconography that giving it up would hurt the team. One of the most perverse aspects of that stance – besides its capitulation to racial caricature in the name of profits – is that the Braves name originally had little to do with Native Americans, but was chosen by a carpetbagger owner pursuing an internecine rivalry with a fellow creature of New York’s Democratic Party machine.

The National League team playing in Atlanta can claim a lineage going back to the foundational nineteenth-century Cincinnati Red Stockings, but it wasn’t referred to as the Braves until well into its 1871-1952 Boston residency. As with many teams in the early twentieth century, the club’s early nicknames were transient and informal, more often the invention of the press than a reflection of any effort at official branding by the team. The nascent Braves’ team colors early on were red, reflecting their founding, and they were referred to as the Reds or Red Stockings. They were called the Beaneaters for a while, a lost chance at advertising synergy. There wasn’t much imagination involved in coining these names: When the team was co-owned by Pittsburgh brothers George and John Dovey, the club became the Doves; when the team was held by New York lawyer William H. Russell, it was called the Rustlers.

This period of wavering nomenclature ended – with one brief exception – after Russell died in late 1911. On December 12 the team was purchased by the latest of a series of out-of-town owners when a partnership of former player-manager, Players’ League organizer, and attorney John Montgomery Ward, New York construction-company owner and political barnacle James Gaffney, and other investors consisting “almost entirely of members and associates of New York’s Tammany Hall.”7

Ward was initially team president and Gaffney treasurer, but the arrangement didn’t last long; tiring of conflict with his major partner, he sold out to him approximately eight months after buying in. The major legacy of his brief ownership may have been the Braves name. Ward biographer Bryan Di Salvatore suggested that the team “adopt[ed] the symbol of Democratic Tammany Hall: The Delaware Indian chief, Tammamend in ‘full headdress’” [sic] as an enticement to Gaffney to join his group. Harold Kaese’s Boston Braves assigns the impetus to Gaffney, saying he “let Ward pick the manager [Johnny Kling] but he selected the new nickname for his team. … They kept their white uniforms and red stockings, but instead of the Old English ‘B’ they bore on their bosoms, they now had the profile of a proud Indian. The new name caught on. It was not only original, it was aboriginal.”8

Kaese’s pun was inaccurate. The chief was a symbol of Tammany, not of North America’s indigenous peoples, even if it was hard to distinguish the two without realizing what was meant by the addition of the chief’s profile to the uniform (not initially on the breast but on the sleeve; it eventually gravitated to the uniform front and, in 1930, shrank to fit within the blouse’s column of buttons but was blown up to terrific size on the players’ backs). Tammany Hall invoked Native American iconography from its earliest days, but only in the insular, cosplaying way of fraternal organizations; they had no affinity or interest in actual Native Americans or their affairs.9

The origins of New York City’s Democratic Party machine began with a semimythical seventeenth-century Delaware or Lenni Lenape chief named Tamanend. His name had many spellings and was soon Americanized to Tammany. In 1682 or 1683, William Penn, proprietor of the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania in his honor, met with Tammany and other Delawares under a tree at Shackamaxon (a site near the Delaware River in present-day Philadelphia) and agreed to a treaty of amity, not to mention land. Tamanend reportedly proposed that the Delawares and the colonists would “live in peace as long as the waters run in the rivers and creeks and as long as the stars and moon endure.”10

In a period in which expansion-minded White colonists often clashed violently with Native Americans, Tamanend became a symbol of the good Indian. “He never had his equal,” a missionary wrote. “He was in the highest degree endowed with wisdom, virtue, prudence, charity, affability, meekness, hospitality, in short, with every good and noble qualification.”11 Early Pennsylvanians, in a practice that spread to other colonies, adopted him as a hero and celebrated May 1 as Saint Tammany’s day. As John Adams later wrote, “The people here have sainted him and keep his day.”12 Tammany societies sprang up around the continent. One of them, the Society of St. Tammany or Columbian Order, was founded in Manhattan in 1788.13

Not initially an explicitly political organization except in its anti-aristocratic, pro-democratic leanings, Tammany (the “Columbian” aspect soon faded) immersed itself in Native American costume and jargon from the outset. The leader was the Grand Sachem; upper-level members were Sachems. The official who ran the meetings was a Sagamore, while the doorkeeper (that is, the sergeant-at-arms) was called a Wiskinskie. For a while, the president of the United States was granted the honorary title of Kitchi Okemaw, or Great Grand Sachem. Ordinary members were Braves. Tammany even had a bespoke calendar that divided the year into seasons and seasons into moons, and took its dates from Columbus’s “discovery” of America, the Declaration of Independence, and the organization’s founding. Thus July 1800 was, by Tammany’s reckoning, “Season of Fruits, Seventh Moon, Year of Discovery three-hundred and eighth; of Independence twenty-fourth, and of the Institution the twelfth.”14

Beginning around 1800, Tammany underwent a change reflecting national political conflicts between Federalists and the Democratic-Republican Party, or the Jeffersonian Democrats. Aaron Burr, that most controversial of the founding fathers, was one of the earliest and most effective political organizers in the nation’s history. At this turn he was working to capture New York’s electoral votes for the anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson against presidential incumbent Adams. He found in the Tammany Society a group of like-minded politically engaged members. Gradually, Burr’s “Little Band” of Democratic-Republican operatives became part of the Tammany Society and Tammany Society members become part of Burr’s organization until the difference between the two evaporated.15

Due to the turbulence of his own career, Burr quickly gave way to others, but his acolytes remained in control of Tammany. As the Democratic-Republicans broke up and were supplanted by the Democratic Party, Tammany changed in turn. Its metamorphosis into one of the most perfect (which is not to say beneficent or productive) political machines in the country didn’t happen all at once, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, something that would become legendary had emerged. The key was the nation’s embrace of universal male suffrage and the concurrent influx of a great wave of immigrants, many of them fleeing the Irish potato famine. Tammany Hall, the Society’s meeting place, often referred to in the press as “the Wigwam,” became a byword for the organization itself. It originally had a mild nativist bent, but its midcentury leaders realized that in this increased democratization of the country came power if only they made themselves indispensable to these newly minted Americans. Richard Condon perfectly encapsulated Tammany’s apotheosis in his 1969 novel Mile High:

All of them – Italians, Irish and Jews – had come from countries where they’d had to fight like tigers to defend themselves from the steady wars declared on them by their own governments. The Irish were bashed and starved by the English; the Jews got it in the head from the Cossacks and the Czar; the whole citizenry of the south of Italy, and particularly Sicily, were looked on like some dumb and wild beasts by all the Italians in the north. They had to be against authority to survive. And when they got out and made it to the City of New York, where Tammany offered nothing but help and shelter in exchange for their votes, their inward-supported leaders took the guidance and the dignity. … It was a democracy contained and sustained by the politicians in good working partnership with the gangs who would man the polls on Election Day with knucks and clubs and knives and guns and guide their own ethnic groups through to vote the straight ticket. … The gangs needed the politicians for protection against the courts and the police and the law, and the politicians needed the sure vote. It was to be a long and increasingly successful marriage, perhaps never to end.

[It was] the greatest democracy, all of it exquisitely organized precisely along the lines of the church itself by Honest John Kelly. … The individual’s vote was captured by the tenement captain, who reported it to the block captain. All the block captains were members of the election district committee and accountable to an election district captain … who reported to [the] district leader, the equivalent of a cardinal. He reported to the executive committee of Tammany Hall, the city’s Curia, together with thirty-three other district leaders, and directly to the Leader of Tammany himself, their pope. All of them along the chain handed out bail money, Christmas turkeys, coal, jobs, justice, and clothes in return for votes and loyalty.16

Beginning with Burr, the Tammany’s hallmark was careful attention to the voters themselves. As historian Kevin Baker noted in The New York Game, “By the 1880s, Tammany was coming into its own as an organization, collecting payments and doling out favors and contracts with machinelike efficiency. Its power rested ultimately on the city’s new immigrants and America’s neglect of them. They went to Tammany for help in getting all the basic necessities of life, for jobs and bail money and shoes, and for the famous turkey at Christmas.

“In return, Tammany asked for their votes. These it used to wield power over everything in the public realm – street paving, garbage collecting, policing, firefighting, building inspection – and thus put itself in position to provide the jobs and the turkeys and the favors. The machine’s reach extended everywhere. … The machine was inherently conservative. Tammany might have been the only institution at the time that consistently cared for the poor, but it needed them to stay poor. … In Tammany’s New York, anything might be granted as a privilege, but nothing as a right.” As Oliver E. Allen put it, “Though ostensibly a friend of the poor, Tammany was in bed with the rich.”17

Tammany was, from an early date, in bed with baseball as well. It wasn’t just that, as Baker noted, the notorious grafter William M. Tweed “ran his own club, the New York Mutuals, who were reputed to have a payroll of $38,000 – all of it supplied by taxpayers, in the form of no-show jobs in the city’s Street and Coroner’s departments” or that Tweed’s famous fire company gave Christy Mathewson his “Big Six” nickname, but that its members and hangers-on achieved such wealth through what member George Washington Plunkitt called “honest graft” that they bought teams. As the “Ode to Tammany” reminded the sachems and Braves,

To public views he added private ends, And loved his country most, and next his friends.18

James Gaffney was one of those friends and practitioners of graft, though the “honest” aspect was debatable, at least to a few prosecutors. “A rather rough-looking, large and fleshy fellow wearing a loud suit and derby … the soul of shameless affability,”19 Gaffney was referred to as “Tammany’s mystery man” and “a power under cover” whose position has been unprecedented.”20 He was born on Manhattan’s packed, impoverished Lower East Side and grew up in what was then known as the Gas House District (as hard as it is to imagine now, for nearly 100 years, Consolidated Gas once had huge storage tanks parked in the East 20s). As with another Tammany hack turned baseball owner, Big Bill Devery, Gaffney began his public career as a police officer. Unlike Devery, he didn’t stay on but instead veered more directly into politics, becoming an election district captain under Grand Sachem Charles Francis Murphy’s brother Billy. This put Gaffney in position to go into partnership with the leadership. In 1901 Gaffney became the part-owner and frontman for the New York Contracting & Trucking Company. Although the majority owner “wished to remain anonymous,” it was likely Charles Murphy, appropriately nicknamed Silent Charlie.

Gaffney’s chance at the big money came when Tammany advanced him to the Board of Aldermen. “Honest graft” meant using inside knowledge of government actions to steer public dollars one’s own way. For example, if one knew the city was looking to condemn a parcel and take it for some civic need, he might buy himself a piece of the parcel before the news got out and caused the price of the land to skyrocket. The Murphy-Gaffney enterprise also practiced more direct, exploitative forms of self-dealing. In 1904 the Pennsylvania Railroad wanted to dig tunnels to their eponymous station. The Board of Aldermen, run by Gaffney, said no. The railroad then awarded the digging contract to New York Contracting, though its bid “had actually been $400,000 higher than that of a competitor, and whose owners had virtually no experience in the contracting business.” With that, the board reversed its decision.21

Gaffney got into real trouble only once: In 1903 he was indicted for using his position as alderman to enrich New York Contracting, having in 1901 acquired a lease on a pier at West 79th Street for the company despite aldermen being prohibited from leasing any city property. Gaffney claimed the case was politically motivated. The state Supreme Court ultimately vacated the charges on the grounds that the law was too vaguely written; surely the legislature had not intended to penalize someone who had “nothing more than a stockholder’s relation to the corporation having contracted with the city,” as Gaffney, to all appearances, had with New York Contracting. Multiply this sort of activity across all of the many city institutions in Tammany’s tentacle-like grasp and the amount looted from the taxpayers quickly reaches stunning proportions. This is what the Braves chief represented – not Native American heroism or nobility, but low theft.22

What the Braves represented to Gaffney was an opportunity to front a more legitimate business than New York Contracting. In this he was similar to his Tammany rivals Devery and Frank Farrell, a gambler and the owner of an opulent but illegal casino (who among other things ran a casino-protection racket). The two found their positions threatened by a reformist wave and attempted to cultivate a more refined image by buying the rights to the American League’s defunct Baltimore franchise, transferring it to New York, and founding the team that would come to be known as the Yankees. (Some of the money behind them belonged to Charles Murphy’s son-in-law.) Gaffney also wanted to beat Farrell to success in the game. This he did within a few years – the Farrell-Devery Highlanders never won anything – and then got out.23

The Braves lost 101 games in Gaffney’s first season of ownership and 82 in his second. Free of Monte Ward, he hired George Stallings as manager and in year two hit it big: the 1914 “Miracle Braves” won 94 games, ran away with the National League pennant, and swept Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Inspired, Gaffney built Braves Field (unsurprisingly nicknamed The Wigwam), a ballpark so cold and expansive as to be both extravagantly pitcher-friendly and fan-unfriendly given the way it kept home runs at bay even after the introduction of the lively ball in 1920. Not only did this cripple the team in its long war with the Boston Red Sox, but Gaffney retained ownership of the ballpark even after he sold the Braves club in January 1916. His heirs continued to collect rent long after his 1932 passing, a burdensome expense for subsequent owners. The National League would be forced to take over the lease in 1935. Gaffney’s widow and one of his former Braves partners finally sold the park back to the team in 1949.24

Thus Gaffney remained a direct influence on the team’s fortunes for approximately eight times as long as he owned the team, but the name he selected has lasted even longer. The team abandoned it only once: After the disastrous 38-115 season of 1935, a year so bad it chased both Babe Ruth and owner Emil Fuchs out of baseball, the new proprietors, fronted by J.A. Robert “Bob” Quinn, changed the name. For the next five years, the Boston National League club would be called the Bees and its park the Beehive. The club reverted to its old name in 1941, just as the actual braves of Tammany were beginning to go into eclipse, the result of failing to support Franklin Roosevelt in his run for the presidency, multiple corruption investigations, and 12 years of setbacks at the hands of reform-minded Republican Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

Just as the chop itself is a Braves “tradition” that goes back only to 1991 when its adoption came about as the confluence of a tune played by the Braves’ organist and the club’s return to competitiveness after the mostly fruitless 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s (two division titles, two 100-loss seasons), the Atlanta baseball team’s ethno-appropriation was not a matter of inevitability but choice. It was a hollow reference to Tammany Hall that was retroactively filled in with faux allusions to actual Native Americans, including the addition of a tomahawk to the uniform jersey in 1946, a revised (roaring) chief’s head to the sleeve in 1957, and such cringeworthy episodes as the nearly 20-year run (1966-1985) of mascot Chief Noc-A-Homa, who came complete with a tipi in left field. Over time, the Braves took something that was general and made it very specific, adding a troubling component that emphasizes the violence of a people who, at the time Georgia and the federal government dispossessed them, did not wield tomahawks but were yeoman farmers and Christians, just like those who coveted their lands. Even in Boston the invocation of Native Americans as mascots was in questionable taste given New England’s ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of the Pequot War (1636-1638), but at least that was an event that could be dismissed as colonial-era primitivism, whereas the removal of the Cherokee remains a stain on the United States of America.25

Going back to 1991, the Braves have been one of the most successful franchises in baseball, playing in one of the most dynamic cities in America. Conversely, the original “Braves” notion is archaic, the tomahawk chant is archaic – as Eastern Band Principal Chief Richard Sneed said in 2019, it’s “so stereotypical, like old-school Hollywood.”26 Whether one approves of its branding or not, for so long as it remains the team will remain a contradiction, a club very much at the cutting edge of the present with iconography which is confusingly rooted in the past.

STEVEN GOLDMAN has been part of Baseball Prospectus for much of the past 20-plus years and currently serves as Consulting Editor and columnist. He edited, co-edited, and contributed to multiple volumes of BP’s best-selling annual and edited Mind Game, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, and Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers. He’s also the author of Forging Genius, on the education of Casey Stengel, and Baseball’s Brief Lives: Player Stories Inspired by the Infinite Inning. His work has appeared in numerous other places ranging from Deadspin to The Daily Beast. He’s the host of the long-running Infinite Inning pod- cast, which sits at the crossroads of baseball, history, politics, and culture. He resides in New Jersey, where his wife, children, and cats total six.

 

Acknowledgments

Portions of this article are adapted from Steven Goldman, “If You Have to Ask, It’s Probably Racist,” Baseball Prospectus, October 28, 2021, https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/70791/ycliu-atlanta-braves-racist-chant-chop/.

 

Notes

1 Chelsea Janes, “Braves Name and the ‘Chop’ Get Rob Manfred’s Support Before Game 1 of the World Series,” Washington Post, October 26, 2021.

2 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tribes-push-back-against-mlb-claims-native-americans-approve-tomahawk-n1282516; https://sports.yahoo.com/national-congress-of-american-indians-rob-manfred-braves-tomahawk-chop-000709992.html.

3 Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent (New York: Liveright, 2022), 392.

4 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/13/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-braves-tomahawk-phenomenon.html; Jeff Schultz, “Tomahawks? Scalpers? Fans Whoop It Up,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 17, 1991: B6.

5 Timothy E. Scheurer, Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), 150.

6 Terence Moore, “Organist Carolyn King Encourages Tomahawking ‘Wave’ into a Ripple,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 9, 1991: 71.

7 Bryan Di Salvatore, A Clever Base-Ballist (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 380.

8 Harold Kaese, The Boston Braves (New York: Putnam, 1948), 129.

9 http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/dressed_to_the_nines/database.htm.

10 William Pencak, Historical Dictionary of Colonial America (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 233.

11 Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 21.

12 Terry Galway, Machine Made (New York: Liveright, 2014).

13 Connable and Silberfarb, 21.

14 Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1917), 5.

15 Oliver E. Allen, The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. 1993), 13.

16 Richard Condon, Mile High (New York: Dial Press, 1969), 5-6, 19.

17 Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City (New York: Knopf, 2024), 29, 51-52; Allen, The Tiger, ix.

18 Baker, 29; Connable and Silberfarb, 9.

19 Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic (New York: Viking, 2007), 157.

20 “James E. Gaffney, Sportsman, Dies,” Brooklyn Times Union, August 17, 1932.

21 Allen, The Tiger, 210.

22 “J.E. Gaffney Dies at East Hampton,” New York Times, August 17, 1932: 17; Kaese, The Boston Braves, 128; “Alderman Indicted in Pier Lease Case,” New York Times, July 22, 1903: 14; “Gaffney Wins on the Doubt,” New York Times, September 22, 1903: 2.

23 Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: FSG, 1991), 172; Baker, The New York Game, 113; Kaese, The Boston Braves, 128.

24 Robert S. Fuchs and Wayne Soini, Judge Fuchs and the Boston Braves, 1923-1935 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998), 26; “Fuchs Remains Braves’ Head,” Boston Globe, February 6, 1935: 1; “Perini Signs to Purchase Braves Field,” Boston Globe, January 22, 1949: 5.

25 Jeff Schultz, “Tomahawks? Scalpers? Fans Whoop It Up,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 17, 1991: 14; Dave Anderson, “The Braves’ Tomahawk Phenomenon,” New York Times, October 13, 1991: 8:1.

26 Johnny Edwards, “Chiefs of Georgia Native Tribes Call Tomahawk Chop Inappropriate,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 13, 2019: A1.