George Gmelch
anthropologist
George Gmelch (born 1944 in New York) is an American anthropologist known for his research on Irish Travellers, return migration and the culture of sport. He is emeritus professor of anthropology at Union College and the University of San Francisco. Gmelch is married to fellow cultural anthropologist, and frequent collaborator, Sharon Bohn Gmelch.
Career
After his sophomore year in college (1965) Gmelch signed a professional baseball contract with the Detroit Tigers. Over the next few seasons he played on four minor league teams. Political scientists Peter Dreier and Rob Elias note in their book Baseball Rebels, “...in the Carolina League towns Gmelch played in, he was shocked by the segregation and racism he observed... ... passing the general manager’s office before a game, he witnessed members of the Rocky Mount’s Chamber of Commerce reminding the ballclub’s General Manager that the town would not support the team if there were ‘too many colored boys in the starting lineup... Gmelch soon learned that the ball field itself was used by the local Ku Klux Klan for gatherings, and that the town’s police chief was a member of the Klan and his brother a Grand Dragon.
Gmelch who had been writing monthly articles about life in the minor leagues for a home town California newspaper, then wrote a piece “Life in Rocky Mount with the Klan,” describing what he had witnessed including the police chief’s involvement in the Klan.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q111360120. VIAF identifies the subject as 27216103. The Library of Congress control number is n80131969. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “George Gmelch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.