Baseball color line

• 1. Introduction

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  The baseball color line drew its first formal boundary on the 16th of October 1867. In Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania State Convention of Baseball denied admission to the Pythian Baseball Club for one reason alone: its players were black. The policy would never be written into the major leagues' official rules. What insiders called a "gentlemen's agreement" enforced the exclusion instead. In the summer of 1887, the high-minor International League made the arrangement explicit. Its vote that season barred new contracts with black players. Within two years, black players had disappeared from the high minors. Within a decade, they were nearly absent from professional baseball entirely. The effective ban would last until 1947. Cap Anson, the dominant player of the National League's Chicago franchise, had been shaping this outcome since at least 1883. The extent of his influence would remain a subject of argument for over a century.

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• 2. The Walker Brothers

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  Before the Civil War, black players had competed at the highest levels of American baseball. The war changed the sport's social context profoundly. Baseball spread through the army camps of the 1860s as a way to bind together soldiers from across the country. When peace came, the sport was reimagined as a tool for national reunion. That reunion was pursued almost exclusively among white Americans.

  Moses Fleetwood Walker debuted in the major leagues on the 1st of May 1884. He played catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association. His brother Weldy also played for Toledo during a portion of that season. Neither the National League nor the American Association had a written rule against black players. These two men were competing entirely within the letter of professional baseball's official standards. Walker was not even the first black man in professional baseball. Bud Fowler had been playing professionally since 1878, though never in the major leagues.

  Cap Anson had made his position clear the year before Walker's debut. In 1883, Anson threatened to pull his Chicago club out of an exhibition game in Toledo if Walker took the field. Anson backed down, but he used a racial slur on the field and publicly vowed he would never play in such a game again. The following year, 1884, Chicago issued its threat earlier and more successfully. Walker sat out the Toledo exhibition. In 1887, George Stovey of the Newark Little Giants was widely regarded as one of the finest pitchers in the International League. That summer would test whether excellence offered any shield against what was coming.

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• 3. The 1887 Reckoning

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  Before the International League cast its vote, Cap Anson had already sent a telegram to the Newark Little Giants. His demand: if Newark played its two black players, Fleet Walker and George Stovey, Chicago would not take the field. The club complied. By the afternoon of the 14th of July 1887, the day of the actual league vote, Anson's team was already in Newark. Stovey and an apparently injured Walker both sat out.

  The vote laid bare the fault lines within the league. Teams with all-white rosters voted in favor of the ban; clubs with at least one black player voted against. The Binghamton, New York club, which had released its two black players just before the meeting, cast its ballot with the majority. Secretary C.D. White left with instructions to approve no more contracts with black players.

  One detail about 1887 is worth noting: it was the high point of achievement for black players in the high minor leagues. Every National League team except Chicago played exhibition games against squads with black players that year, including Newark and other International League clubs. In September 1887, eight members of the St. Louis Browns of the American Association refused to play against the New York Cuban Giants during a road trip. The Cuban Giants were the first openly all-black professional baseball club. The Browns cited racial objections alongside a practical one: they were worn down and did not want to risk their hold on first place. The Philadelphia Times described the episode as "for the first time in the history of base ball the color line has been drawn."

  After the vote, only two black players remained in the International League for 1888. Frank Grant played for the Buffalo Bisons; Moses Fleetwood Walker had moved to the Syracuse franchise. Both were kept only because their contracts predated the ban. Walker stayed through most of 1889. Sol White, a black minor league player who later managed semi-professional teams, wrote about these events in a 1907 book. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2006. His conclusion about Anson: "Were it not for this same man Anson, there would have been a colored player in the National League in 1887." Anson's biographer Howard W. Rosenberg argued a different case. Rosenberg called Anson a "reinforcer" of segregation rather than its architect, with no demonstrable effect beyond his own team's exhibition schedule. American Indian players could cross the color line without disguise. Within a decade, some managers would begin looking for ways to exploit that opening.

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• 4. Passing and Pretending

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  Charles Albert Bender was a star pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1910. Bender's mother was Chippewa and his father was German. He played under the same unwritten rules that barred black players but allowed American Indians and native Hawaiians to compete in the major leagues. Native Hawaiian Prince Oana was another player who crossed into the majors under those same terms. Their presence made the color line's own logic visible: the barrier was drawn against blackness specifically, not against all non-white players.

  In 1901, John McGraw, then managing the Baltimore Orioles, tried to sign a black second baseman named Charlie Grant. McGraw gave Grant the name Charlie Tokohama and identified him as Cherokee. Grant played along. The disguise might have held, but his tryout in Chicago drew a crowd of his black friends, and the fiction collapsed. He never played in the major leagues.

  On the 28th of May 1916, a Canadian-American named Jimmy Claxton played two games for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. A part-American Indian friend had introduced Claxton to the team owner as a fellow member of an Oklahoma tribe. The Zee-Nut candy company issued a baseball card for Claxton before he had even finished his second game. Within a week, a friend of Claxton's disclosed that he had both Black and Indigenous Canadian ancestry. Claxton was dismissed immediately.

  The Cincinnati Reds tried a different approach in 1911, signing two light-skinned Cuban players, Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida. Both had previously played "Negro Baseball" with the integrated All Cubans barnstorming club. When questions arose about their eligibility, the Reds' managers gave a blunt assurance: the two men were "as pure white as Castile soap." The black newspaper New York Age took a broader view. The Age argued that if Cubans could break through, it would become "easier for colored players who are citizens of this country to get into fast company." It would be nearly thirty years after Claxton's two games before another man known to be black appeared in organized white baseball. In that time, a parallel sporting world had grown up entirely on the other side of the color line.

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• 5. The Landis Era

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  Rube Foster founded the Negro National League independent of the National Baseball Commission, and that circuit ran through 1931, primarily in the midwest. A companion league, the Eastern Colored League, operated for several seasons until 1928. Further leagues followed: a "National" and an "American" Negro league were established in 1933 and 1937 respectively, and both persisted until integration. The Negro Southern League ran from 1920 at a lower level. None of these leagues belonged to Organized Baseball, the structure of professional play led from 1921 by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Professional baseball in the United States existed during this period as two separate systems divided strictly by race. Each had its own championship or all-star game.

  Landis made no move to integrate. The one serious attempt to breach the color line during his tenure was Bill Veeck's. Veeck tried to buy the struggling Philadelphia Phillies and stock the roster with Negro league stars. When Landis learned of the plan, he and National League president Ford Frick arranged for the franchise to go to a different buyer. That buyer was William D. Cox. Veeck described his Phillies plan in his 1962 autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck. He stated his reason plainly: the best black athletes, in his view, "can run faster and jump higher" than the best white athletes.

  A 1998 article in SABR's The National Pastime argued that Veeck had invented the entire story. The authors noted that Philadelphia's black press had made no mention of a prospective sale to Veeck. Baseball historian Jules Tygiel refuted the argument in a 2006 piece in SABR's The Baseball Research Journal. Paul Dickson's 2012 biography, Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick, included an appendix examining whether Veeck had fabricated the Phillies story. The Phillies ultimately became the last National League team to integrate. John Kennedy debuted for Philadelphia in 1957, fifteen years after Veeck's attempted purchase. Happy Chandler succeeded Landis as commissioner and would take a very different position on black players. Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers was already planning to make use of that shift.

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• 6. The Breach

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  Sam Nahem was a pitcher with major league experience stationed in Rheims, France, in 1945. After the German surrender in May of that year, the American military expanded its baseball program to Europe. More than 200,000 soldiers took part. Nahem was assigned to oversee two leagues in France and to player-manage the Oise All-Stars. Black soldiers had been confined to all-black teams until that point. Nahem integrated his team. He recruited two players with Negro leagues experience: outfielder Willard Brown and pitcher Leon Day. When asked later whether this had caused any trouble, Nahem was direct. He said: "There was no problem. I made sure there would be nothing of that sort on my team." Nahem, who had experienced discrimination for his Jewish faith, identified with what black players were facing.

  In 1945, Rickey partnered with Gus Greenlee of the Pittsburgh Crawfords to create the United States League as a vehicle for scouting black players. Happy Chandler gave Rickey a crucial signal of support. Chandler said that if a Black player could prove himself on Okinawa and Guadalcanal, "hell, he can make it in baseball." Rickey signed Jackie Robinson in October, intending him to play for the Dodgers. Robinson spent 1946 with the Dodgers' top minor league affiliate, the Montreal Royals of the International League. When he was called up to Brooklyn, Robinson endured death threats and racial abuse. He got off to a slow start. His athleticism and skill carried him through, and he won the first Rookie of the Year award ever given. That award now bears his name.

  Larry Doby joined the American League in 1947, signed by Bill Veeck for the Cleveland Indians. Baseball historian Daniel Okrent captured the difference in public attention: "Robinson had a two year drum roll, Doby just showed up." Doby faced many of the same indignities Robinson had, with less press coverage. Both men were eventually elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. That same 1947 season, Willard Brown played briefly for the St. Louis Browns. He became the first black player to hit a home run in the American League. Brown's Hall of Fame election came on the strength of his Negro leagues career. The Class AA Southern Association, founded in 1901 and operating in the Deep South, would not yield as readily.

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• 7. The Southern Exception

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  Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella were assigned to the class-B Nashua Dodgers of the New England League in 1946. Nashua became the first minor league club based in the United States to integrate its roster. Johnny Wright was also posted to the Montreal Royals that same season. The Pawtucket Slaters, the Boston Braves' franchise in the same New England League, also integrated that year. So did Brooklyn's class-C affiliate in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Most of the remaining minor leagues followed in the years ahead, including those operating in the American South. The Carolina League integrated when the Danville Leafs signed Percy Miller Jr.

  The one exception was the Class AA Southern Association. Founded in 1901 and anchored in the Deep South, the Association permitted only a single black player across its entire existence. Nat Peeples of the 1954 Atlanta Crackers played two games, going hitless in four at-bats on the 9th and the 10th of April 1954. He was then demoted to the Jacksonville Braves of the Sally League. The Southern Association returned to an all-white roster policy. Its major league parent clubs were required to field all-white teams throughout much of the 1950s. By the end of that decade, civil rights leaders were boycotting the circuit. The Association finally ceased after the 1961 season. Its franchises were absorbed into the International League, the Sally League, and the Texas League, all of which were integrated. At the major league level, one franchise had held out longer than any other: the Boston Red Sox, who did not integrate until 1959.

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• 8. The Last Holdout

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  Tom Yawkey, the longtime owner of the Boston Red Sox, drove his team's resistance to integration. His determination had roots that stretched back years. In April 1945, the Red Sox gave Robinson and outfielder Sam Jethroe a brief tryout at Fenway Park. It was arranged as a concession to Boston City Councilman Isadore H. Y. Muchnick. Muchnick had threatened to revoke the team's exemption from Sunday blue laws. The stands held only management when the tryout took place. Robinson was subjected to racial taunts even so. He would later describe Yawkey as "one of the most bigoted guys in baseball."

  The legal and civic pressure that finally forced a change arrived in 1959. On the 7th of April, Yawkey and general manager Bucky Harris were named in a discrimination lawsuit. The NAACP issued charges that the club was "following an anti-Negro policy." The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination announced a public hearing. Facing these pressures, Harris promoted Pumpsie Green from the Red Sox's AAA farm club. Green debuted on the 21st of July as a pinch runner. Earl Wilson joined the roster later that season as the club's second black player.

  The years that followed brought more change. Joe Foy, José Tartabull, George Scott, George Smith, John Wyatt, Elston Howard, and Reggie Smith all joined the club during the early to mid-1960s. The 1967 Red Sox won the "Impossible Dream" pennant. They lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. Tom Yawkey died in 1976. His widow Jean eventually sold the club to Haywood Sullivan and Edward "Buddy" LeRoux.

  The story of race in Boston did not end there. The Elks Club of Winter Haven, Florida, the team's spring training home, barred black members and guests. Yet the Red Sox permitted the Elks to enter the clubhouse and distribute dinner invitations to white players, coaches, and business staff. Tommy Harper was a popular black former player working as a minor league instructor for Boston at the time. He protested the policy. When the story appeared in The Boston Globe, he was fired. Harper sued the Red Sox for racial discrimination. His complaint was upheld on the 1st of July 1986.

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