Baseball Color Line
The color line in American baseball excluded players of black African descent from Major League Baseball and affiliated minor leagues, until Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization for the 1946 season and in 1947, both Robinson in the National League and Larry Doby with the American League's Cleveland Indians appeared in games for the first time in MLB history. Racial segregation in professional baseball is sometimes called a gentlemen's agreement, meaning a tacit understanding, because there was no written policy at the highest level of baseball organization. Some leagues did rule against member clubs signing black players, however, as the color line was drawn during the 1880s and 1890s.
On the "other side" of the color line, many black baseball clubs were established and especially during the 1920s to 1940s there were several "Negro" or "Colored" Leagues in operation, which primarily featured those players barred from organized baseball. Some light-skinned Hispanic players, some Native Americans, and native Hawaiians played white baseball during that period.
Read more about Baseball Color Line: Origins, Sub Rosa Efforts At Integration, The Negro Leagues, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Bill Veeck and Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, Boston Red Sox, Professional Baseball Firsts
Famous quotes containing the words baseball, color and/or line:
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)
“When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)
“The English never draw a line without blurring it.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)