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:
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)
“The great God endows His children variously. To some he gives intellect—and they move the earth. To some he allots heart—and the beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a soul, without intelligence—and these, who never grow up, but remain always His children, are God’s fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one color instead of many.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
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—Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913)