Status Updates From Baseball's Great Experiment...

“Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder of the 1944 St. Louis Browns, became a dramatic symbol of the wartime manpower shortage. Organized baseball totally ignored the two-armed, able-bodied Negro League athletes. In light of both the international embarrassment caused by segregation and the need for ballplayers, pressures mounted for baseball to drop its color barrier.”

“Within the empire of Jim Crow, black ballplayers carved out their own game, a distinctive entity in which baseball attained some of its greatest moments, only to see them ignored and forgotten. But the ability to survive and sustain a flourishing culture in the face of discrimination does not erase the stain.”

“Racial and ethnic exclusion often constituted a means to define the distinctiveness of a given profession. As baseball attempted to establish itself on a secure institutional footing, players and owners defined the attributes of a respectable, professional game. The national pastime would be wholesome, free from the taint of gamblers, and the exclusive preserve of white athletes.”

“Baseball was one of the first institutions in modern society to accept blacks on a relatively equal basis… An examination of the forces that led to Robinson’s hiring, the reaction among both blacks and whites, the institutional response of the baseball establishment, and the resulting decline of the Jim Crow leagues reveals much about the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.”