A Century of Black Players Fighting for Representation in Baseball
At the close of the year 2020, on the 100the anniversary of their founding, Major League Baseball officially conferred major league status on the Negro Leagues. It was a small, symbolic step toward remedying the many historic injustices that Black baseball players had experienced over the decades.
Leagues of their own
Excluded from any possibility of playing in the white-run leagues around them, Black players in the United States had already formed their own leagues by the latter part of the 19th century. They played on teams within the network of historically Black colleges and universities, teams formed by Black-owned businesses, and teams based on military installations.
But there were some opportunities to play on white teams in that era as well, and Black players like Bud Fowler and Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker (each credited by various sources as the first-ever Black professional baseball player) began playing professionally on white teams in New England and Ohio, respectively. Both encountered significant and often virulently ugly push-back due to racism. In 2022, Fowler was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
But as Jim Crow laws tightened up segregationist practices throughout the country at the turn of the century, Black players were forced off white teams and began to form new teams of their own. They would often “barnstorm” cross-country to take on any other team that would agree to the challenge.
Making it official
In 1920, Chicago American Giants owner and former player Andrew “Rube” Foster was instrumental in formalizing a formal league for Black players. After Foster and other team owners based in the Midwest established the organization, other Black-led groups created their own leagues in the South and other regions. The rivalries resulted in exciting play across the nation, and even into Canada and several Latin American countries.
Notably, this explosion of sports talent generated new sources of income and infrastructure development in African American communities. While baseball players—especially players of color—in the earliest days of the sport earned minuscule salaries, after the formation of the Negro Leagues in the 1920s, players could earn as much as $400 a month, a considerable paycheck in those days.
The heroism of Jackie Robinson
The most famous player in the Negro Leagues was, of course, the great Jackie Robinson, who played one season as shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs. So widely beloved was this team in the Black community that local churches changed the times of their Sunday services around its playing schedule. Robinson’s powerful hitting and agile base-stealing made him a major asset to the team.
Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers president and general manager, signed Robinson to a farm team with the goal of breaking baseball’s color barrier by moving him up to the Dodgers’ lineup. When Robinson began his career with Brooklyn on April 15, 1947, he was steeled to his task of not only helping his team win games, but standing up with dignity to the virulent racist attacks heaped on him from all sides.
Robinson’s courage in putting himself forward as the first Major League Black player opened the door for others, including Larry Doby. Doby joined the Cleveland Indians only months after Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers, becoming the MLB’s second African American player and the first in the American League.
While the color barrier had been broken, the deep racism in American sports, and the unequal treatment of Black players continued.
Historic and contemporary inequities
A 1970 study titled “Racial Discrimination in Organized Baseball” found that 22 percent of Major League players in 1968 were Black, and that their salaries and bonuses seemed to be approaching those of white players when individual playing positions and statistics were factored in. That study did, however, also find the type of serious inequities at the top that continue to plague the sports world half a century later.
For one thing, Black players in the 1960s were overwhelmingly positioned as outfielders and first basemen. Relatively few were catchers or pitchers. In terms of management, only about 3 percent of umpires, coaches, and managers were Black in 1969. This was the case even though the statistics showed Black players on average outperforming their white counterparts.
MLB hired its first Black manager in 1975, when the legendary Frank Robinson began leading the Cleveland team. But, in the same way that the National Football League has struggled against a deep-rooted bias in regards to hiring Black head coaches, Major League Baseball in 2021 counted only two managers of color in its ranks: Dave Roberts (whose mother is Japanese and whose father is African American) of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Dusty Baker of the Houston Astros.
The first-ever African American MLB umpire, Emmett Ashford, was hired in 1966. Yet, as of 2019, only six out of 76 MLB full-time umpires were Black.
It’s also worth noting that the percentage of African American players in Major League Baseball has declined steeply. In 2021, only about 8 percent of MLB players were Black, in contrast to the aforementioned more than 20 percent in 1970.
A dearth of Black players means there are fewer experienced individuals ready to take on leadership roles in management. And that should concern us all, when we as a country need an American pastime that reflects the rich diversity of the American people.