Negro League

14 Pages 3565 Words

nal League banned future contracts with black players, even though it allowed black players already under contract to stay on its teams. These are two of the events that helped form the color line, which segregated baseball until the 1940s.

During the 1890s, most professional black players were only allowed to play in exhibition games on colored teams on the barnstorming circuit. Players on major league teams also barnstormed in cities and towns after the regular season was over. In some places black teams and white teams played each other. In amateur baseball, some athletes played on integrated teams like the Navy baseball team.

Some baseball owners and managers of major league teams tried to hire African Americans by describing the players as Hispanic or Native American, this was there way of trying to sound the least discriminate as possible. In 1901, John McGraw, manager of the Baltimore Orioles, tried to get black second baseman Charlie Grant into the game by calling him a Cherokee named Tokohama. The bulk of owners and managers did not even try things like that. Baseball also did not like interracial barnstorming and white players were in the long run banned from wearing their major league uniforms in these games.

In parts of Latin America, baseball was not segregated. A lot of blacks played baseball there in the winter as well as in Negro Leagues in the United States in the summer. The most popular of the Negro Leagues started in 1920, the Negro National League. The Negro American League started in 1937 and then took in the Negro National League teams.

By the 1940s, organized baseball had been racially segregated for a lot years. The black writers and some of the white writers had long wanted integration of baseball. Wendell Smith of The Pittsburgh Courier was very active in the fight. World War II experiences forced more people to question segregation. Though several people in major league baseball tried to end s...