After Jackie: Integration Pioneers in 1947 and Beyond

Larry Doby, right, the first African-American player in American League history, signed a major league contract with Cleveland Indians president Bill Veeck on July 5, 1947, then made his debut later that day. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Sixteen franchises conspired to segregate major-league baseball before 1947, but each team’s path to integration was an individual matter.

It was 16 American and National League clubs, acting largely on their own, making front-office and field-management decisions on 16 players (or 17, or 18), who integrated the majors between Jackie Robinson’s April 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Pumpsie Green’s July 1959 appearance with the Boston Red Sox.

Baseball’s integration includes as much “woulda, coulda, shoulda” as any aspect of the game’s history. Prominent laggards carry tales of how closely they missed becoming the vanguard. The Philadelphia Phillies, owned by Bill Veeck, fielding a team of Negro Leaguers in 1943? Robinson and Sam Jethroe working out at Fenway Park in 1945? Countless stories involving the Pittsburgh Pirates, fueled by all the Black baseball greatness around Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s?

The actual instances of integration, presented in the 16 profiles below, reflect the points at which the demand to win — or intolerance of losing — and public pressure drove each team into baseball’s new era. Initial deployment of the pioneering players was varied, perhaps reflecting their teams’ attitudes towards integration. Some pioneers were in the lineup on Opening Day, or as soon as their teams signed them; others debuted away from the team’s home ballpark, as substitutes. It is notable that most of the teams who first embraced integration — the Dodgers, Indians, Giants, and Braves — were the only ones to break the Yankees’ championship stranglehold between 1947 and 1959.

Baseball’s integration was a long, complex process, not a singular moment. After Jackie Robinson’s first game in April 1947 at Ebbets Field, every time he traveled to play in a new ballpark in the National League he achieved a new first. When Larry Doby was signed by Cleveland in July, he began to integrate every American League ballpark, too. Over the next decade-plus, hundreds of other African American and Latino players integrated each of their minor league teams and towns, as well — sometimes as teenagers, sometimes with a language barrier, usually all by themselves in small, segregated towns. These players typically experienced none of the fanfare that Robinson received, but just as much animus in the Jim Crow era.

Once Green pinch-ran for the Red Sox, 4,480 days after Robinson’s first game in Brooklyn, the game’s racial ills were no more solved than America’s. But the National Pastime could now provide a more inclusive example to the rest of the country.

— John Fredland