The Negro Leagues

The baseball color line began with the post-Civil War prevailing beliefs about race and civil rights, both of which were not too different from the pre-Civil War beliefs about race and civil rights. Slavery had been outlawed; not much else had changed. In 1857, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, campaigning hard for his spot in the American Scum Hall of Fame, wrote that Negroes were "so far inferior [to whites] that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect." The 13th amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery, but neither emancipation, nor the adoption of the 14th amendment -- which established Negro citizenship and guaranteed civil rights, due process and equal protection -- nor the 15th amendment -- which ostensibly guaranteed the right to vote -- did anything to change the essential reality of Taney's words: as far as the vast majority of whites were concerned, Negroes had no rights. The ink had not even dried on the surrender at Appomattox before whites, principally in the south, began acting both overtly and clandestinely to keep the Negro "in his place." Violence ensued almost immediately, but it was only with a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1870s and 1880s that the ball really got rolling on intimidation and segregation.

Ironically, at roughly the same time that Booker T. Washington was gaining notoriety for telling his fellow blacks to set aside social equality as an immediate goal and go it alone ("Separate as the five fingers"), the United States Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), was telling Negroes that they didn't have any choice in the matter. Echoing an 1849 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that stated that prejudice "is not created by law and probably cannot be changed by law," the court validated segregation, saying that if whites felt that blacks were inferior then the government had to accept it. "Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts," Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the court, "or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences. ... If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. ...” Jim Crow had been sanctified by the Supreme Court; the federal government was now out of the civil rights business. It did not reappear on the scene until 1954, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and dragged the feds, kicking and screaming, back in. Night was falling on America's black minority.

Jackie Robinson as a Kansas City Monarchs

Chicago Union Giants in 1905