In 1942, Rickey joined the Dodgers and quietly began plans to bring black players to the team. Louis Post- Dispatch, Monday, October 31, 1955) The noted sportswriter Red Smith fondly summed up Rickey's multi-faceted persona: "player, manager, executive, lawyer, preacher, horse-trader, spellbinder, innovator, husband and father and grandfather, farmer, logician, obscurantist, reformer, financier, sociologist, crusader, sharper, father confessor, checker shark, friend and fighter." (Editorial page, St. He had been particularly troubled by the policy of barring African Americans from grandstand seating in St. Rickey's interest in integrating baseball began early in his career. ![]() His Hall of Fame plaque mentions both his creation of baseball's farm system in the 1920s and his signing of Jackie Robinson. Looking back on this time, Rickey described the problems he faced and the events that influenced his decision in a speech to the One Hundred Percent Wrong Club in 1956.īranch Rickey (1881-1965) was involved with baseball in a variety of capacities - as a player, coach, manager, and owner - for more than sixty years. Others saw the addition of black players as a way to attract larger white as well as black audiences and sell more tickets. Some owners also thought that a white audience would be reluctant to attend games with black players. Team owners knew that if baseball were integrated, the Negro Leagues would probably not survive losing their best players to the majors, major league owners would lose significant rental revenue, and many Negro League players would lose their livelihoods. For example, many owners of major league teams rented their stadiums to Negro League teams when their own teams were on the road. In addition to racial intolerance, economic and other complex factors contributed to segregation in baseball. In 1945, the Jim Crow policies of baseball changed forever when Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson of the Negro League's Kansas City Monarchs agreed to a contract that would bring Robinson into the major leagues in 1947. World War II experiences prompted more people to question segregation practices.Īlthough several people in major league baseball tried to end segregation in the sport, no one succeeded until Brooklyn Dodger's general manager Branch Rickey set his "great experiment" (See Jules Tygiel's Baseball's Great Experiment in the bibliography) into motion. Wendell Smith of The Pittsburgh Courier was especially vocal. The black press and some of their white colleagues had long campaigned for the integration of baseball. ![]() Listen to this page Breaking the Color Line: 1940 to 1946īy the 1940s, organized baseball had been racially segregated for many years.
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