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Banned, Black, And Barnstorming: How Traveling Black Teams In The Great Depression Changed Kansas, Maxwell Kutilek

Master's Theses

In the 1870s and early 1880s, almost seventy African American men played for white owned ball clubs. By 1890, White owners reached an unwritten agreement to prevent African Americans from playing with white baseball players. Not until April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers did a black baseball player play professionally with white players. It took the general manager of the Dodgers, Branch Ricky, almost a decade to get Robinson in a big league uniform. This meant for nearly sixty years, African Americans had to play separately. Before the creation of the Negro National …