Unit 8 · Who Was Written Out

After the Civil War, baseball clubs spread fast. Many joined the National Association of Base Ball Players, founded in 1857. It set rules and decided which clubs were members. In Philadelphia, a Black club called the Pythians played strong teams, Black and white.

The Pythians were led by Octavius Catto, a teacher and civil rights leader. In October 1867 the club applied to the Pennsylvania state baseball association. Delegates made clear they would vote it down, and the club withdrew. In December 1867 the national association’s nominating committee went further. It recommended keeping out any club with even one Black member.

That report is an early written exclusion in American team sport. It did not ban games between clubs. It banned membership, which meant no place in the official schedule or records. Catto kept working for voting rights. He was shot and killed on election day in Philadelphia in October 1871.

Moses Fleetwood Walker grew up in Ohio. He studied at Oberlin College and played on its baseball team. He also played for the University of Michigan. In 1884 he joined the Toledo Blue Stockings as a catcher.

That year Toledo belonged to the American Association, a major league of the time. Historians count Walker as the first openly Black player in the major leagues. His brother Weldy Walker also played a few games for Toledo that summer. Both brothers were in the majors 63 years before Jackie Robinson’s debut.

Walker faced hostility from some players and crowds. In 1883, when Toledo was still a minor-league club, Cap Anson of the Chicago White Stockings objected to playing against him. Toledo let Walker go after the 1884 season. He kept playing in the minor leagues until 1889.

In 1887 several Black players starred in the International League, a top minor league. Frank Grant played for Buffalo. George Stovey pitched and Fleet Walker caught for Newark. Bud Fowler played for Binghamton.

On July 14, 1887, Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings came to Newark for an exhibition game. Anson refused to play if Stovey took the field. Stovey did not pitch that day. The same day, the International League’s directors voted to approve no new contracts with Black players.

The vote did not remove every Black player at once. Existing contracts ran on, and a few men stayed into the early 1890s. But clubs stopped signing new ones. Other leagues followed the same gentlemen's agreement. By the late 1890s, organized white baseball had no Black players left.

The color line was never printed in the major leagues’ rules. The National League, founded in 1876, and the American League, a major league from 1901, had no rule about race. Owners simply did not sign Black players, and each owner followed the others.

In 1920 the owners hired a federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, as baseball’s first commissioner. He held the job until he died in November 1944. In 1942 Landis said publicly that no rule barred Black players. No team signed one while he was in office.

An unwritten rule was hard to challenge. There was no clause to repeal and no vote to reverse. Black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender kept pressing teams in print. Change came only when one owner acted in 1945.

Bud Fowler is often named the first known Black professional baseball player. He played for many minor-league clubs in the 1870s and 1880s, moving from town to town. When leagues closed to him, he helped organize Black traveling teams.

In 1885 the Cuban Giants formed on Long Island, New York. They are often called the first Black professional team. They played white college teams, town teams and other professionals. Many independent Black clubs followed in the East and Midwest.

These teams lived by barnstorming. They traveled by train, and later by car and bus, playing in small towns for a share of the gate. Some hotels and restaurants refused to serve them. Without a league, there was no set schedule, no standings and no pennant.

Andrew "Rube" Foster was a star pitcher and a manager. He founded and ran the Chicago American Giants. By 1920 they were among the best-known teams in Black baseball. Foster believed Black baseball needed its own league to survive.

In February 1920, Foster met with other club owners at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri. They founded the Negro National League. Eight clubs played its first season, including teams in Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, St. Louis and Indianapolis. Foster served as its president.

A league meant a constitution, a schedule, standings and contracts that other clubs had to respect. Foster fell ill in 1926 and died in 1930. The league folded after the 1931 season, early in the Great Depression. Foster was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.

Negro Leagues clubs were real businesses. Many owners were Black, and teams hired Black managers, trainers, bus drivers and ticket sellers. Clubs often rented major league parks when the white teams were away. The Chicago American Giants played for years in their own park on the South Side.

In 1924 the first Negro World Series was played. The Kansas City Monarchs beat Hilldale, a club from near Philadelphia. In 1933 a second Negro National League began, led by Pittsburgh owner Gus Greenlee. The Negro American League followed in 1937.

Also in 1933, the first East-West All-Star Game was played at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Fans voted for the players through Black newspapers. The game often drew crowds of tens of thousands. For many fans it was the biggest day of the Black baseball year.

Effa Manley co-owned the Newark Eagles with her husband, Abe Manley, from the 1930s into the 1940s. She ran much of the club’s business. She handled contracts, travel, promotion and payroll. The Eagles won the Negro World Series in 1946.

Manley also used the club for civil rights causes. She promoted an "Anti-Lynching Day" at the ballpark in 1939. She was also active in civil rights groups in Newark. Her work tied the team to its city’s civil rights movement.

When major league teams began signing Black players, they often paid Negro Leagues clubs little or nothing. Manley insisted that her players’ contracts were real property. In 2006 a special committee elected 17 Negro Leagues figures to the Hall of Fame. Manley was among them, the first woman ever elected.

In 1945 Jackie Robinson played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. That October, Branch Rickey, head of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed him. Robinson spent 1946 with the Montreal Royals. They played in the International League, the same league that voted Black players out in 1887.

On April 15, 1947, Robinson played first base for Brooklyn at Ebbets Field. He was the first Black player in the major leagues since the Walker brothers in 1884. He faced threats and insults and won the first Rookie of the Year award. His debut ended the color line in the National League.

On July 5, 1947, Larry Doby played for Cleveland, the first Black player in the American League. He came from Effa Manley’s Newark Eagles, and Cleveland paid the Eagles for his contract. The Dodgers had paid the Monarchs nothing for Robinson. That difference shows how integration could strip value from Black-owned clubs.

Robinson’s debut did not open every team at once. Each club decided for itself. The St. Louis Browns signed Black players in 1947, and the New York Giants in 1949. The New York Yankees waited until Elston Howard in 1955.

The Boston Red Sox were the last major league team to integrate. Pumpsie Green joined them in July 1959, twelve years after Robinson. Satchel Paige, a Negro Leagues star for two decades, joined Cleveland in 1948 at about age 42. In 1971 he became the first player elected to the Hall of Fame for his Negro Leagues career.

As the best players left, crowds followed them to major league parks. The second Negro National League folded after the 1948 season. The Negro American League kept going, with fewer and fewer teams, until about 1960. Hundreds of jobs for Black owners, managers and staff disappeared with the leagues.

For decades, official major league records left out the Negro Leagues. Their box scores sat in old newspapers, and many games were never recorded at all. Researchers spent years finding and checking those box scores. Their work made it possible to count the games again.

In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced that seven Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948 were major leagues. That meant their players’ statistics would join the official record. The decision covered the leagues Rube Foster and others had built. It changed the official record, not just the story told about it.

In 2024 MLB added those statistics to its official database. Josh Gibson, a catcher for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, became the career leader in batting average. Gibson died in 1947, months before Robinson’s debut. He had been elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972.

In the 1800s many English sports were run by clubs of well-off men. They called themselves amateurs, from a French word meaning a lover of something. An amateur played for love of the game, not for money. A professional was paid to play.

In 1866 John Graham Chambers helped found the Amateur Athletic Club in London. Chambers also wrote the Queensberry rules for boxing, published in 1867. Clubs like his held championships only for amateurs. Deciding who counted as an amateur became a key power of a club.

In rowing, the rules went further. In 1879 the stewards of the Henley Royal Regatta adopted a definition of an amateur. It barred anyone who was a mechanic, artisan or laborer, or who worked for wages with his hands. The mechanics clause turned a rule about pay into a rule about class.

American clubs copied the English idea of amateur sport. In 1888 they founded the Amateur Athletic Union, or AAU. It ran national championships in track, swimming, boxing and other sports. For decades it also chose many U.S. Olympic athletes.

Colleges built their own body. In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt pressed schools to make football safer after many deaths and injuries. Sixty-two colleges formed the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States that year. In 1910 it took the name National Collegiate Athletic Association, the NCAA.

Both bodies decided who was eligible. An athlete paid for a sport could lose the right to compete as an amateur. In Illinois, the IHSA, founded in 1900, set eligibility rules for high school sports. Each body held a power that shaped careers: the power to say who counts.

Pierre de Coubertin was a French educator. In June 1894 he held a congress at the Sorbonne in Paris. Delegates founded the International Olympic Committee, the IOC. They planned the first modern Olympic Games for Athens in 1896.

The congress spent much of its time on one topic: amateurism. Delegates agreed that the Games would be for amateurs only. The rule matched the club sports of England and France. It favored athletes who could train without earning money from sport.

Women were not part of the Athens Games in 1896. Coubertin opposed women’s events for much of his life. The rule on pay and the absence of women both shaped who could stand on the field. Both would be argued over for the next hundred years.

Jim Thorpe was a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation. He studied at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, he won the pentathlon and the decathlon. Both are contests made of many track and field events.

In January 1913, newspapers reported that Thorpe had been paid small sums to play minor-league baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910. The AAU declared him a professional. The IOC took away his medals and his records. Many college players then played summer baseball under false names; Thorpe had used his own.

Thorpe went on to play major league baseball and professional football. In 1920 he was named the first president of the league that became the NFL. He died in 1953. The IOC restored his medals in 1982, listing him as co-champion. In July 2022 it recognized him as the sole champion of both events.

Avery Brundage, an American, led the IOC from 1952 to 1972. He defended amateurism hard. At the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, the IOC sent home Austrian skier Karl Schranz for taking part in advertising. Meanwhile, many nations paid their athletes through government jobs or army posts.

Critics said the rule had become unfair. Athletes from some countries trained full time with state support. Athletes from others had to work second jobs. In 1974 the IOC rewrote its eligibility rule in the Olympic Charter and dropped the word amateur.

In 1986 the IOC let each sport’s international federation decide whether professionals could enter. Professional tennis players returned to the Olympics in 1988 in Seoul. In 1992 in Barcelona, NBA players joined the U.S. basketball team. A rule that had shaped the Games for about a century was gone.

In 1920 Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall played in the American Professional Football Association, the league that became the NFL. In 1921 Pollard became a co-head coach of the Akron Pros. He is counted as the first Black head coach in the league. A few other Black players followed in the 1920s.

From 1934 through 1945, no NFL team had a Black player. As in baseball, no written rule said so. Owners kept an unwritten ban. Black college stars, such as Kenny Washington of UCLA, went unsigned.

In 1946 the Rams moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles. They wanted to lease the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a public stadium. Black journalists pressed the Coliseum’s commission to refuse a team that shut out Black players. The Rams signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode that spring. In the new All-America Football Conference, the Cleveland Browns signed Marion Motley and Bill Willis the same year.

Before 1950, Black basketball stars played on all-Black professional teams. The Harlem Rens won the World Professional Basketball Tournament in Chicago in 1939. In 1950 the NBA opened. Chuck Cooper was drafted by the Boston Celtics, and Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton signed with the New York Knicks. Earl Lloyd of the Washington Capitols played first, on October 31, 1950.

In hockey, Willie O’Ree played for the Boston Bruins on January 18, 1958. He was the first Black player in the NHL. O’Ree played with sight in only one eye after an injury. He was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018.

Golf’s color line was written down. In 1934 the Professional Golfers’ Association of America added a clause to its constitution limiting membership to white people. Black golfers such as Charlie Sifford were kept out of many tournaments. California’s attorney general, Stanley Mosk, pressed the PGA, and it repealed the clause in 1961.

Major American tennis tournaments were run by the United States Lawn Tennis Association. Its events were held at private clubs that did not admit Black members. In 1916 Black players founded the American Tennis Association, the ATA. It ran its own national championships.

Althea Gibson grew up in Harlem, New York, and won many ATA titles. In 1950 the former champion Alice Marble wrote an open letter in the magazine American Lawn Tennis. She argued that Gibson had earned a place at the top events. That August, Gibson played at the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills, the first Black player there.

Gibson won the French Championships in 1956. In 1957 she won Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals, and she won both again in 1958. She was the first Black player to win a Grand Slam title. Later she also became the first Black woman to play on the women’s professional golf tour.

The 1900 Olympic Games in Paris were the first with women athletes. Twenty-two women took part, in sports such as tennis, golf and sailing. The British tennis player Charlotte Cooper became the first woman to win an individual Olympic event. Men made up the rest of nearly a thousand athletes.

Women’s track and field was added in 1928 in Amsterdam. Officials then dropped the women’s 800 meters for decades, claiming the race was too hard for women. It returned in 1960. The women’s marathon was not held until 1984 in Los Angeles, where Joan Benoit of the United States won.

Each new women’s event came from a governing body changing its rules. Women’s boxing joined the Olympics in 2012 in London. By then, every sport on the Summer program had events for women. The doors opened one vote at a time, over more than a century.

The Boston Marathon began in 1897. For decades its rules admitted only men. In 1966 Bobbi Gibb ran the course without a race number. In 1967 Kathrine Switzer entered under the name "K. V. Switzer" and ran with a number. An official tried to pull her off the course during the race, and she finished.

Boston officially opened its race to women in 1972. Eight women started that year, and Nina Kuscsik was the first official women’s winner. The rule change followed years of women showing up and running anyway.

Little League Baseball, founded in 1939 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, also allowed only boys. In 1972 Maria Pepe played for a Hoboken, New Jersey, team and was forced off it. The National Organization for Women took the case to New Jersey’s civil rights agency, which ruled for girls in 1973. In 1974 Little League opened to girls, and Congress amended its federal charter that December.