The MLB teams that took the lead on integration

Years before significant civil rights milestones, teams like the Dodgers were ahead of society in employing African Americans

By Frederic J. Frommer

In 1947, Jackie Robinson famously shattered Major League Baseball’s color barrier when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers. But less remembered today, nearly 80 years later, is that several other teams quickly followed the Dodgers’ lead in integrating—years before the civil rights movement.

In July of that season, the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns would also feature Black players. This was still a full year before President Harry Truman desegregated the military and the federal workforce in a pair of executive orders. In 1949, the New York Giants followed with a pair of Black players, firmly putting MLB on the course of integration, even though the progress that followed was uneven among the sport’s other 12 teams.

Major League Baseball, like much of American society, was segregated through most of the first half of the 20^th century. It fell on bold executives to force change, led by Dodgers President Branch Rickey, who signed Robinson. Three months after Robinson’s April 1947 debut in the National League, Indians owner Bill Veeck didn’t need any more persuading; he signed Larry Doby to a major league contract in July, making him the first Black player in American League history.

Rickey and Veeck bucked not just MLB but much of America when they pursued integration. Meanwhile, Robinson, Doby, and others immediately disproved newspaper predictions that Black players couldn’t cut it in the majors while enduring the most vile and hateful racist abuse from fans, opposing players, and coaches. These pioneers—on and off the field—deserve credit for integrating the national pastime before civil rights marches and sit-ins forced Americans to pay attention.

None other than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized Robinson’s contribution to the civil rights movement that followed him. King said that baseball’s first modern-day Black player “underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

Indeed, Robinson’s accomplishment preceded civil rights milestones such as the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in (1960) and the Freedom Riders (1961). After his career, he would be active in the civil rights movement.

Doby made his debut with Cleveland on July 5, 1947. Veeck said at the time that Robinson had already proved to be a “real big leaguer,” so, “Why wait?” He predicted, accurately, that within a decade, Black players would be a regular feature of major league rosters.

Those early signings helped galvanize fans in the nation’s capital to push for integration in their city, too. When Cleveland came to Washington, D.C., for a series, the fans held signs that read, “Cleveland has a colored ball player—why not Washington?” and “Brooklyn signed a Negro player—why don’t the Nats?”

In the summer of ’47, St. Louis Browns general manager and vice president Bill DeWitt Sr— father of current Cardinals managing partner Bill DeWitt Jr.—signed two Black players for baseball’s southernmost city at the time. One, Hank Thompson, made his debut on July 17, less than two weeks after Doby, and the other, Willard Brown, appeared in his first game on July 19. It was a hard experience for the duo, shunned by their own teammates. Both were let go before the end of the season. But they made a significant contribution to the cause of diversity in baseball by exposing fans in a segregated city to Black players—and by becoming the first Black teammates in the history of either the AL or the NL.

Back in Brooklyn, Robinson had an immediate impact on the game, which he revolutionized with his swaggering style. In his first year, Robinson hit .297 while leading the NL with 29 stolen bases and was named baseball’s first Rookie of the Year, an award now named for him. Doby, meanwhile, had a rough first season in limited action, but blossomed in ’48, helping lead Cleveland to what remains the franchise’s most recent World Series title.

In 1949, the Giants were the last of these four teams to sign an African American, adding Thompson, the former Brown, and future Hall of Famer Monte Irvin. (Willie Mays would follow two years later.) That summer’s All-Star Game, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, was the first to feature African American players—four in all. After the season, there was yet another milestone, when Robinson, who led the NL in batting and stolen bases, became the first Black player to win a Most Valuable Player award.

Progress slowed across baseball in the early ’50; by 1952, only two more, the Boston Braves and Chicago White Sox, had featured Black players, leaving 10 teams that had yet to have a single African American. Some teams were notoriously (and shamefully) late, including the Detroit Tigers (1958) and the Boston Red Sox (1959). Still, that halting track record doesn’t diminish the visionary steps that Rickey, Veeck and others took for diversity at a time when much of America was resistant to integration.

MLB in recent years has tried to atone for the sport’s racist past, most notably by announcing last year it was incorporating Negro League stats into its record books.

For all that baseball’s first Black ballplayers did on the field to advance diversity in American society, a literal snapshot off the field also made an enduring contribution. After Doby hit a home run that helped Cleveland win Game 4 of the 1948 World Series, he embraced his white teammate, winning pitcher Steve Gromek. A photo of the two players, smiling cheek-to-cheek, ran in newspapers across the country. Many Americans viewed the picture as a symbol of racial progress and tolerance.

As Doby would reflect years later, “That was a feeling from within, the human side of two people, one Black and one white.”

Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications. A former Associated Press reporter, Frommer is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals." Follow him on X.

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