My son and I are already watching pre-season baseball games on TV. We hosted a viewing of the great film "The Jackie Robinson Story" for his Little League team. Here's a book that examines the interracial baseball that barnstormed the country before then.
Interracial games had been a part of baseball for almost as long as the game has been played. Beginning as early as 1869 in Philadelphia, and becoming a component of professionalized baseball culture by the 1880s, teams of black players and teams of white players stepped out onto the diamonds and went at it for nine innings. Remarkably enough, it was possible for a team like the All Nations (with a roster of blacks, Native Americans, Cubans, Polynesians, Asians, and Italians) to “barnstorm” the country between 1912 and 1920, before they were transformed into the legendary Kansas City Monarchs of the original Negro National League. Otherwise, interracialism meant that all-white teams played against all-black teams. But even so, once the regular season ended, some of the stars of the Negro and Major Leagues (including Babe Ruth) would join the barnstorming tours for the competition, the fun, and the cash (though not necessarily in that order)....
And yet, even as Paige, Dean, and Feller demonstrated that baseball fans might well be ready for integration, the contradictions of Jim Crow America hung over them. Paige had mixed feelings about the prospects of integrating the game, successful as he was in the world of the Negro League and interracial barnstorming. What might integration hold in store for him? “You might as well be honest about it,” he reflected in the early 1940s, “There would be plenty of problems, not only in the South, where the colored boys wouldn’t be able to stay and travel with the teams in spring training, but in the North, where they couldn’t stay or eat with them in many places. All nice statements in the world from both sides aren’t going to knock out Jim Crow.”
