How The Other Teams Integrated, Part One: 1947

Yep, it's another series...

I’m going to go back to doing non-serialized posts eventually, I swear. Originally this edition of the newsletter was just going to be a ~500-word appreciation of Elston Howard.

You see, this weekend was the anniversary of 1963’s March on Washington,* and I was going to point out that 1963 was ALSO the year Elston Howard became the first Black player to win the AL MVP award. This is kind of crazy, since it was 16 years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, and in that time the National League had 11 (!) Black MVPs, including Ernie Banks twice and Roy Campanella three times.

*Some people now like to point out that the full name was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” but that’s for nerds.

Then I started thinking about how, even though baseball celebrates April 15, 1947 as the day segregation “ended,” integration did not happen all at once. There were 15 other teams in the league that day, and each of them had their own trailblazers.

After falling down a rabbit hole of research about those stories, I decided it would be useful to go through all of them. This is not to undercut Robinson, one of the few American icons who truly deserves all the praise he gets, but to examine how social change actually happens, as opposed to the way we typically remember it.

All these stories seriously complicate the narrative of slow but inevitable progress. Some end happily, but many do not. A generation of athletes—not to mention their families and fans—was wrapped up in baseball’s attempts to overcome its racist history. And while it is useful to remember the triumphs, it is often just as useful to look at the failures.

The last baseball team wasn’t integrated until 1959—this series won’t take quite that long. It’ll probably take one per week through the end of baseball’s regular season.

But today we start with that fraught, tumultuous, hopeful first year, 1947.

July 5: Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians

Doby’s story is pretty well-known, since he integrated the American League just a couple months after Robinson’s debut in Brooklyn. His teammate Bob Feller compared him to Buzz Aldrin. Doby would eventually become a Hall of Famer, but his debut did not go well at all. Unlike Branch Rickey, who signed Robinson in 1945 and spent over a year preparing the team, the organization, and Robinson himself for the event, Cleveland’s Bill Veeck figured he could skip all that: He purchased Doby’s contract from the Newark Eagles on July 2nd and Doby made his debut three days later, pinch hitting and striking out.

On some level, you’ve got to respect Veeck’s impatience. He was serious about integration: In 1942, he had tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies, supposedly with the intent of signing a bunch of Negro League stars, but was blocked by baseball’s segregationist Commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis. (There’s some debate about the veracity of this story, but he did move quickly to add Black players to his team, signing Satchel Paige in 1948, and Minnie Minoso in 1949.) And there’s something admirable about Veeck not feeling obliged to center the worries of white racists in his efforts to desegregate the team.

The problem, in this case, was that Cleveland was clearly unprepared for Doby’s arrival. The team already had Hall of Famers at shortstop and second base, his two positions, and so Doby was almost exclusively used as a pinch hitter in ‘47. He had 32 at bats over 29 games, getting only five hits. But the next year, he learned centerfield, became one of Cleveland’s best hitters, and, along with Paige, became one of the first Black players to win a World Series.

July 17: Hank Thompson of the St. Louis Browns

Less than two weeks after Doby’s debut, the Browns broke their color barrier with second baseman Hank Thompson, followed two days later by outfielder Willard Brown. Like Doby, Thompson and Brown had their contracts purchased directly from the Negro Leagues in the middle of the season. But the Browns owner, Richard Muckerman, did not share Veeck’s commitment to integration. The moves were a clear attempt to gin up interest in a floundering team. The Browns were heading for a last place finish, and Thompson and Brown were both stars for the nearby Kansas City Monarchs. At the same time, St. Louis’ Black population was quickly growing after World War II. Neither performed very well (although Brown became the first Black player to hit a home run in the American League), and a month later, both players were sent back to the Monarchs to avoid having to pay a “retention fee.”

Later in life, Brown and Thompson would both suggest that they did not receive sufficient team support St. Louis. It’s worth remembering that St. Louis was the farthest south of any city that had a Major League franchise at the time. As we’ll see, “some cities are just too racist” is a trope that, while based in truth, was and is often used as an excuse for delaying justice. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the team was simply hoping Thompson and Brown would boost ticket sales, and didn’t care much about the racist abuse they received.

Willard Brown would never get another shot with an MLB team—he was already pushing 30—but he continued to mash, going to the Puerto Rican Winter League and winning a Triple Crown that winter. He did it again a couple years later, earning the badass nickname of “Ese Hombre” (That Man). In 2006, he was finally inducted into both Cooperstown and the Caribbean Baseball Hall of Fame.

Hank Thompson was still young, and he would get another chance. A couple years later, he would again become a team’s first Black player, this time for the New York Giants. Before that, though, he got into a bar fight and killed a guy (who was literally named Jim Crow!)—Thompson struggled with alcoholism throughout his career, and while he put up good numbers with the Giants, there was a lingering sense that he did not reach his potential.

The Browns wouldn’t really get integrated until 1951, when they were bought by… Bill Veeck, who had been forced to sell the Indians after a divorce in 1949. Veeck once again signed Satchel Paige, which people mocked, since Paige was already 44 years old. But in 1952, Paige was the Browns’ best player. A couple years later, the Browns would finally give up on St. Louis, where they had long since been eclipsed by the Cardinals, and move to Baltimore and become the Orioles. That inaugural Orioles team had a couple of Black players in 1954—Joe Durham played in ten games and Jay Heard pitched in two—but they didn’t have Black player make key contributions until trading for starting pitcher Connie Johnson in 1956.

August 26: Dan Bankhead of the Brooklyn Dodgers

Obviously, the Dodgers had already been integrated, but it seems important to include Bankhead, who integrated the pitcher’s mound. He’s also worth mentioning because, while Branch Rickey famously managed Robinson’s debut in meticulous detail, Bankhead got no such treatment. The Dodgers needed pitching that summer, so Bankhead was signed from the Memphis Red Sox on August 22nd and made his debut four days later against the Pirates.

And his first appearance was the opposite of glamorous. Hal Gregg, generally a relief pitcher, started for Brooklyn that day, gave up four runs in the first inning, and let the first two guys reach base in the second. At that point, manager Burt Schotton brought the first Black pitcher into an MLB game—and Bankhead immediately gave up an RBI double, a sacrifice fly, an RBI single, and then another RBI double. The Dodgers were behind 8-0, but it was still only the second inning, and there were 23 more outs to get, so they just left Bankhead out there to eat some innings in the dog days of August. He got through the rest of the second, then held Pittsburgh scoreless in the third and fourth, but in the fifth he got rocked for six more runs before they finally pulled him. The Dodgers lost 16-3, and Bankhead finished with an exceptionally ugly pitching line: 3.1 IP, 8 ER, 10 H. His ERA was 21.60.

Bankhead would appear in three more games for Brooklyn, and was actually OK: Over 6 2/3 innings, he only gave up one run on a balk and another on a sacrifice fly after the runner got to third on an error. But his ERA was still 9.00 at the end of the year, and he was sent back to the minors for the next two seasons. The Dodgers brought him back in 1950, when he seemed to straighten things out, but by then he’d been eclipsed by Don Newcombe, who had already become an elite starter for Brooklyn. In 1951, injuries and control issues limited Bankhead, and he spent most of the rest of his career playing in Mexico.

What held Bankhead back? While in the Dodgers minor league system, he showed flashes of brilliance. In 1948, he struck out 243 batters in 203 innings. But he walked 128 batters, and 170 the next year in Montreal. In Joe Posnanski’s book about traveling with Buck O’Neil, he quotes a theory O’Neill had about Bankhead, as he told it to Satchel Paige’s son:

“See, here’s what I always heard: Dan was scared to death that he was going to hit a white boy with a pitch. He thought there might be some sort of riot if he did it. Dan was from Alabama just like your father. But Satchel became a man of the world. Dan was always from Alabama, you know what I mean? He heard all those people calling him names, making those threats, and he was scared. He’d seen Black men get lynched.”

Is that the real reason Bankhead struggled with control? I don’t know. It’s certainly fair to be skeptical—Bankhead had control issues in the Negro leagues, too. But it’s a real reminder of the reality these guys were playing in. The cliché that Black players had to be “twice as good” is inspiring when applied to guys like Robinson and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, who really were that good. But the other side of “twice as good” is “half as many”; there were of course hundreds of players who were only “as good” and so nevertheless were kept out of the league even after the game was integrated.

But it’s not just that guys like Bankhead (and Thompson and Brown) were kept from maximizing their potential. Looking at these stories shows how these historic players were often treated like pawns by white people with power. Whether it was a well-meaning “white savior” like Veeck, a cynical capitalist Muckerman, or even Rickey, who was obviously capable of doing the right thing but just needed a pitcher that August, the players were subject to the whims of people in charge. Often, narratives of progress ignore the politics of power. Black Americans had indeed achieved new levels of power by 1947—there was a strong Black press and an emerging Black middle class—which explains why integration happened. But they obviously lacked the power over how integration happened, which was dictated by white owners and white managers. I suppose we could keep waiting for those classes to diversify, but 74 years after Robinson’s debut there has been shockingly little progress made on those fronts. In my view, it’s simpler to just liberate the working class…