When you look back at the process of desegregation, one thing that stands out is how much of it was done by just a few teams. Of the first 20 Black players in the Major Leagues, 14 of them made their debut for the Dodgers, Giants, or Indians (and a 15th, Hank Thompson, ended up with the Giants after just a month in St. Louis, as we saw in Parts One and Two).
It makes some sense that these teams would lead the charge. In Brooklyn, the Black population nearly doubled between 1940 and 1950, and Bedford-Stuyvesant was becoming a prominent Black neighborhood not far from Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played. The Giants, of course, played uptown, near Harlem, which had long been a center of Black culture in America. And Cleveland too was becoming a destination for Blacks leaving the American South.
But one city feels conspicuously absent from that list: Chicago. Chicago is often considered that capital of Black America, and by 1950 the city was over 10% Black, but neither the White Sox nor the Cubs had yet had a Black player, even though a dozen had already played in the MLB. In 1951, though, that changed.
1951
May 1: Minnie Miñoso of the Chicago White Sox
Minnie Miñoso did not make his debut with the White Sox—he was one of many Black stars who premiered in Cleveland. He came up in 1949, but the Indians didn’t really have a spot for him, and quickly sent him out to the Pacific Coast League. For the next two years, he put up amazing offensive numbers in the minor leagues, but Cleveland still did not have an obvious position for him, in part because of his reputation as a bad fielder.
Meanwhile, Frank Lane had taken over as General Manager of the White Sox. Lane had a bunch of fun nicknames—“Frantic Frank” and “Trader Lane” and “The Wheeler Dealer”—all stemming from his propensity for trades. In his six years running the White Sox, he made 241 trades. But at first he didn’t even want to make his best one. He was concerned about Miñoso’s defense, but his new manager, Paul Richards, had just seen Miñoso hit in the PCL and told Lane, “I’ll find a place for him. We’ll just let him hit and run.”
So Lane traded for Miñoso, who did indeed hit and run. In his very first at-bat for the White Sox, he hit a two-run home run against the Yankees. The next day he hit two doubles and knocked in another run. Four days after that he started stealing bases, his first two of a league-leading 31 that year.
Miñoso was an instant hit in Chicago, so much that the team held a “Minnie Miñoso Day” at the stadium before his rookie year was even up. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly fun player to watch. He ran constantly—too much, honestly, as he was caught stealing so many times that it likely negated the value of his 216 career steals. He crowded the plate so much that he led the league in HBPs for nine of his first 10 seasons. In 1956, he hit 18 triples—one of three times he would hit double-digits in that category. And on top of everything, he had a lively, colorful personality that made fans love him.
Despite Miñoso’s success and Chicago’s significance for Black America, the White Sox would not be known for their Black stars. They would trade for Larry Doby later in the 1950s, and add a few more Black players. But, aside from Miñoso, the only Black player to be among the White Sox career WAR leaders is Frank Thomas, who would not debut until almost 40 years after Miñoso.
Instead, in the 1950s the White Sox would be known for their Latin American stars. Chico Carrasquel, born in Venezuela, made the team the year before Miñoso, and would be the starting shortstop until he was supplanted by fellow Venezualan and future Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio. They also had Puerto Rican Jim Rivera in the outfield for most of the decade; Al López, their manager starting in 1957, was from Cuba.
As was, of course, Miñoso himself. The story of Latin American players in the MLB is a complicated one, both distinct from the plight of Black players and completely enmeshed with the process of desegregation. We’re about to get to a player who was caught between those two stories, but Miñoso is a key figure in both. He was an early hero to both Black players and Latin American ones.
And yet it was almost Miñoso’s destiny to be overlooked. In the history of Black pioneers, he was eclipsed by Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. In the history of Latin American players, he was eclipsed by Roberto Clemente. In the history of Chicago baseball, he was eclipsed by—well, we’ll get to that player later.
Miñoso never won an MVP. He never played in a World Series—the White Sox were perennial contenders once he got there, but always came just short of the pennant. They finally broke through in 1959—by which point they had traded Miñoso back to Cleveland, who finished second in the AL that year. Despite collecting over 4,000 hits in his professional career, he did not make the Hall of Fame, either when he was originally on the ballot, or when Cooperstown assembled its Committee on African-American Baseball in 2006. Last year, Joe Posnanski called him the greatest player not in the Hall of Fame. And while that seems like a stretch, there are few people whose careers meant more to baseball history than the first Black major leaguer in Chicago.
1952
Yet another year in which no new teams added Black players. But by this point the dam had broken. The number of Black players doubled in 1951. The National League had its fourth straight Black Rookie of the Year in 1952. The 1950 World Series would be the last ever played between two all-white teams. You would think at this point that teams would realize the value of signing Black players, but we are still seven years—hypothetically, a player’s entire prime—away from the last team integrating.
1953
April 22: Carlos Bernier of the Pittsburgh Pirates
If you ask Google who the first Black player on the Pittsburgh Pirates was, it will tell you: Curt Roberts, who debuted in 1954. That is also the answer you will get from the Pirates organization, and Major League Baseball. And it was the answer offered by Branch Rickey, who by then had moved from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh, and gave Roberts the same kind of preparation he’d given to Jackie Robinson.
But it’s not really the correct answer. Carlos Bernier, who was on the team for most of the 1953 season, was Puerto Rican, but he was also Black. In a testament to how “race” is a social construct, “Puerto Rican” was thought of as a race separate and distinct from “Black” and “white” at the time, similar to how “Irish” or “Jewish” were considered distinct races at various points in history.
Of course, that cannot be the whole story for why Bernier gets overlooked. After all, some Black players from Puerto Rico, like Nino Escalera, were recognized as breaking a team’s color barrier.
Part of the reason Bernier gets overlooked is that Blacks in Pittsburgh did not consider the team integrated in 1953. Indeed, Black civic leaders in the city were threatening boycotts and demonstrations if the team didn’t add a Black player prior to the 1954 season. Bernier had been identified as Black in the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s major Black newspaper, but these groups seem to have considered the color barrier unbroken until an American-born Black made the team.
The other reason for Bernier’s erasure is that he was something of a hothead. His career in the minor leagues was littered with suspensions and fines. He once started a brawl that had to be broken up by police. He slapped a minor league umpire in the face for using a racial slur. And while he avoided his most extreme outbursts while in the majors in 1953, The Sporting News still called him Pittsburgh’s “most temperamental player.”
His reaction to prejudice is often contrasted with Jackie Robinson’s—indeed, Bernier’s son would later say, “My father’s only shortfall was that he did not handle the injustices of society with the same grace as a Jackie Robinson or a Roberto Clemente. He was quite angry at the injustices and faced them head on.”
There is no doubt that Bernier faced more than his share of discrimination, but we should be wary of this false dichotomy between Robinson and Bernier. For one, Bernier’s outburst were not always at racial injustices—he once accused Vic Power, another Black Puerto Rican, of throwing at his head, and started a fight that cleared the benches. And there is some evidence that Bernier’s anger issues stemmed from a head injury sustained when he was hit by a pitch in 1948, leaving him with chronic headaches throughout his life. Indeed, he took his own life in 1989 after a post-playing career plagued by medical issues.
In general, though, we ought to be skeptical of the idea that only a certain kind of Good Minority could make it in the majors. For one, that’s exactly the logic that segregationists used to keep Black players out for so long. And we’ve already discussed other players, like Hank Thompson, who had anger issues but were still able to thrive in Major League Baseball. One point of this series to illustrate that, while we remember icons like Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, who had seemingly superhuman talent and character to play as well as they did when they did, much of desegregation was done by guys who were just guys. Players with elite but familiar skillsets and the same drawbacks that hold back players today.
It's also tempting to think of Bernier as a victim of Latin American players pitted against Black players, but it’s important to think beyond such divides. It’s not as simple as “The Pirates cut Bernier to make room for Curt Roberts,” and forcing that narrative onto events isn’t fair to either player. In truth, Bernier just couldn’t overcome the barriers he faced: After a hot start, his 1953 season was not very impressive. He hit .216 with almost no power, and he never made a major league roster again. By all accounts, he had talent, but trying to precisely pinpoint which barriers were based on him being Black, which were based on him being Puerto Rican, and which on random bad luck like a pitch to the head, is unlikely to be productive.
Curt Roberts, who got the spotlight, had a similarly uninspiring year in 1954, but he played second and didn’t have the personality issues Bernier had, so he stuck around a couple more seasons. By the time he left, the Pirates had called up Clemente, a Puerto Rican who, for whatever reason, did count as Black. But Bernier was first, and he deserves to be recognized as such.