How The Other Teams Integrated, Part Six: 1955

We have arrived, eight years into the integration story, at the New York Yankees, baseball’s preeminent franchise. Before 1955, the Yankees were an especially annoying holdout; their continued success undermined the growing narrative that Black players were necessary for a team to succeed.

Over in the National League, the two most integrated teams—the Dodgers and Giants—had mostly been trading pennants ever since they started adding Black players. In 1954, the Giants made the World Series while the Dodgers finished second, with the Braves, another team that had been integrated for years, in third. The Giants faced the Cleveland Indians, who were the first AL team to integrate and had won two pennants in the eight years since. Meanwhile, teams that had resisted integration, like the Senators, Athletics, Browns/Orioles, and Pirates, all finished near the bottom, in the second division.

But then there was the Yankees. In the eight years since Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier, the Yankees had won the World Series six times, and they had done so without a single Black player. Indeed, the Yankees were in the middle of a historic stretch of dominance. In the 42 years between 1921 and 1962, they made the World Series 27 times. During that period, there was never a four year stretch when New York did not win the World Series at least once, and multiple stretches where they won four in a row. It’s a run that will likely never be topped—imagine if the Tom Brady Patriots had lasted another two decades.

And they did it all without almost any Black players. Except for one:

1955

April 14: Elston Howard of the New York Yankees

Before we get to Elston Howard, though, we have to go all the way back to 1945, after the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson but a year and half before he took the field. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, in his last year in office, assembled a committee to study the issue of segregation in baseball, which included prominent baseball figures, powerful New York City political figures, and leaders in the Black community.*

*The New York Times story on the committee lists its members and includes all their of fancy titles (a presiding judge of Brooklyn’s Appellate Division, a Columbia University Professor, the former Democratic mayoral candidate), and then concludes with “and Bill Robinson, tap dancer.” When I read this, I actually laughed out loud. I had no idea who Robinson was, but I shouldn’t sell him short: Bill Robinson was a pioneering vaudeville performer who was likely the most highly paid Black entertainer of the early 21st century. He wasn’t without controversy—nicknamed “Bojangles,” he was criticized by many as an Uncle Tom, since his performances often indulged racist stereotypes about Blacks. On the other hand, he did a lot to advance civil rights, including staging the first integrated public event in Miami. Putting a prominent Black entertainer, who campaigned for integration but also had a history of setting whites at ease, makes total sense. A full account of Robinson’s legacy is beyond the purview of this post, but it’s an interesting reminder of the role that Black entertainers have always played in the fight for civil rights and equality.

The report issued by the committee applauded the Dodgers for signing Jackie Robinson and declared that the exclusion of Black players from the major leagues was due to “sheer prejudice and tradition.” The Yankees team president, Larry MacPhail, was on the committee, but he apparently did not like that conclusion, and wrote a letter to Mayor LaGuardia excoriating the report. MacPhail said the others on the committee didn’t know anything about baseball, and that ACTUALLY there were perfectly legitimate reasons to continue with baseball’s segregation policy. He wrote that, “Signing a few negro players for the major leagues would be a gesture which would contribute little or nothing towards the solution of the basic problem,” and that “There are few, if any, negro players who could qualify for play in the major leagues at this time.” He concluded by saying categorically that he had “no hesitancy in saying that the Yankees have no intention of signing negro players under contract or reservation to negro clubs.”

MacPhail’s views came much closer to representing the institutional views of Major League Baseball. A few months later, lines from his letter would appear verbatim in a league report that addressed the “race question.” That report would include a rather direct rebuke to the Dodgers’ signing of Robinson:

“There are many factors in this problem and many difficulties which will have to be solved before any generally satisfactory solution can be worked out. The individual action of any one Club may exert tremendous pressures upon the whole structure of Professional Baseball, and could conceivably result in lessening the value of several Major League franchises.”

In other words, “Slow down, Branch Rickey, before you wreck all our shit.” (For what it’s worth, MacPhail and Rickey reportedly hated each other.) This report and the letter MacPhail wrote are remarkably honest documents. They are as close to an Official Defense of Segregation as you will see, and they were both written by the Yankees’ co-owner.

Before the 1948 season, Del Webb and Dan Topping bought out MacPhail’s share of the team and promoted longtime scouting director George Weiss to General Manager. Weiss was less controversial and belligerent than MacPhail, but in some ways his racial views were worse. According to a 2009 biography of Yogi Berra, Weiss once announced at a cocktail party that he would never let a Black man play in a Yankee uniform. In public, he was more diplomatic, insisting that the Yankees had an affluent, Westchester-based fanbase that would feel uncomfortable with Black fans at games. Once integration was underway, Weiss insisted that the Yankees could only do it with the right player.

The first player of color the Yankees signed was Luis Márquez, a Black Puerto Rican added in 1949. Márquez had hit over .400 for the Homestead Grays in the Negro National League in 1947… but the NNL folded after the 1948 season, and his contract was sold to the Baltimore Elite Giants, of the Negro American League. Or at least that’s what the Yankees thought. They had bought his contract from the Elite Giants, but the Grays had sold an option on Márquez to the Cleveland Indians, which Bill Veeck claimed.

At the same time, there was a similar dispute between the Yankees and Indians over Artie Wilson, shortstop for the Birmingham Black Barons. Both fights went to the Commissioner, who split the baby, awarding Márquez to Cleveland and Wilson to the Yankees. So Márquez was out of the Yankee system after little more than a month. He would get called up a couple years later by the Boston Braves, becoming only the second Afro-Latino in the majors, but most of his career was spent in the minors.

Artie Wilson spent even less time in the Yankees organization than Márquez had. He did not appreciate the Commissioner’s decision—he’d chosen to sign with the Indians and had seemingly no interest in playing for the Yankees (who weren’t going to pay him as much), so he never even reported to New York’s minor league affiliate in Newark. He stayed in the Pacific Coast League, playing for the Oakland Oaks, until the Yankees traded his rights to the New York Giants in 1951. He started that season in the majors, but got only two starts in a month before being sent down to make room for Willie Mays.

The next near-Yankee was Vic Power, another Black Puerto Rican who you may remember from his fight with Carlos Bernier in Part Three. Power’s given name was Victor Felipe Pellot, but he started going by “Power” while playing in the Provincial League in Quebec, because “Pellot” sounded sexual to the French Canadians. And Power was a star in the Provincial League; Tom Greenwade, the Yankees scout who later spotted Mickey Mantle, had seen Power play in Puerto Rico, and after checking on his performance in Canada, he gave Power a Yankee contract.

Power actually stuck around in the Yankees’ system and hit well in the minors. By 1952, he was in Triple-A, hitting .331. But he was blocked at his natural position, first base, by Bill Skowron, so Power mostly played outfield. In 1953, he raised his average to .349, with some power, and people started expecting the Yankees to call him up. His hitting had caught people’s attention, and there was a sizable population of Puerto Ricans in the Bronx who were anxious to see one of their own make the team.

But executives like Weiss were wary of Power, who had grown up in Puerto Rico and spent time in Canada, leaving him somewhat unfamiliar with the American racial caste system. He was not used to all the ways Black players were discriminated against. At a restaurant in the South, when a waitress told him “We don’t serve Negroes,” he replied that was fine because he didn’t eat them. Power was also considered a flashy player since he made one-handed catches and waved the bat with his left hand while he waited for the pitcher. He said things like that were just how baseball was played in Puerto Rico, but they earned him a reputation. Even worse, he was known to date white women, which Weiss specifically criticized. “A lot of Black Puerto Ricans marry white women,” he would say. “I told them ‘Jeez, I didn’t know white women were that bad. If I knew that, I wouldn’t go out with them.’”

The concern, when people like Weiss spoke about Power publicly, was always about whether he could be successful. But indeed he was successful—he would have a productive 12-year career, mostly with the Athletics and Indians. But he offended certain white sensibilities in the Yankee organization, and it wasn’t as if the team lacked talent. They already had Mickey Mantle, Gene Woodling, and Hank Bauer in the outfield, who’d lead them to five straight World Series titles. Bill Skowron was ready to take over at first, and they still had Joe Collins. So Power was expendable, and he was traded to Philadelphia before the 1954 season.

That left Elston Howard. Howard had grown up in St. Louis and turned down football scholarships from multiple Big Ten schools to join the Kansas City Monarchs in 1948, when he was 19. He played with them for two and half seasons—it was his Monarchs manager, Buck O’Neill, who steered Yankees scouts towards him. Howard was signed in July of 1950 and hit nine home runs in 54 games in Single-A before the end of the year.

That fall, he was drafted into the US Army, and he missed the next two seasons. When he came back in 1953, he and Vic Power teamed up in the outfield for the Yankees’ affiliate in Kansas City, and while Howard’s numbers were not as good as Power’s, he did not have the baggage that Power had. Perhaps his years in the military had prepared him to work well with whites. Whatever the reason, once Power was traded, all attention turned to Howard as the guy who would integrate the Yankees.

Instead of bringing him up in 1954, though, the Yankees sent him to play for Toronto in the International League, where they would convert him to a catcher. This did not come completely out of nowhere—Howard had come to the Monarchs as a catcher, before moving to the outfield, so he had some experience. But it was still a curious move, as the Yankees already had Yogi Berra. Berra was arguably the best catcher in baseball (or, potentially, the second-best catcher in his own city, depending how you ranked him vs. Roy Campanella). He had already won an MVP award in 1951, and he was less than four years older than Howard, so he wasn’t exactly at the end of his career.

Many people, including Howard’s own wife, saw the move as a way of further slowing down his ascent. But Howard liked catching, and thrived in the International League, winning its MVP award and basically daring the Yankees not to call him up. During spring training in 1955, it was all but assumed that Howard would finally make the team. As Arthur Daley wrote in The New York Times:

“He seems certain to be the first Negro to make the Yankees. … They’ve waited for one to come along who [is] ‘the Yankee type.’ Elston is a nice, quiet lad whose reserved, gentlemanly demeanor has won him complete acceptance from every Yankee.”

But there was still the matter of Yogi Berra, who had just won his second MVP and was heading towards his third. So even though Howard finally made the team, he was still on the bench. His first appearance came in the second game of the season—he entered in the outfield after Irv Noren was ejected in the sixth inning. When he finally came up to bat in the eighth, he singled in a run. Howard’s first start did not come until the 14th game of the season, when he caught and hit cleanup—he had three singles and two RBIs. He started again the next day, but then sat for five games before starting in left field and going 4-6 with his first career home run.

It continued like that all year. Despite having delayed him a season to convert him to catcher, the Yankees only played Howard at catcher nine times that first year. He mostly split time in left and right field, starting a few times a week or being used off the bench. But you couldn’t keep Howard down. Despite the unconventional use, by the end of June, he was slashing .355/.408/.561, appearing in just over half the team’s games. He faded down the stretch, but still managed to be a key contributor on a pennant-winning team, and started all seven games of the World Series.

The next year, Yankees manager Casey Stengel told Howard he was going to catch more, and perhaps that was the plan, but Howard hurt his finger in spring training, and then was needed to fill in the outfield again, so he only caught 24 games. This would become an annual tradition: Every spring Stengel would announce that Howard would catch more, in part so the Yankees could preserve Berra by playing him more in the outfield. But then every year, Howard would barely play at catcher. In 1957, he caught 31 games; in 1958, thanks to an injury to Berra, he got up to 66, but then went back down to 42 in 1959. In 1960, Stengel finally committed to Howard as a catcher—he didn’t play the outfield at all that year. But injuries limited him to just 86 starts.

The other odd thing about Howard’s first years with the Yankees was that they resisted integrating any further. Typically, teams added a second Black player quickly after the first, often integrating two at a time to save money on hotel rooms (since Black players usually had to stay at separate hotels on the road). But the Yankees didn’t add a second Black player until trading for Harry Simpson in 1957, over two years after Howard first made the team—and Simpson was traded back to Kansas City just a year later. (Simpson would say getting traded to the Yankees was “the worst break I ever got.”) It wasn’t until 1959, when the team traded for Héctor López, that Howard would get a Black teammate who would stick around.

All this time, though, Howard found ways to contribute. In 1958, he hit .314 in limited at-bats. Then, in Game Five of the World Series, he made a diving catch in the outfield that he turned into a double play, saving the Yankees from elimination. After the game, he told reporters, “I’m no outfielder. I’m a catcher, but the manager put me out there and I had to do the best I could.” Then, in the last two games of the Series, he went 4-for-8 as the Yankees came back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Braves.

In 1961, the Yankees replaced Stengel with Ralph Houk (who had been Yogi’s backup catcher before Howard), and Houk finally gave Howard a real chance behind the plate. By now Howard was 32 years old; it was normal for Black players of that era to not get a chance until their 30s, but Howard had not spent his prime in the Negro leagues. He’d been on the Yankees for six seasons—his prime had been lost to the Army, the minors, and the bench.

Still, Howard made the most of his time. In the four years that he was the team’s regular catcher, from 1961 through 1964, he slashed .306/.354/.499. Those numbers are on par with Roy Campanella’s career numbers, and better than Berra’s. And remember: Those cover his age-32 through age-35 seasons. In 1963, at the age of 34, he won became the first Black American Leaguer to win an MVP award, leading the Yankees to another pennant. He nearly won the award again the next year.

By 1965, though, age finally caught up with Howard—and seemingly the entire team. The Yankees had their first losing season in 40 years. Howard missed over 50 games, and had an on-base percentage of only .278. It was the beginning of the bad times for the Yankees, who would go 11 years without getting back to the World Series. Two years later, Howard was traded to the Red Sox, where he didn’t really hit at all, but earned a single MVP vote for his leadership of the pitching staff, which supposedly helped turn Boston around in that Impossible Dream season. He retired after 1968.

I don’t see how you can look back on Howard’s career and not be depressed at the way the Yankees used him. It would be too harsh to say they ruined him, because Howard still managed to have a great career, but it’s impossible not to wonder what could have been. They jerked him around on playing time, changed his position, and kept him on the bench—all for what? To uphold some stupid mystique about the “Yankee way”? To satisfy a ridiculous idea of which type of Black person “Westchester types” wanted to see? It was all nonsense.

After Howard left, the Yankees would eventually integrate further, adding Black players like Roy White, Willie Randolph, and Reggie Jackson. But the Yankees, it must be said, are still behind on racial matters. The franchise has never had a Black manager. That’s somewhat common, sadly, but even worse are numerous incidents of Black players feuding with managers or executives, in ways that clearly have a racial component: Reggie Jackson vs. Billy Martin; George Steinbrenner vs. Dave Winfield; Joe Torre vs. Gary Sheffield; etc. Much of this stems from the bullshit idea of a “Yankee Way,” a fundamentally reactionary image of how players ought to be that persists today. When you start to get prescriptive about what kind of person can do the work, you are bound to alienate certain groups of people, whether based on race, gender, class, or some other metric.

The lesson people often draw from Elston Howard is that Black people could live up to the “Yankee Way.” But the lesson we should learn is that they shouldn’t have to.