We are nearly at the end. After Elston Howard made his debut for the Yankees, as documented last week, there were only three teams left to be integrated. Alas, the process still took four more years.
1956
This would be the last year of Jackie Robinson’s Hall of Fame playing career. The previous season had been bittersweet—the Dodgers won their first World Series, but Robinson had the worst season of his career. He bounced back somewhat in 1956, but he was already 37. The Dodgers traded him to the Giants after the season, and Robinson announced his retirement. (He’d decided to retire before the trade.)
In the story in Look Magazine announcing his retirement, Robinson lamented that there were still teams in baseball that had not yet had a Black player. Indeed, not a single new team integrated in the 1956 season. The remaining teams would need protests, boycotts, public pressure, and even lawsuits to finally add Black players to the roster. In an interview on Meet the Press after his retirement but before the start of the ’57 season, Robinson was asked whether civil rights organizations like the NAACP weren’t moving too fast.
“You know, I heard that… when I was out in Pasadena, California, trying to get into the YMCA: ‘Take your time. Be patient.’ Patience is fine. I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens. ‘Be patient,’ I was told as a kid. I keep hearing that today, ‘Let's be patient; let's take our time; things will come.’ It seems to me, the Civil War has been over about 93 years; if that isn't patience, I don't know what is.”
1957
April 16-22: Chico Fernández and John Kennedy of the Philadelphia Phillies
The Phillies’ primary role in baseball’s integration story will always be as antagonists. That is mostly thanks to Ben Chapman, the Philadelphia manager who famously heckled Jackie Robinson with racial slurs in Robinson’s rookie season. The story plays such a prominent role in the Hollywood narrative of integration because it is the kind of racism that is easy to condemn: vicious, ugly, and personal in nature.
But Chapman would be out of baseball by the next year, and yet segregation continued for over a decade...
The Phillies would also be the last all-white team to win the National League pennant, in 1950, and the last team in that league to finally integrate. They only did so in 1957, rather unceremoniously. The guy who usually gets credit for breaking Philadelphia’s color line is John Kennedy, who’d been invited to spring training that year after time with the Kansas City Monarchs. Kennedy had a good spring, but would appear in only five games, three as a pinch runner and two as a defensive replacement. He was hitless in two at-bats and got sent down to the minors in early May.
But the guy who was blocking Kennedy at his natural position was Chico Fernández, who they’d brought over from the Dodgers in the final weeks of spring training. Fernández was born in Cuba, and although he was light-skinned, he considered himself Black. Indeed, a story in the Philadelphia press from that month referred to both players as the “Phils’ Negro players.” We saw this in Pittsburgh, where an Afro-Latino player, Carlos Bernier, was overlooked by history in favor of an American-born Black, Curt Roberts, who is credited as the first Black player on the Pirates.
That omission was explained in part by Bernier’s reputation as ill-tempered, and Roberts’ better public persona. But in this case, the guy getting the credit, Kennedy, was gone within a month, and never made the big leagues again. Fernández, on the other hand, started almost every game at shortstop for the Phillies that year. He couldn’t hit much at all, but he was a decent fielder and came back the next year. Alas, his hitting never improved (it got worse, actually), and his defense regressed, so Fernández was traded to Detroit before the 1960 season. While he never hit enough to contribute much value, he played until 1963, and is remembered as a pioneer of Latin American players. So it’s a little odd that he doesn’t get credit as the first Black player on the Phillies. (As we will see, the next player on our list faced almost the same circumstances, but DOES get the credit.)
By the time Fernández was traded, the Phillies had added more Black Latin American players. In 1959, they’d hired John Quinn as their General Manager. Quinn had been GM for the Braves when they signed Sam Jethroe and added Hank Aaron, so he had no qualms about using Black players, and would actually be a decent advocate for players of color, pulling his team out of hotels that refused to serve Black and Latin American players with whites. The next contending Phillies team, in 1964, included not just Latin American players like Tony Taylor and Tony Gonzalez, but also the first American-born Black Phillies star, Dick Allen, who won Rookie of the Year that season.
1958
June 6: Ozzie Virgil, Sr. of the Detroit Tigers
John Quinn’s role in Philadelphia is a great illustration of a theme of this series, which is how often simply changing the guy in charge of hiring made all the difference. It’s important to be careful about this lesson—I don’t want to endorse a kind of Green Lantern theory of desegregation, whereby some white savior can force integration through sheer force of will. And neither should we downplay how persistent and endemic racism was during the era of desegregation.
But whenever baseball executives were asked why segregation persisted, even though there was no official rule enforcing it, they gave answers about how powerless they were in the face of racism. “We can’t desegregate,” they would say. “The white players will revolt! The fans will stop coming to games! Racism is just too powerful!” You still hear defenses like this, that emphasize the permanence of racism, whenever people suggest certain policies to address racial disparities.
Except that when baseball teams finally DID integrate, none of the things owners predicted actually happened. This is not to say that it was easy, of course—baseball’s Black pioneers faced lots of obstacles, as we’ve seen. But the players did not react the way owners said they would. There were no serious walkouts or strike attempts. Some racist white players grumbled and mistreated their Black teammates, but for the most part they were accepted. Fans did not abandon the game—in fact, attendance increased in the years after segregation.
The issue, in other words, was not that racism was some mystically powerful force that could not be defeated, but that the people empowered by the system were free to abuse that power in a racist way with no penalty. One of those people was Tigers owner was Walter Briggs, who owned the Tigers from 1935 to his death in 1952. Briggs was a racist in both personal and systemic ways. In 2017, his great-grandson wrote an op-ed reckoning with his family’s past, including not just the Tigers’ delayed integration, but the horrible working conditions faced by Blacks in his factories. When he died, in 1952, control of the team passed to his son, who also showed no interest in adding a Black player.
The team was sold in 1956, and while the new owners were no civil rights hero, they were at least amenable to pressure. By then, the Tigers had a few Black players in their minor league system, but most of them were years away from the big leagues. Before the 1958 season, the team traded for Ozzie Virgil, who’d been a utility player for the New York Giants. That year, prominent Black leaders in Detroit formed a Boycott Committee to pressure the Tigers to finally integrate. Initially the committee set a deadline of May 7th, then announced plans to start a boycott on June 1st, and then delayed it again—the committee seems to have been somewhat ad hoc and disorganized. But on June 5th the Tigers called up Ozzie Virgil.
Of course, the team insisted that the timing was just a coincidence. General Manager John McHale said, “Look at the standings. We needed help at third base.” And there was some truth to this: Detroit’s third baseman before Virgil was Reno Bertoia, who was hitting .235/.273/.315 when the team called up Virgil to replace him. There were also some activists who were not mollified by Virgil’s inclusion on the roster—Virgil was Dominican, not African-American, and some didn’t consider him Black enough. Virgil himself reportedly told people, “I’m not Negro; I’m Dominican.” Nevertheless, the boycott was called off and Virgil officially broke Detroit’s color line.
Virgil started his Tiger career on an eight-game hitting streak. In his first game in Detroit, he went 5-for-5, bringing his early slash lines up to .327/.351/.473. But Virgil couldn’t sustain that production—he was never much of a hitter—and his offense dropped off dramatically over the next month. By August he was back in the minor leagues. That left the Tigers without a Black player once again. They would trade for Larry Doby that offseason, giving them their first African-American player in 1959. But Doby was near the end of his Hall of Fame career, and he didn’t contribute much. He also was off the team within a month.
The Tigers would not have a Black regular until Jake Wood in 1961—by this measure, they were worse than the Red Sox at desegregating. Virgil, meanwhile, would get another shot in 1960, before getting traded to Kansas City the following year. He bounced around the majors and minors for the next decade, before undertaking a long career as a coach. Eventually he would be recognized for his role as a pioneer—he was the first in a wave of Dominican-born players in the major leagues. But his role as Detroit’s first Black player was difficult and contentious. The removal of someone like Walter Briggs was enough to get someone like Virgil on the Tigers roster, but not enough to really set him up for success.
1959
July 21: Pumpsie Green of the Boston Red Sox
Elijah “Pumpsie” Green’s story is one of the stranger stories in baseball history. For one, nobody seems to know where the nickname “Pumpsie” came from. Green himself said his grandmother gave it to him, but he didn’t know why. Even stranger was the way Green broke the Red Sox color barrier.
The blame for Boston’s long resistance to integration usually falls on then-owner Tom Yawkey, whose reputation has fallen considerably in recent years. Whereas once Yawkey was respected for investing money in the team and staying out of the press, he is now remembered as a racist. Jackie Robinson once called him “the most bigoted man in baseball.” Current Red Sox ownership has distanced themselves from Yawkey, getting the city of Boston to rename the street outside Fenway Park formerly known as “Yawkey Way.”
As with so many attempts to reckon with the country’s racist past, there is a way in which this is true and a way in which it is an attempt to cover things up by blaming a scapegoat. It is certainly true that Yawkey stood in the way of racial progress. The mere fact that he was a sole owner of the last team to integrate is enough to say he was a racist. But he did not act alone. There are some people who try to turn these discussions into debates over whether Yawkey was “personally racist,” but discussions of racism should focus on power, not personal feelings. Yawkey had the most power, but he was not all-powerful.
In fact, Yawkey ceded control of most baseball operations to his General Managers, first Eddie Collins and then Joe Cronin. It was Collins who oversaw Boston’s 1945 sham tryout of Sam Jethroe, Jackie Robinson, and other players from the Negro leagues, after first telling a Boston city council member that:
“I have been connected with the Red Sox twelve years and during that time we have never had a request for a try-out by a colored applicant . . . It is beyond my understanding how anyone can insinuate or believe that ‘all ballplayers regardless of race, color, or creed, have not been treated in the American Way’ so far as having equal opportunity to play for the Red Sox.”
And it was Cronin who refused to sign Willie Mays and never traded for any Black players, even after the leagues integrated. Yawkey hired both of them, and certainly bore responsibility for their choices. But focusing on his (or their) personal feelings misses the point.
Which brings us back to Pumpsie. Green had grown up in Oakland and joined the Pacific Coast League after college. His contract was purchased by the Red Sox in 1955, and they asked him to report to their minor league affiliate… in Montgomery, Alabama (the team was literally named “the Montgomery Rebels”). Green declined, staying in Oakland until 1956. By that time Boston had both he and pitcher Earl Wilson in their minor league system, but it was in no hurry to bring either player to the major leagues. Wilson was drafted into the Marines in 1957, slowing his development, and leaving Green as the player most likely to break Boston’s color line.
Once Virgil debuted in Detroit, leaving the Red Sox as the last team to integrate, it seemed like a fait accompli that Green would soon be called up. In September 1958, the Red Sox added Green to their 40-man roster—he’d been in their system long enough that they risked losing him otherwise.
That’s when the weirdness started. First, when Green reported to spring training with the Red Sox, he ended up staying in a separate hotel, 17 miles away, because the team hotel was in Scottsdale, where Black people could not stay overnight. On its own, this was not that unusual. Major league teams often refused to stop staying in segregated hotels even after they integrated. What made it odd was that the team had made no accommodations for Green—there were no other Black players at camp for him to room with—and then lied about it, telling the press that all the hotels in Scottsdale had simply been booked by “tourists.”
Eventually, Green would stay with the Giants, who had a team hotel in Phoenix. When the Red Sox flew to Texas for a preseason exhibition with the Cubs, Green again roomed with the opposing team—Boston had again not chosen an integrated hotel.
Despite such a rude welcome, the Red Sox seemed happy to have Green. The organization touted his performance. The media treated him like one of the bright spots of spring training, and implied it was a foregone conclusion that he would make the team. Indeed, General Manager Bucky Harris seemed to tell reporters that Green would be on the Opening Day roster just a few days before it was released.
But then he was sent back to the minors. This was such an obvious slight that the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination opened an investigation into the team. The investigation was damning, uncovering the fact that, “With one brief exception, the Red Sox had never hired a black person anywhere in the organization, even in the most menial position.” It also exposed rumors that manager Pinky Higgins, who was quoted once as saying ““There’ll be no n------ on this ball club as long as I have anything to say about it,” had overruled the General Manager about putting Green on the Opening Day roster.
The MCAD found probable cause of discrimination, but its power was limited. It entered into negotiations with the team, but they couldn’t do much to stop the Red Sox from dragging their feet. The formal agreement reached on June 12th was tepid, relating mostly to finding integrated accommodations for spring training in 1960. But, according to MCAD member Walter Carrington, they also received a verbal commitment from the team to call up Green, who was having his best year yet in the minors, before the end of the season.
On July 3rd, Boston fired its racist manager Pinky Higgins (really, they moved him to a new role within the organization, but he no longer controlled on-field decisions). Then 18 days later they called up Green, and he got almost a hero’s welcome. The Boston Herald ran a photo of him and Ted Williams in the dugout on the front page. After a long road trip, the team flew his wife to Boston to meet him when he got back. It was as if the team had not spent years actively resisting adding him, and not ultimately required a court order to call him up.
Joe Cronin, who was now the AL president after years as the Boston General Manager who refused to trade for Black players and had kept Green in the minor leagues so long, acted like this was his idea all along:
“I’m happy over Green’s elevation. I hope his play has improved sufficiently so that he can stay up here for a long time. His advance has been part of a long-range program in the Red Sox organization. Through it all, Pumpsie has conducted himself as a very fine young man.”
It’s a pretty galling reminder of how the people who perpetuate a racist system will also take credit for ending it the minute it’s over.
A week after Green’s debut, the Red Sox also called up Earl Wilson. Wilson’s career got off to a slower start—he only pitched in nine games that year, and would get sent back to the minors in 1961—but ultimately Wilson became a fixture of the Boston rotation, before getting traded to Detroit, where he won 22 games in 1967.
Green did not have that longevity. While he walked a lot, he never hit for power and his defense was shaky, so he never quite locked down a spot in the Red Sox infield. He played for Boston through 1962, splitting time at shortstop and second base, before getting traded to the Mets, who sent him down to the minors early in 1963. He never got back to the big leagues again.
Later in life, Green, who died in 2019, would speak proudly about his role in the team’s history. But he also acknowledged the nagging uncertainty about what getting caught up in the desegregation fight did to his career.
“Sometimes it would get on my nerves. Sometimes I wonder if I would have even made it to the major leagues if it had not been for this Boston thing. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been better off it was not for the Boston thing. Things like that you can never answer.”