Baseball Color Line - Sub Rosa Efforts at Integration

Sub Rosa Efforts At Integration

While professional baseball was regarded as a strictly whites-only affair, in fact the racial color bar was directed against blacks exclusively. Other races were allowed to play in professional white baseball. One example was Charles Albert Bender, a star pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1910. Bender was the son of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German father and had the inevitable nickname "Chief" from the white players.

As a result of this exclusive treatment of blacks, deceptive tactics were used by managers to sign African Americans, including several attempts, with the player's acquiescence, to sign players who they knew full well were African American as Native Americans despite the ban.

In 1901, John McGraw, manager of the Baltimore Orioles, tried to add Charlie Grant to the roster as his second baseman. He tried to get around the Gentleman's Agreement by trying to pass him as a Cherokee Indian named Charlie Tokohama. Grant went along with the charade. However in Chicago Grant's African American friends who came to see him try out gave him away and Grant never got an opportunity to play ball in the big leagues.

On May 28, 1916, British Columbian Jimmy Claxton temporarily broke the professional baseball color barrier when he played two games for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Claxton was introduced to the team owner by a part-Native-American friend as a fellow member of an Oklahoma tribe. The Zee-Nut candy company rushed out a baseball card for Claxton. However, within a week, a friend of Claxton revealed that he had both Negro and Native American ancestors, and Claxton was promptly fired. It would be nearly thirty more years before another black man-at least one known to be black-played organized white baseball.

There possibly were attempts to have people of African descent be signed as Hispanics. One possible attempt may have occurred in 1911 when the Cincinnati Reds signed two light-skinned players from Cuba, Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida. Both of them had played "Negro Baseball," barnstorming as members of the integrated All Cubans. When questions arose about them playing the white man's game, the Cincinnati managers assured the public that "...they were as pure white as Castile soap."

The African American newspaper The New York Age had this to say about the signings:

Nonetheless, regardless of the skin tone of the Cuban players, at the very least blacks of the United States were still banned from white baseball albeit if Marsans and Almeida were in fact black but light skinned then their successful breaking of the color barrier has gone unheralded.