Peter Dreier
Sep 07, 2025

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson

The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.

^{peter-dreier (Common Dreams)}