Before Jackie: How Strikeout King Satchel Paige Struck Down Jim Crow

Satchel Paige was pitching in the Negro Leagues in California when he got the news he had been anticipating for two decades. Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey had just signed a Negro to a big-league contract. The first Negro in modern times. Word tore through America’s clubhouses and grandstands that October afternoon in 1945: a black man was going to be in the minors, then the Major League. Jackie Robinson would topple baseball’s color bar. And Leroy “Satchel” Paige would not.

Earthshaking—almost like the emancipation of the slaves, integration supporters proclaimed. It was fitting “that the end of baseball’s Jim Crow law should follow the conclusion of a great war to preserve liberty, equality and decency,” wrote Lee Dunbar of the Oakland Tribune. A desecration of the natural order, segregationists shot back. “We live happier with segregation in athletics as well as all other activities,” argued Bud Seifert of South Carolina’s Spartanburg Journal. Bob Feller, the Cleveland Indians flamethrower with a golden arm and tin ear, told reporters that if Jackie “were a white man, I doubt if they would consider him as big league material.”

The public listened to the cacophony of voices, but the one it wanted to hear most of all was Satchel’s. What did America’s best-loved black ballplayer—the man everyone had assumed would be first—make of the Dodgers’ historic move? “They didn’t make a mistake by signing Robinson,” Satchel said. “They couldn’t have picked a better man.” The words ate at him even as he uttered them. Not only was he being bumped, he was being bumped by his Negro Leagues teammate, an untested rookie who could not hit a curve, gun a throw to first, or land the job as the Kansas City Monarchs’ second baseman until an injury forced out the incumbent.

The piece above is an excerpt. For more on Satchel Paige’s reaction to the breaking of baseball’s race barrier, please see the entire article in History Now, a publication of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.