Today, Major League Baseball is celebrating the 65th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the game. It is a wonderful opportunity to remember that it was the marketplace that initiated this collapse of racial barriers, not the state! While governments were still criminalizing inter-racial marriages, enforcing a variety of “whites only” ordinances, and forcing “back-of-the-bus” seating, owners of private businesses saw the profit-seeking advantages to their teams of employing talented black players.
This 1947 event had additional meaning to me. In the neighborhood in which I lived, a bunch of us guys had a sandlot team we called “The South-Side Bums.” One of our players — clearly the best player on our team — was the only black kid in our neighborhood. He — along with the rest of us — took pleasure in saying “the Brooklyn Dodgers was the first team to have black and white players; the Southside Bums were the second team to do so.”
