Early Victories

During World War II, many Black Americans had supported the “Double-V Campaign,” which called on them to defeat foreign enemies while simultaneously fighting against segregation and discrimination at home. After World War II ended, many returned home to discover that, despite their sacrifices, the United States was not willing to extend them greater rights than they had enjoyed before the war. Particularly rankling was the fact that although Black veterans were legally entitled to draw benefits under the GI Bill, discriminatory practices prevented them from doing so. For example, many banks would not give them mortgages if they wished to buy homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods, which banks often considered too risky an investment. However, Black Americans who attempted to purchase homes in White neighborhoods often found themselves unable to do so because of real estate covenants that prevented owners from selling their property to Black buyers. Indeed, when a Black family purchased a Levittown house in 1957, they were subjected to harassment and threats of violence.

The postwar era, however, saw Black Americans make greater use of the courts to defend their rights. In 1944, an Black woman, Irene Morgan, was arrested in Virginia for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus and sued to have her conviction overturned. In Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946, the Supreme Court ruled that the conviction should be overturned because it violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. This victory emboldened some civil rights activists to launch the Journey of Reconciliation, a bus trip taken by eight Black men and eight White men through the states of the Upper South to test the South’s enforcement of the Morgan decision.

Other victories followed. In 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court held that courts could not enforce real estate covenants that restricted the purchase or sale of property based on race. In 1950, the NAACP brought a case before the Supreme Court that they hoped would help to undermine the concept of “separate but equal” as espoused in the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave legal sanction to segregated schools. Sweatt v. Painter was a 1950 case brought by Herman Marion Sweatt, who sued the University of Texas for denying him admission to its law school because state law prohibited integrated education. Texas attempted to form a separate law school for Black people only, but in its decision on the case, the Supreme Court rejected this solution, holding that the separate school provided neither equal facilities nor “intangibles,” such as the ability to form relationships and thus establish a network with other future lawyers, something a professional school should provide.

Figure 1. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson (a) was active in the civil rights movement. He served on the NAACP’s board of directors and helped found a Black-owned bank. Alice Coachman (b), who competed in track and field at Tuskegee University, was the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

In 1953, years before Rosa Parks’s iconic confrontation on a Montgomery city bus, a Black woman named Sarah Keys publicly challenged segregated public transportation. Keys, then serving in the Women’s Army Corps, traveled from her army base in New Jersey back to North Carolina to visit her family. When the bus stopped in North Carolina, the driver asked her to give up her seat for a White customer. Her refusal to do so landed her in jail in 1953 and led to a landmark 1955 decision, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, in which the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that “separate but equal” violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Poorly enforced, it nevertheless gave legal coverage for the Freedom Riders years later and motivated further challenges to Jim Crow.

Groundbreaking Athletes

Not all efforts to enact desegregation required the use of the courts. On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, playing first base. He was the first African American to play baseball in the National League, breaking the color barrier. Although Black people had their own baseball teams in the Negro Leagues, Robinson opened the gates for them to play in direct competition with White players in the major leagues. Other African American athletes also began to challenge the segregation of American sports. At the 1948 Summer Olympics, Alice Coachman, a Black woman, was the only American woman to take a gold medal in the games. These changes, while symbolically significant, were mere cracks in the wall of segregation.

The long reach of jim crow

Figure 2. Topps Jackie Robinson baseball card, No. 10, 1954. In 1949, Robinson and Cleveland Indians’ Larry Doby and Satchel Paige became the first black players to appear on baseball cards. Baseball cards were introduced in 1886 by Allen and Ginter Tobacco Company, which packaged their cigarettes with picture cards of sports figures.

As in other aspects of postwar American life, the world of sports was often segregated by race. Irrespective of individual talent, Black players were limited to the teams of the Negro leagues, an organization with roots in the late nineteenth century. In 1946, Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey began scouting the leagues for a player of exceptional ability that he might sign. Complicating his goal was the system of laws and rules known as Jim Crow that relegated Black Americans to a separate and unequal position in much of the United States. While part of Jim Crow was based on laws enforceable by the state, another part was a matter of social convention and dubious “tradition,” such as the imperative for a Black man to step off a sidewalk to make way for White passersby. While there was not necessarily a law requiring such deference, as indicated by the “Whites Only” signs in certain sections of a 1950s Alabama bus, for example, the deeply embedded racism that informed such conventions was every bit as destructive and demeaning. Given that these non-judicial segregationist norms existed in a grey area, it is all the more striking when they were upheld in situations when they might instead have been waived or at least challenged without legal consequence.

 

After Rickey brought Jackie Robinson onto the Montreal Royals, a part of the International League and a farm team to the Dodgers, Robinson was likely unsurprised to be denied restaurant service or a seat on segregated buses in the environs of Sanford, Florida, where his team was beginning spring training. At one point, Robinson and his wife, along with another Black player and several journalists from the traditionally Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, had to be relocated from a Daytona hotel where they were under threat to the more secure private home of an accommodating Blak family. Elsewhere in Florida, Robinson was unable to play baseball, as owners called off games, locked ballfields, or called the police when he took the field. In some instances, these actions were supported by Jim Crow laws; in others, they were judgement calls made in the moment and based on nothing more than hateful social norms.

 

The long reach of Jim Crow could also intrude abroad, where its legal status was tenuous but its stubborn durability in the form of simple prejudice was often a given. When Robinson went to Cuba for a Dodgers and Royals training camp, he and other players of color thought they would be comparatively better treated, but Rickey still put them up in sub-par lodgings away from the finer hotel of the White players—not because he had to by law, but because he wanted to avoid the possibility of local confrontation. Later, while playing a series of exhibition games in the the Canal Zone of Panama, legally United States territory within a foreign country, Robinson found himself subject to Jim Crow laws and was required to lodge outside of the Zone where these laws did not apply. Even when traveling in a foreign country and for the sake of one’s livelihood, the jurisdiction of Jim Crow could still do its insidious work on a technicality.

Desegregation would come slowly to professional baseball, with the Boston Red Sox becoming the last major league team to sign a Black player in 1959.