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“Satchel Paige was above race.” –Bill Veeck
Satchel Paige and Segregation
Blacks in Alabama
Leroy "Satchel" Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama. White lynch mobs murdered five blacks from 1906 through 1910 in Alabama. To continue the madness, in the spring of 1912, a policeman shot and killed a black man without cause. The Interdenominational Ministers Union had a meeting with city commissioners and requested "fair treatment and protection . . . by the authorities and the white people generally." In 1913 a black sociologist explained the "sharp cleavage between whites and 1Negroes, living and dead," in southern cities like Mobile. "With separation in neighborhoods, in work, in churches, in homes and in almost every phase of . . . life," he wrote, "there is growing up in the cities of America a distinct Negro world, isolated from many of the impulses of the common life and little known and understood by the white world. . . ."
*quotes found on http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3880/is_200304/ai_n9172973/pg_9
Jim Crow Laws
The Jim Crow Laws are laws that segregated whites and blacks. Here are a few examples of these laws:
Health Care
No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.
Transportation
All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races. The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.
Public Facilities
It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment. It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards. Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities."
*quote found on http://afroamhistory.about.com/cs/jimcrowlaws/a/jimcrowlaws.htm
Blacks in Baseball
While baseball was ahead of the curve in desegregating itself, it was also one of the first organizations to be segregated. Segregation in baseball started in 1884 in a minor league game between the Chicago White Sox and the Toledo Mud Hens. Toledo had one black player, and Adrian “Cap” Anson, one of the best players for the Chicago White Sox, refused to play on the same field with a black player. After that game the black players started to be kicked out of the minors because the whites refused to play with them. The MLB never formally banned blacks but the only way to the MLB was through the minors. Two Negro leagues were then created, the Negro National League and the Eastern Colored League. “In 1946, Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, who had long despised the color line, signed Jackie Robinson and placed him with the Montreal Royals of the International League. This was the beginning of the end of the Major League color line.” Robinson became a Brooklyn Dodger in early 1947. The next blacks in the MLB were Larry Doby and Hank Thompson, both also in 1947. Satchel Paige was signed by the Cleveland Indians in 1948, and in 1971, he became the first black player to be elected into the Hall of Fame who played primarily in the Negro Leagues.
*quote found on http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/history/mlb_negro_leagues_story.jsp?story=kaleidoscopic
1 Negro- African Americans, Colored people, blacks