Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (review)
Jackie Robinson’s appearance in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in the starting lineup on opening day at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, was a seminal event, not merely in the history of major league baseball but in the history of all baseball, all American sports, and the larger American society. Not only did it offer Afro-American baseball players who had labored for decades in rigidly segregated Negro baseball leagues the hope of enjoying the status and rewards of playing at the highest professional level, but it also gave dark-skinned Latinos the same prospect. And, as journalist Leonard Koppett observed, Robinson made “decent” white people aware of what they had been able to ignore and drew their attention to the inequities of a system in which lily-white baseball was only one small symptom.