Amy Essington - The Integration of the Pacific Coast League: Race and Baseball on the West Coast

This is a story about individuals who wanted to play a game they loved, baseball. For many years the game denied some of these players access to the sport because of their race. With pressure from the outside, the power structure changed, and those previously denied finally had the opportunity to prove their skills as professional baseball players. This book examines the integration of the Pacific Coast League, a minor baseball league in the three states along the Pacific Coast, from 1903 to 1957. While the PCL was not the first Minor League to integrate (that milestone went to the International League in 1946), it was the first league in baseball, at either the Minor or the Major League level, to have each of its teams include a player of color on its roster during the regular season. The integration of the PCL happened over five seasons, from 1948 to 1952. I began this project with the name of each player who integrated each PCL team. It became important to me to compile a full story of which players joined what teams and when and also to examine the process of integration in the PCL .

This is the first work to examine the integration of a Minor League. In Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South (1999), Bruce Adelson examined the integration of Minor Leagues in the South, but he focused on a region of the country, not on any particular league in the South. When we understand integration in a specific league, the roles of individuals in the process of integration become more apparent. By defining who decided when a team or a league would segregate and who decided when they would integrate, we can learn much about racism and the process of integration. In studying Major League Baseball ( MLB ), the answer to the first part of the question is usually Cap Anson, a player-manager who refused to play against African Americans in the 1880s, and the answer to the second part of the question is Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who signed Jackie Robinson to a professional baseball contract in 1945. The experiences of these two individuals, who are well known to integration history, do not tell the whole story. Integration was a process that involved hundreds of players on dozens of teams in tens of leagues across the country and over decades. If the story of integration ends with Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, we lose the story that happened to everyone beyond those two men and the larger understanding of integration in sport as part of the social movement for civil rights that grew and developed during and after World War II.