ABSTRACT

At the time that Branch Rickey plotted to integrate baseball (and America), an entire society was against him. Jim Crowism was ironclad in the South, where Christian fundamentalism and the bitterness from losing the War Between the States and a slave workforce crystallized a caste system that called for Afro-Americans to be as invisible as possible to white society. In the North, even in New York City, that bastion of cosmopolitan liberalism, racism was more subtle but just as palpable. Jesse Owens, America's heralded hero against the Nazis in 1936, could not stay at the Plaza Hotel on his return. If you were black, you stayed in Harlem with your own kind.