ABSTRACT
The early years of professional baseball coincided with the emergence of segregation as an American institution. While the rules of play had become fairly standardized by the late nineteenth century, regulations varied from one league to another. With regard to the admission of blacks in baseball, only a patchwork of local decisions existed. During the 1880s, as many as two dozen blacks played on professional teams. A pair of brothers, Moses and Weldy Walker, played briefly with Toledo of the American Association (then a major league) in 1884. However, in 1887 a sequence of events–the folding of The League of Colored Base Ball Clubs (recognized as a minor league by the National League's National Agreement in 1879) and a growing crescendo of complaints by whites about their black teammates as well as segregationists (which led the International League to ban future contracts with blacks)–led professional baseball irrevocably down the path to Jim Crow. By the turn of the century, blacks could no longer be found at any level in the major and minor leagues.
