ABSTRACT
The discipline of history consists mainly of political and intellectual history, but social history deserves not to be neglected, and baseball is certainly part of that social history. Recent celebrations of Jackie Robinson's fiftieth year as a major league baseball player will go far, I hope, to remedy that neglect. Robinson was named by Life magazine in 1990 as one of the one hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century and I doubt anything has happened in this last decade that would make Life feel its judgment was premature. I
Still, it will not in the slightest diminish the significance of Jackie Robinson's achievements as a trailblazer who did more for integration than even the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Kansas decision for people to learn that he was not the first black man to play major league baseball. That he was not first, however, is a very little known fact, and it may be worth our while to put that fact in historical perspective.
