Jackie Robinson and the Decline of African Americans in Baseball

While the reintegration of Major League Baseball was a massive victory for equality, the results wound up destroying the Negro Leagues and creating a setback for African American involvement in professional baseball. After signing Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey has often been regarded as a hero in civil rights. This gateway allowed Jackie Robinson to pave the way for many other African Americans and other non-white ballplayers to join the ranks of the Major Leagues. When discussing this bit of history, a less talked about fact is the impact this had on the Negro Leagues. By disregarding the Negro Leagues and signing Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey became the catalyst for the destruction of the Negro Leagues and, ultimately, the decline of African American participation in professional baseball.

In 1910, the African American Hilldale Club signaled the start of professional black baseball, headed by Edward W. Bolden. Year later, from 1916 to 1919, the Great Migration occurred. This period saw approximately 500,000 African Americans leave the south and move into more urban environments in the north. This, of course, resulted in increased African American populations in major northern cities. Examples include Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. These migrations helped lead to the rise of the first African American professional baseball leagues. First, the Chicago-based league headed by Andrew “Rube” Foster, the Negro National League in February 1920. The next league was lead by Bolden, the Eastern Colored League.
Unfortunately, African Americans generally saw economic misfortune by the mid-1920s. As a direct result of this, the Negro Leagues fell into a state of decline. Muc...

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...American ballplayer into the National League. Debunking this, Rickey instead retorted that he planned to improve the quality of African American professional baseball. Here, a new African American baseball league, the United States League, was announced. At the press conference, Rickey suggested that Major League teams could potentially recruit the top players from the U.S.L.
In his autobiography, Jackie Robinson discusses Rickey and the United States League. Robinson writes that while many people questioned and criticized Rickey’s intentions with the U.S.L., and accused Rickey of actually using the league to keep the Dodgers further away from integration, nobody knew his true intentions. According to Robinson, the true intentions of Rickey behind the U.S.L. were to begin actively searching for African American ballplayers to recruit for the Brooklyn Dodgers.