This year’s Major League Baseball opener is an upcoming Wednesday night game between the New York Yankees and the Giants in San Francisco. That game marks 150 years since the first official opening day, when the Boston Red Stockings defeated the Philadelphia Athletics on April 22, 1876. A great deal of major league history followed, both on and off the field.

Much of the latter was caused or influenced by the U.S. Supreme Court, like the court’s legendary 1922 ruling that Major League Baseball is not a business in interstate commerce (Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs).

That reasoning led to the major league exemption from antitrust laws. Given the size and breadth baseball’s coast-to-coast business, that decision was preposterous—then and now. Much of the court’s impact on baseball has involved racism—not only from the court’s influence over baseball but baseball’s influence on the court, perhaps even including the seminal Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. How could that be?

Before the first opening day in 1876, Chicago businessman William Hulbert founded a whole new National League that evolved into today’s major leagues. Hulbert already owned the Chicago White Stockings, which soon morphed into the National League Chicago Cubs (not the White Sox). Hulbert had serious issues with his team’s first league, so he gathered some of his friendly owners in New York City, and together, they launched the new National League.

No opening day was more significant than Jackie Robinson’s National League debut on April 15, 1947. Yet, even so, Robinson was not really the first to break the color barrier. His big league appearance was surely historic, but the Society for American Baseball Research estimates there were as many as 55 Black players in organized baseball during the late 1800s.

The first Black ballplayer on an otherwise all-white pro team is widely thought to be John “Bud” Fowler. Beginning in 1869, Fowler compiled a .309 batting average over 465 games. Another Black player, Moses “Fleetwood” Walker, played 42 games for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884. Because Toledo was in one of two recognized major leagues at the time, this made Walker the first official Black major leaguer.

For the next 63 years, there would be no other Black players in the majors. Robinson’s achievements on the field were indeed historic and part of a wider arc that reached beyond the majors, like on Feb. 13, 1920, when the Negro Leagues were born. This diluted the overall pool of qualified Black players for the professional ranks, and it probably also deflected arguments for including Black players in the majors much earlier than 1947.

The major league segregation policy had been boosted by Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court’s lopsided 7-1 “separate but equal” ruling of 1896. It gave cover, if not de facto permission, to maintain the all-white big leagues.

The majors made a point of excluding Black players from 1884 to 1947, a practice that longtime Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis denied until his death Nov. 25, 1944. In October 1945, less than one year later, the Dodgers’ Branch Rickey announced the signing of Robinson by their Montreal farm team. This date is not as celebrated as Robinson’s 1947 major league debut, but it was just as significant. And both milestones were set into motion by the death of Landis.

The integration of the major leagues was headline news wherever Robinson and the Dodgers played. He batted .297 in his first year and led the league in stolen bases. In 1949, he led the league in hitting with an impressive .342 average, he again stole the most bases, and he was named the most valuable player.

Seven years after that, the Supreme Court did the same for public schools with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling May 17, 1954. Was the Brown case about baseball? Not directly, of course. But the justices could not have missed the pervasive headline success of Robinson and those who followed like Larry Doby (Cleveland), Willie Mays (New York Giants) and Ernie Banks (Cubs). During his MVP season, Robinson batted .308 and led the league in on-base percentage (.440). Significantly, this was 1952, the same year that Brown was first argued (Dec. 9).

In 2003, exactly 100 years after the first World Series, Chicago’s Field Museum featured the official Baseball as America traveling exhibit. Around this time, I was introduced to former Negro Leagues players Johnny Washington and Hank Presswood. Both were living in Chicago. Johnny played for the Houston Eagles (1948 and 1950) and the Chicago American Giants (1949). Hank played for the Cleveland Buckeyes (1948-1950) and the Kansas City Monarchs (1952).

They were engaging, modest, fun and more than eager to share stories of their Negro Leagues days. More than once, I invited both to speak to my Sports, Law & Society class at the IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law. Johnny enjoyed telling how he was often nominated to get food for the entire bus of Negro Leagues teammates when they traveled to southern ball fields. Johnny had decidedly light skin, he said, so they sent him inside to pick up sandwiches for the rest of the team. He enjoyed laughing at that dubious honor. Even though the underlying tragedy remains inescapable.

Eldon L. Ham is a member of the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he has taught since 1994. He is also the designated legal analyst for sports radio station WSCR in Chicago and is the author of five books on topics of sports history. For more information, visit his website at EldonHam.com.

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