It was not an issue for blacks or whites, at least not as it related to professional baseball

Also absent in coverage buy cheap fifa 15 coins throughout the period is any discussion of integration. It was not an issue for blacks or whites, at least not as it related to professional baseball, not yet. The pendulum of race had swung so dra- matically toward separation that the black press and baseball’s “magnates” busied themselves with building up the sport as a business and not directly challenging, in historian Donn Rogosin’s words, “the inherent irrationality of American segregation.”93 The newspapers, too, were focused on pro- moting the interests and welfare of the black community as a discreetly separate world within a world, socially, culturally, and economically seg- regated from the mainstream.94 One of the only references to the exclusion of blacks from “organized baseball” was made by the Courier’s Ira Lewis in Vann’s short-lived monthly Competitor magazine. Lewis observed that major league baseball seemed to approve of Cubans, “provided they do not come too black,” Chinese, Indians, “and everyone else under the sun . . . except the black man.” He mused that “Perhaps, some day, a Regular American baseball man will establish a precedent—maybe.”

Even on the many occasions when Negro league teams and squads of major leaguers played against each other in exhibition games, the hypocrisy that black players were prohibited from playing in the country’s “National Game” drew little mention, much less debate or protest.96 These exhibition games for the black press were instead reasons to celebrate since getting the two colors on the same field was more important in the 1920s.

The emphasis on building up fifa coins black baseball and, more generally, on improving the lot of black Americans perhaps explains also the lack of criticism regarding the practice of many major league teams to hire blacks as trainers and mascots, and only as trainers and mascots. It is possible that these subservient roles fueled racial prejudice, and they most certainly helped to foster stereotypes that later players, including Jackie Robinson, would find difficult to break. In the 1920s and 1930s, trainers served only as equipment managers, with no medical, nutritional, dietary, or physical training responsibilities whatsoever. Even these limited roles were impor- tant to the black community, however. Bill Buckner, a long-time trainer for the Chicago White Sox, was portrayed as a sort of hero in the pages of the Defender, which ran features on the black barbershop owner and reported on his travels with the Sox. When he was reappointed the Sox trainer in February 1922, fans flooded the Defender with letters of congratula- tions.97 In March, when Buckner accompanied the Sox to spring training, he reported back via the Defender on the “plentiful” Ku Klux Klan buttons worn by residents of the Lone Star State.9