Tags
baseball integration, Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Daily News, Oscar Charleston, United States League
ran an excerpt from Oscar Charleston yesterday, in which I discuss Oscar’s role scouting for Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Presumably the article provided readers with a welcome interlude between stories about headless corpses and dogs driving cars.
By spring 1945 two years had passed as Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, deliberately searched, to no avail, for the first black man to sign for his team.
Part of the problem, he believed, was that it was hard for his white scouts to show up at Negro League games without arousing suspicion. It was even harder for them to get accurate inside knowledge about the character and background of any given player. Oscar Charleston and a new black baseball circuit called the United States League (USL) provided Rickey with a solution to this twofold dilemma.
More here . . .
