 Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon if you're on the east coast. My name is Peter Dreyer. I teach at Occidental College in Los Angeles. And I'm the co-author of these two books that you see here on the screen. Baseball Rebels, the Players, People, and Social Movements that shook up the game and changed America. And Major League Rebels, Baseball Battles over Workers' Rights in American Empire. Both of these books were published in April, and they're the result of about three years of research, but a lifetime of being a baseball fan. And I played in high school and college as well, but I wasn't that great. But I've always maintained my love of the game. And baseball is known as the national pastime. In the last several decades, probably since the 70s, baseball has had to compete with football and basketball, and to some extent, what we call a soccer, what the rest of the world calls football, and hockey for popularity, for attendance at both amateur and college and professional games. But baseball, more than any other sport, is intertwined with American history. It's the oldest game in America that way, organized game. And it also has a lot of mythology around it, a lot of interesting characters, and it's got a way of making people feel that they're more American. And when immigrants came to this country, beginning in the late 1800s, mid-1800s, baseball was one way that they could become feel more American. But baseball, like every other institution in America, is also intertwined with some of the uglier aspects of American life, particularly racism and economic injustice and American militarism. And it's also intertwined with the movements, the great movements of beginning in the late 1800s, that sought to make America a more democratic and fair and equal society, around issues of race, around issues of workers' rights and labor, around issues of women's rights, around issues of gender and homosexuality, and also around issues of America's role in the world, sometimes called foreign policy or empire or imperialism or militarism. And so our books are these two books that I wrote with my co-author, Rob Elias, who is a professor of political science at University of San Francisco. Both of these books are efforts to tell the story of the rebels, the players and the owners and the sportswriters and some managers who challenged the status quo both in baseball and in the larger society. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today. And I hope you'll find this interesting. I'm going to start with the issues of race in America. This week was Roberto Clemente Day and in April we had Jackie Robinson Day in baseball. And there is a prevailing story about race and baseball, which is partly myth that I want to talk about. Everybody in America probably knows the story of Jackie Robinson. It's been a subject of a number of movies like 42 a couple of years ago. Lots of books, a couple of plays, a lot of TV shows, including Ken Burns' documentary about Jackie Robinson. And most of them, not all of them, but most of them tell the story of two trailblazers, Jackie Robinson, the great athlete with an enormous amount of emotional resilience and Branch Rickey, the owner of the Dodgers, a great political strategist who had to figure out how to help Jackie Robinson overcome those obstacles. So it's a story of these two great men. And it's partly true, but it's also partly not true. And I want to tell that story, the not true story about what really happened to break down the racial segregation in American baseball. Jackie Robinson came on the scene for the Dodgers in 1947. But back after the Civil War and during the Civil War, there were a generation of black leaders in America, one of whom was this guy named Octavius Caddo, who were active in trying to bring about more equal rights for former slaves and slaves themselves. They were abolitionists. He was a real Renaissance man. He lived in Philadelphia. And he was a pioneer in the battle for racial integration, for education, for African Americans, getting voting rights for African Americans in Philadelphia. But for the purposes of our book and this talk, he was also the founder and the captain and the star player of a black baseball team called the Black Pythians. And they were mostly comprised of reasonably educated African Americans in Philadelphia, and they played other black teams. And while he was engaged in politics and doing what he could to address issues of abolition, Caddo was also somebody who used baseball to try to promote more equal rights and civil rights. They were a great team. And after the 1867 season in Philadelphia, Caddo petitioned the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Association of Baseball Players, which was one of the first leagues organized leagues to allow the Pythians to join the league. And they wouldn't even give them a hearing. So despite the fact that they were a great team, they weren't allowed to play in the white league. They weren't even voted. 265 white teams were allowed into that league, but not the Pythians. But he didn't give up. And he kept trying to get white teams to play the Pythians to see how they would size up against the better white teams. And he actually was successful in that. And he arranged for his team to play, attracted a lot of white and black fans to come to the games. They won some of the games. They lost some of the games. But the important point for history was that it was one of the first times where black players were treated, if not as equals, as at least talented enough to be on the same field. And at the time that was considered a victory. In 1871, four years later, Caddo was assassinated. Here's a painting of that on the right. When he was trying to get people to register to vote for an election, a mayoral election in Philadelphia. He was a martyr to the cause of black rights. But he saw baseball as an avenue, as a vehicle for giving black people in America pride in themselves and helping to educate white people that blacks were equal in both the baseball talents and in other ways as well. And there were black players, even though Jackie Robinson is often called the first black player in the major leagues, there were black players in professional, what we now call major league baseball, wasn't called that back then. And one of them was Fleetwood Walker. He's a catcher, the first black ball player in what we now call the major leagues in the 1880s before the Jim Crow system developed baseball. And after his career was over, which I'll mention in a second, he became a black activist in civil rights in the late 1800s. He was an inventor of both artillery equipment and film, and he opened an opera house, and he was an impresario, he was an entrepreneur. So that's Fleetwood Walker on the left, on the right in the middle is a guy named Bud Fowler, who played on a number of teams. He actually grew up in Cooperstown, New York, of all places where baseball was allegedly but mythically invented by Andrew Doubleday. And he played on a number of all-white teams until the segregation entered baseball. And just last year, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And so these two players, among others, played on otherwise all-white teams and did very well. But then this guy shows up, Cap Anson, who was the captain of the Chicago White Stockings, now called the Chicago White Socks. And he was a leader among baseball, white baseball players to basically ban blacks from baseball. And he was able to succeed in doing that in the late 1800s, which is why Fowler and Fleetwood Walker were the longer out to play. He basically said, if any black players play on another team, his team will break out the game, and the leaders of the league went along with it. So he's in the Hall of Fame, he was a great athlete, but he was also a segregationist. And if anybody gets credit for baseball segregation or the shame of it, it's this guy, Cap Anson. And if you go to the Baseball Hall of Fame, you'll see lots of things about him. But on his plaque at the Hall of Fame, it doesn't say he was the leader of the Baseball Segregation Movement. It talks about his statistics as a player and a manager. So having been segregated, African Americans started their own league. And the key figure in that is a guy named Rube Foster, who was a star pitcher in the early 20th century. He created the first Negro League, organized league, professional league in the 1920s, called the Negro National League, and became a Negro American League. He also became a highly successful manager and executive and owner of black teams. And he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981. There were no blacks in the Baseball Hall of Fame until the satchel page got in in the 1970s. And one of the people who deserves some credit for making that happen is Ted Williams, the great Boston Red Sox batter. Slugger, who in his induction speech to the Hall of Fame in 1966 basically said it's time to allow African Americans, the great players. He knew how great some of them were because he played against them in barnstorming games. Rube Foster was in the Hall of Fame in 1981. Somebody who's not in the Hall of Fame, but maybe should be, is this guy on the right named Frank Sykes. Frank Sykes was in the Negro League as a pitcher. He was a pretty good pitcher. He went to dental school at Howard University and he later became a dentist. But while he was a pitcher in the black leagues, he thought for better pay and better working conditions for the players. And in the 1920s there was a famous trial called the Scottsboro Boys trial where nine African American teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama and they were brought to trial. They were convicted by an all-white jury despite the fact that there was no evidence except the two women accused them. Turns out we've now learned that they were prostitutes and they were not raped or even had sex with any of those boys, but it was young men. But that's how they were accused. And there was a long trial. It got international attention. There were marches and protests all over the country called Frida Scottsboro Boys. And in there, one of their trials, Frank Sykes stood up and said that there were plenty of African Americans in this little town in Alabama who could be on the jury and he protested that they weren't on the jury. That was a very risky thing for an African American man to do back in the 1920s. He could have been lynched. He could have had his house burned down. He could have had his dental practice office burned down. But he did it and he was outspoken and very courageous for doing that. Eventually he moved to Baltimore from Alabama and started his dental practice all over again. But there were great stars in the Negro Leagues. Josh Gibson, the great catcher and slugger, satchel page, perhaps the greatest picture in the history of baseball. And Oscar Charleston, one of the great fielders and hitters in the Negro League baseball. And if you were an African American in America in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, or 50s, you knew about them and some of the other stars in the Negro Leagues. But if you were a white American and you were reading the mainstream white newspapers, you probably didn't hear about these athletes unless they came to your hometown and played in an exhibition game against your local semi-pro team or even a team of white all-stars, which they often did and usually beat them. Usually beat the major league white players in these exhibition games. So they were basically invisible to most of America, even though to black Americans they were heroes. Some people say that Josh Gibson was the black Babe Ruth. Other people say that Babe Ruth was the white Josh Gibson. He was that good. But there were some sports writers who did believe that baseball segregation was a mistake and that it should be dismantled. And two of the most important were these two columnists, Haywood Brun, who was a syndicated columnist for hundreds of newspapers around the country in the 30s and 40s, and Jimmy Powers who wrote a column, a sports column for the New York Daily News, the largest newspaper in America, and who was very outspoken. In 1933, both of them wrote columns and gave talks to the Baseball Writers Association that basically said that it was time if white people could cheer for Joe Lewis as heavyweight champion and African Americans like Jesse Owens could be, and others, including Jackie Robinson's brother, Mack, could represent the United States in the Olympics. It seemed silly for African Americans not to be able to play in the national pastime. And they were crusaders in their columns and that was rare among white sports writers at the time to integrate baseball. But perhaps the most influential and important sports writers who were part of that crusade were the sports writers for the many African American newspapers. Every major city in America had a black newspaper. Some had more than one. Some of them were dailies, some of them were weaklies. And they not only covered the Negro Leagues, but they also crusaded for integration. And among the most important were Wendell Smith, the guy on the left who wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier, probably the most influential black newspaper in the country. It wasn't just read in Pittsburgh, it was read all over the country. The guy in the middle is a guy named Joe Bostic who wrote for the Amsterdam News and Sam Lacey on the right who wrote for the Baltimore African American newspaper. And so they would interview white players and ask them how would you feel about having black teammates? And they wrote columns and investigative reports saying that most white players were okay with that. I'm sure that many of the players from the south and there were quite a few were not okay with it. But they basically tried to make the case that America was ready to integrate its national pastime and even many of the players on the teams in the major leagues would be willing to do that. Another important part of this crusade was the guy named Lester Rodney who was the sports editor of The Daily Worker which was the newspaper of the Communist Party which was never very big but in the 1930s he didn't have a following and he was actually quite an influential figure and he was relentless in his columns and in the articles that the paper covered to get major league baseball to integrate he and the black sports writers for the black papers would send telegrams to the owners and to the commissioner of baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis and say why don't you give black players tryouts for these teams? They would expose the hypocrisy of people talking about baseball as a national pastime and they would tell people about baseball American boys can dream about being major league players but a significant number of them who African Americans couldn't do that. They would organize petitions in front of baseball games and get people that over a million signatures on petitions demanding the integration of baseball. They lobbied politicians and as I said they interviewed white ball players who told them that they would most of them would accept black teammates on their teams. So probably the biggest obstacle to integrating baseball in the 20th century until Jackie Robinson was Kennesaw Mountain Landis who was the commissioner of baseball and it was often called the czar of baseball because he was very powerful the owners hired him in 1919 after the Black Sox scandal the corruption scandal where the Chicago White Sox fixed the World Series and lost it and he had almost dictatorial control and he was a committed segregationist. He would say publicly that there's no ban on black players in the major leagues it was up to each team but everybody knew and the sports writers knew and they said it in their stories that there was a gentleman's agreement that enforced segregation and would have punished any owner that hired a black player. Another key figure in this is Paul Robeson who in the 1930s and 40s was probably the best known African American in the country and around the world perhaps along with Joe Lewis the heavyweight champion and he was an outspoken progressive he was one of the few African American movie stars at the time and he was on Broadway, he sang opera he sang in over 50 different languages he was a leftist and the black sports writers asked him to come to a meeting of the major league owners in 1943 in Chicago and to talk to them about the need to integrate baseball the guy on the right in that picture there is Wendell Smith, reporter for the columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier and so they did invite him it would have been hard to say no to somebody as popular and well known as Paul Robeson so the owners invited Robeson to come and speak along with some of the owners of Negro newspapers black newspapers and Robeson basically said look if I can play Othello in the theater with a otherwise all-white cast then America can integrate its national pastime and he spoke for about 20 minutes there's a transcript of his speech you can find online it's mentioned in baseball Rebels and Landis had told them told the owners don't ask him any questions after his speech so they didn't so he spoke and then nobody asked him any questions and he left but it did get a lot of newspaper coverage and so all these things were ways of keeping this issue on the public's mind by drawing media coverage to the hypocrisy of segregation in baseball there were protests mostly by labor unions and civil rights groups back in the 30s and 40s this is a May Day parade in New York by a group of labor unions you can see that the march itself is integrated and it basically says admit Negroes to big league baseball that was they were protesting and they had pickets in front of Wrigley Field and Whiteside and Kaminsky Park in Chicago Ebbetsfield Paul Grounds Yankee Stadium in New York they even picketed outside Wrigley Field in Los Angeles which is where the minor league Los Angeles Angelos at the time were playing again this was an attempt to draw attention to the problem and to rally public opinion Bill Beck was a really fascinating character he was the son of the president of the Chicago Cubs and he always wanted to own his own baseball team and first he bought he borrowed money because he didn't have much of his own he bought the Milwaukee Brewers who were then a minor league team and when they went to spring training in Florida he sat in the black section of the stadium and the sheriff of this little town in Florida came out and said you can't sit there and he said if you don't let me sit here I'm going to move the team I'm going to move our spring training I'm going to try to get other teams to do that so the mayor and the police chief left him alone but it showed that he was a principal person around that issue so in 1943 he claims in his autobiography Beck as in rec that he wanted to buy the Philadelphia Phillies which had gone bankrupt and were for sale and so he made an offer from labor unions actually he raised money to buy the Phillies and his plan was to integrate the team and be the first team in the major leagues to have black players from the Negro Leagues but according to his autobiography he made a mistake and he told the commissioner what he was going to do he got on a train in Chicago to go to Philadelphia to sign the papers to buy the Phillies and by the time he had got to Philadelphia Commissioner Landis had already talked to the owner of the Phillies and arranged for someone else to buy the team and so Bill Beck did not get the chance to be the role that Branch Rickey now is famous for the person that integrated major league baseball now is this story true because Bill Beck is in his autobiography there's some dispute about whether it's true probably the leading baseball historian of our age and in Jules Tygo looked at the evidence and said he thought it was true but it's still controversial because Bill Beck was known to exaggerate about his own life but there were other people who were fighting this fight as well the Chicago White Sox during World War II used to train at a park in Pasadena, California which is where I'm talking right now it's my home in Brookside Park and there you see the spring training and there was a lot of agitation to get the White Sox from people in Pasadena and other places to integrate and so reluctantly the White Sox allowed two people who grew up in Pasadena to go a tryout at the White Sox at Brookside Park one of them was Jackie Robinson who just graduated just finished UCLA and Nate Morland who was a college student in Pasadena and who was a great baseball player so they had a tryout didn't get much media publicity this is a story they didn't get any publicity in the White Newspapers they kept it quiet apparently they did very well Jimmy Dykes, the manager of the White Sox said that that Robinson would be a great star he was able to play in the major leagues but they never heard from the team again once they had the tryout something happened very similar in 1945 Isidore Muchnick the guy on the left was a left wing city council member in Boston in Boston they had rules that said you need a permit if you're going to open your business on Sunday and sell liquor on Sunday so he threatened the owner of the Boston Red Sox that if you don't at least give some black players a tryout I'm going to make sure that the city council withholds your permit to play baseball on Sunday which of course was the day of the biggest attendance for the Red Sox and every other team and so again reluctantly the Red Sox held a tryout at Fenway Park and with the help of Wendell Smith they identified three players that they wanted to try out Sam Jethro Jackie Robinson and Marvin Williams who were all in the Negro leagues at the time same thing happened they had a tryout they all did pretty well but Jackie Robinson really did extremely well during the tryout and the hitting coach of the Red Sox also said you could do very well in the major leagues they had the tryout and they never heard of them again although Robinson became very friendly with Muchnick for the rest of his life and so think about this the Red Sox were the last team to have a black player in 1959 because the owner Tom Yocchi was one of the stronger racists among the owners in baseball but they could have been the team that first integrated if they had followed up with this tryout in 1945 but it took another two years before before that actually happened when the Dodgers hired Jackie Robinson in 1947 Sam Naham was a little known character in the history of baseball although we put him on the cover of our one of the people that we put on the cover of our baseball Rebels because I think he deserves to be better known he was a Jew from a Syrian background grew up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1930s he played both baseball and football at Brooklyn College and he was an okay pitcher not a great pitcher but it was good enough to get a contract with the Dodgers and then he played for the Dodgers he played for the Phillies he played for the St. Louis Cardinals he had an okay record but not a great record but his claim to fame for purposes of the story is that during World War II he was sent to overseas and he was with a unit on a military base in France and after the Germans surrendered in 1946 the military bases all had baseball teams and they wound up playing a European World Series lots of games that attracted 10,000, 30,000 people to their games and Sam Naham was asked to organize a team on his military base in France in a little town called Oise which is what's on their uniform so we did that most of the members of his team were minor league players was he and another major league player on the team a lot of them had been in college some had played semi-pro but he did something very unusual and courageous at the time the military in America American military was racially segregated and so were its baseball teams but Sam Naham who had been a radical in college and continued to be a radical and believed in integration he insisted that there would be black players on his team and he recruited two Negro League stars who were stationed in France one of them was Willard Brown who ended with a Hall of Fame and his wife never played one year in the majors and Leon Davis Leon Day a pitcher for the Newark Eagles the Negro League team and they did really well they were 17 and 1 and they got into the World Series and the team they were playing was General Patton's team called the Red Circles and they had 7 or 8 major league players but despite that in a 5-game World Series played in France and in Germany Sam Naham's team beat the General Patton's team with an integrated team and one of the more interesting side-lights to that is that the final game of the military World Series where Sam Naham pitched and his team won the World Series was played in Nuremberg Stadium in Nuremberg Germany which was the site of many of Hitler's Nazi rallies but the American soldiers got the got the German Christmas of War to build a baseball field in the middle of this Coliseum Nuremberg Coliseum Stadium and they changed the name from Nuremberg Stadium to Nuremberg Field and it's a little known but I think important story so that all laid the groundwork that was 1945-1946 in 1946 Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers minor league team in Montreal, Canada and the next year he was brought up to the majors and while he was a player he played for the Dodgers from 1947-1956 during that whole period he was an outspoken activist for civil rights he he spoke out against racism against segregation against the second class citizenship of African Americans against the segregation of the spring training facilities mostly in Florida at the time and he was speaking all the time about civil rights to high schools and colleges he really was the first professional athlete to use his platform to speak out about social justice and after his baseball career was over he became even more engaged he helped to start a bank in Harlem called Freedom National Bank which gave loans to black people who were denied loans by white owned banks started a construction company for low income housing he traveled all over the south going with Dr. King to civil rights rallies he raised money for the students who were arrested after the sit-ins in 1960 he was everywhere and he was still among the most popular people in the United States African American people in the United States politicians wanted his endorsement he was very well known but he was going to be controversial for the sake of of integration and he lived a remarkable but short life and he died at the age of 53 of both diabetes and a heart condition the final story I want to tell about integration took place in 1968 and it involves two people who have been in the news in the last couple of days many because it was the vertical many day on September 15th and Mori will it's the great Dodger base dealer who died yesterday Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4th 1968 that was the last day of spring training for Major League Baseball and the Commissioner of Baseball William Eckert said teams can decide for themselves what they want to play on the day of Dr. King's funeral almost every other sport at the time including race forcing and hockey canceled their games honored Dr. King but not baseball so it was up to each team and these headlines baseball corresponds traditional openers makes it sound like baseball postponed their games willingly but that isn't the truth the headline on the right is the truth Negro pirates won't play at Houston on Monday that story is the story of Mori Wills who at the time was an infiltrator for the pirates Roberto Comendi the first Latino superstar Don Cundenan had been friendly with Martin Luther King's family in Atlanta when he was growing up and Dave Wickersham a white picture for the pirates they called Wills and Comendi and Cundenan called a meeting of their black teammates there were more black players on the pirates than any other team and they said we're not going to play the day of and the day before Dr. King's funeral they were supposed to play in Houston on those days and they told the owner of the pirates and the GM general manager and then they called a meeting of their white teammates and they unanimously agreed they were not going to play on Martin Luther King's funeral day or the day before to honor him and that idea spread throughout Major League Baseball and eventually every team had a similar meeting and they all agreed not always unanimously but they agreed they weren't going to play on those days and the owners were furious but there was nothing they could do about it and that was in effect a wildcat strike or it was a strike over over wages or working conditions or pensions it was a strike over racial justice and everybody says the first baseball strike was 1972 but in fact that was a strike over justice over racial justice and that leads to the next topic which I'll go through very quickly which is we just came through a walkout of games while they were negotiating a contract with the baseball players union we sort of take it for granted now that there is a baseball players union but that wasn't always true and now as of last week there will be a minor league players union which is something I'll mention in a second so there were labor wars and baseball was founded and grew in the 1870s and 1880s and 1890s which was a period in America called the Gilden Age Titans, corporate Titans the Carnegie's, the Rockefellers the Fricks owned a lot of companies they were the wealthiest people in the world at the time and including J.P. Morgan the owner of the largest bank in the company and these big corporations were sort of riding roughshod over both consumers and over their workers and that was also true in baseball the first owners of these major league teams thought of themselves or acted like robber barons in baseball and the players the players didn't like that very often the owners would cut their pay in the middle of the season where they'd make them pay for their uniforms or they would make them pay for their own meals or their own hotels and they were treated very shabbily so in the 1880s this guy John Monkerm who was not only on the New York Giants baseball team he was an attorney who later became a championship golfer and in 1885 he started the first union of professional athletes called the Brotherhood of Baseball Players in 1885 to challenge what he considered to be the exploitation by owners who suppressed their wages and made them sort of slaves to their teams through the reserve clause which said they could be traded without their consent and they can't bargain with other teams to get a better contract so Ward was kind of the Moses that led the baseball players out of slavery at least that's what he hoped to do through a union and he had help and in the book Major League Rebels we talk about some of his co-conspirators Jim O'Rourke Tim O'Keefe Mark Baldwin and they were all influenced by what was going on at the time in America which was the rise of the labor movement and strikes and protests and they absorbed that in the larger culture and they also gave their support as celebrities some of the strikes that were going on Mark Baldwin was a supporter of the homestead strike outside Philadelphia outside Pittsburgh and so they even started their own baseball players league when the owners wouldn't negotiate a contract they started their own league called the players league it only lasted a year but it was their way of saying that we are going to control our own destiny they couldn't afford really to start their own league without outside investors and eventually the owners of Major League Baseball got to those outside investors to disinvest I'm going to skip a few things Danny Gardell was a player for the New York Giants who sued Major League Baseball over the right to be whether he could be traded or not he played in Mexico for a couple of years in the Mexican League for twice or three times the salary he got for the Giants but he wanted to come back and take some play and Major League Baseball had imposed a prohibition anybody who played in Mexico would come back and play in the American National League so he sued but he couldn't afford to keep playing a lawyer so he settled the Major League Commissioner settled with him and he won quite a bit of money but he didn't set a precedent because he never actually got ruled on in court Sandy Kovacs and Don Drozdor went on strike in the mid-60s to get a better contract they refused to play during spring training and that opened the eyes of lots of other players who weren't as big a star as Kovacs and Drozdor some of the other players who thought it was time to have a union in Major League Baseball were Robin Roberts and Jim Bunning to all-star pitchers and they recruited Marvin Miller the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association that players union had existed in the 50s but it didn't have any staff, didn't have any money and it was a paper tiger and it was under Miller that the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports was concluded he got better salaries and working conditions and health care benefits through educating and organizing the players in the 1960s and 70s and then in 1970 after Kurt Flottis started outfielder for the San Luis Cardinals got traded to the Phillies he said, I don't want to go to Philadelphia it's a southern town racist town I've got my family and friends and business opportunities in San Luis and he was an all-star he was a gold glove winner he didn't want to leave and he went to Miller and he said I don't want to leave I'm going to go to the contract and he said, well can I sue Major League Baseball and he said, sure you can sue but you'll lose and he said, I want to do it anyway so the players union agreed to back his suit in 1970 he sued Major League Baseball over the reserve clause that bit of indentured servitude that bound players to their teams two years later he watched the suit in the Supreme Court the Supreme Court ruled that Baseball was not a business and it was not an interstate business therefore it did not come under the federal rules about antitrust and collusion that had been passed in the 1890s and the Supreme Court had ruled in 1922 that Baseball was not a business and the Supreme Court in 1972 upheld that so Flood lost his lawsuit but he educated the public and he educated the players it doesn't have to be this way things that they had taken for granted like the reserve clause maybe we can change it and Miller figured out how to change it by getting two other players Andy Messer-Smith and Dave McNally to play without a contract in 1975 and then at the end of the year basically said well we don't have a contract so we are now free agents and an arbitrator an outside arbitrator ruled in favor of the players and that's how the reserve clause the form of indentured slavery got overturned Kurt Flood on the other hand his career was over he was blacklisted for Major League Baseball and he never played again played a couple of games but he never really had a career after that in baseball Marvin Miller retired after about 15 years of being the head of the Players Union and he was blacklisted from the Baseball Hall of Fame seven times Major League Hall of Fame which is basically controlled by the corporate owners of Baseball refused to let him in the Hall of Fame until there was a kind of movement a crusade to get him in by the Players Union and others and eventually in 2019 on the eighth try after he had already been dead for six years the Hall of Fame let him in the pandemic postponed the ceremony where he would be inducted posthumously and last year he was inducted into the Hall of Fame but in the last literally month there's been a whole other story another wave of Unionism by minor league players and that's because a number of minor leagueers formed an organization called advocates for minor leagueers included some former major leagueers most people don't know that minor leagueers have poverty pay about $20,000 a year terrible housing conditions many have mental health problems because of the conditions so this article in ESPN and last year was going to help to raise awareness but in 2014 minor league players sued major league baseball for violating federal minimum wage laws they get less than minimum wage actually and that got them angry and they organized and eventually earlier this year they won that suit in July and major league baseball agreed to settle for $185,000,000 to the minor league players that gave the players a sense we can win, we can do this so the major league baseball union agreed to organize them back in last year but it didn't get any media attention until a couple of weeks ago they joined the Anfravel CAO the national labor movement they began talking to players all over the country just about 5,000 minor leagueers on 120 teams around the country and last year last week they won the major league baseball agreed to accept the players association as the representative and bargaining agent of the 5,000 minor leagueers part of our book is about whether women have played in baseball I'm not going to go through a lot of detail about that except to say that women have always played baseball softball I mean baseball Alta Weiss, Lizzie Murphy were two of the great women players against all male teams in the early 1900s women on the right Jackie Mitchell played for a team a minor league team called the Chattanova Lookouts in Tennessee in an exhibition game she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were quite embarrassed by that as soon as she did that and it got a lot of headlines Commissioner Landis made a ruling that women could no longer play on minor league teams even though she was the only one at the time there was the All-American Girls Baseball League which has been made famous by the film 1992 film A League of Their Own Helen Cowhan was one of the star players that story in the movie was based on her sister there were two players in the All-American Girls Baseball League her son Casey Kandell is now the bench coach for the Toronto Blue Jays he was a major leaguer on three different teams in the 70s and 80s Gina Davis played the character one of the characters of the sisters not entirely a true story but based on a true story there were lots of stars the teams played from 1943 until about 1954 there were about 600 women that played in that league many of them were gay and the movie A League of Their Own did not talk about that but some of them did come out of the closet after their playing careers were over or in their obituaries they were moving with their partner we talk about that in our book Baseball Rebels there were three black women that played in the Negro Leagues that story is told in the new Amazon in the new Amazon TV series also called A League of Their Own which came out last month Tony Stone, Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan were the models for the black picture called Max in that TV series Little League Baseball refused to let girls play until some of them did play by cutting their hair and so forth but when they were found out they were kicked off the teams but eventually as a result of the women's movement and Title IX and growing awareness players, more women, more girls got to play in the Little League they had to sue in some cases to get access to the Little League games May Davis was a Little League pitcher who played in the Little League World Series and she was the first Little League player to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated and she now plays softball for a college team Illa Borders was the first woman to get a baseball scholarship to go to a play on an all male team in college then she played in the independent minor leagues for four years she was a pretty good pitcher not good enough to make the majors and she was quite a heroic figure she wrote a book about her experiences as well and again this movie that came out this TV series, seven part series that came out a couple months ago a month and a half ago tells two stories that weren't told in the original League of their Own one is about the sexuality the number of lesbians and how they were in the closet because the teams wanted the players to be all American girls they didn't want them to be known as lesbians we don't know how many lesbians but many of them were and the story about the races there were no black players ever in the All American Girls professional baseball league there are now black and women sportswriters Claire Smith for the New York Times was a woman umpire in the minor leagues who sued and she wasn't permitted to play in the major leagues, Pam Postema there is now a major league coach on field coach and there's other coaches, there's strengthening coaches in the majors Kelsey Whitmore is now a pitcher and outfielder for the minor league statin island Ferry Hawks and she played in Cal State Fullerton again she's playing baseball not softball there's now a woman general manager and a minor league manager in Tampa who's a woman there have been 20,000 players in the major leagues since 1900 none of them have ever come out as gay but two of them came out as gay after their careers were with Clint Burke and Billy Bean about it Clint Burke died of AIDS sorted in a tragic story Billy Bean was hired by Major League Baseball to be a vice president for inclusion and diversity and he still has that job actually every major league team except the Texas Rangers now it's a pride night there's a lot of gay people in the executive wing of baseball teams it's not great but even so no major league has still ever come out of the closet even though we know there are gay players but there are players that have played in the minors and come out of the closet including these three there's more than that but I just mentioned these three David Denson played AAA for the Milwaukee Brewers and just four weeks ago a minor league named Salomon Bates came out of the closet there were two gay umpires at least that we know of who come out of the closet Dale Scott and Dave Pullo and they have other written books about that experience I'm going to skip the role that American baseball has played against militarism of Vietnam and other American imperialism American colonialism of Latin America you can see some of the players we talk a lot about it in the book Major League Rebels Roberto Clemente was very outspoken about that just last week for the first time in major league history the Tampa Bay team put up on the field nine Latino players first time I said what happened and the book ends with today's Rebels I won't go into a lot of detail a lot of them are critical of Trump's immigration and asylum policies some of them refuse to go with the Red Sox and some players on the Washington Nationals and other teams refuse to meet with President Trump in the World Series in protest including these two players who refused to go to the White House Bruce Maxwell took a knee similar to Colin Kaepernick and his white teammate Mark Kanya Kanya put his hand on him to show solidarity a couple weeks ago Kanya made a statement on his Twitter feed about Pride Night and Gay Rights which is being very outspoken Sean Doolittle has been very outspoken on lots of issues that we talked about in the book Mookie Betts and Dave Kapler took knees in support of Black Lives Matter as did many other players and finally the one remaining issue in major league baseball that I think needs to be addressed are the sweatshop conditions in the factory in Costa Rica where all 1.2 million baseballs that are used in major league baseball are manufactured you can see a picture of the factory right there the workers get serious physical problems carpal tunnel syndrome it's very tough to sell a baseball and they do have to do it under enormous pressure and speed a couple years ago major league baseball bought a quarter interest in the Rawlings company and therefore a major league baseball there are 30 teams 25 of them are billionaires major league baseball owns a sweatshop in Costa Rica and it wouldn't cost them very much money to improve the working conditions improve the pay and to make it easier for these workers to improve their lives and hopefully the players association and others will draw attention to this this real tragedy and abuse that still hovers over major league baseball and we talk about that in some detail in our in our book so I would like to thank you for your attention and feel free if you have any questions to email me, my name is Peter Dreyer you can look up my name and teach at Occidental College in Los Angeles where you can find my email address I'd like to thank the archives for doing this for a generous of them I've been a big fan of the archives for many years I've used the archives at the presidential library in Austin, Texas, the LBJ library when I was doing some research it's been a real privilege to work with the archives on making this presentation and I appreciate your attention and if you're interested in following up and learning more about the things I raised in this talk I hope you'll buy the two books baseball Rebels and major league Rebels so thank you very much it's been a pleasure