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Brian C.Here's an important image from a 1905 Wesleyan University Yearbook. It pictures the baseball team with coach Branch Rickey (top left) and African American catcher Charley Thomas (center). The team traveled in Spring 1904 to Indiana to play Notre Dame. The hotel refused to permit Thomas to stay there. Rickey persuaded the hotel to let Thomas sleep on a cot in his room. Thomas is said to have wept and wished that he could turn his skin white. Years later, Rickey would tell that story and say that he vowed that other Americans would not suffer the same humiliation. Forty two years after this photo was taken, in 1947, Rickey would sign Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract.
