Racism and baseball cards
 

This isn't looking to start a firestorm, but an interesting question was brought up to me

In the early post war card years (say 1948-1950) integrated baseball was still a touchy subject. It's possible many collectors at that time might have refused to keep cards of certain players. Could that have had an impact on the survivor numbers of those player's cards?

I guess that possible. No one could ever confirm.

Here's a blatant racist card made by a card company (Gad in 1963)

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/T1wAA...aF/s-l1200.jpg

Some racist imagery on the Mungo card’s cartoon.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...a1f720a911.jpg

I was told by an authority on the topic that cards of African-American players in the 1949 and 1950 Remar Bread sets were tougher to find because some distributors refused carry them.

A lovely Pele rookie.

Counterpoint:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...io%20etc_1.jpg

Nice Adam, I expect this thread will degrade quickly. Can someone please post a card of Mr. Rickey.

Chris,
Absolutely correct. The Remars were distributed one player per week, free of charge, in most East Bay Area (Oakland) markets. However there are period collectors that lived in upper middle class areas (Kensington, Berkeley Hills, Piedmont for example) that do not remember seeing any cards of the black players being distributed at their local markets.

In diverse, middle class areas, such as the Berkeley flatlands, Richmond and East Oakland, all of the players were distributed at the local markets. I don't think the issue was with Remar Bakery, as owner Peter Pedersen sponsored around 100 youth baseball teams in and around Oakland beginning in the 1930's as part of the Remar Baseball League. The problem was likely with a few individual grocery store owners that either disagreed with integrating baseball, or that some of their customers may have been offended.

Three of the cards pictured were definitely tougher to acquire when I first started to build Remar sets 50 years ago. (Woods was the toughest for me to initially acquire) The Wilson card was likely printed in larger quantities due to his popularity with fans, and despite the absence from some retail markets (maybe 5-10%), other markets were likely given larger quantities, and the kids could grab as many as they wanted. Wilson, the last .400 hitter in the Negro Leagues also went on to become the PCL batting champ in '49 with a .348 average.

Mark

And it is still effected today as many collectors will not buy cards of Cap Aanson because of his history of Racism

I had not thought of this, the (for lack of a better term) virtue signaling of commenting on historical dislikes of people long dead seemingly effects the market more now than the current issues of the past. I would believe it does reflect stronger today. Some of the nonsense Stump published on Cobb seemed to affect pricing until many saw through the charade, the movie was a travesty.

That said I am sure there were isolated incidents such as noted on the Remars, but I doubt they were largely embraced. I would think it would more largely affect the pioneers of each sport far more that just players after the fact. If a true issue, then Jackie Robinson should be the most discarded and I see no discernable truth of that.

As a Cubs collector, Anson's issue is more powerful than simple racism.

Many people and players were racist at this point in time as it was socially acceptable, but Anson wielded his power and influence to institutionalize racism as an operating procedure in the game.

That's a major reason racist like Jimmy Ryan is in the somewhat recently created Cubs Team HOF and Cap Anson isn't.

Boxing provides a useful perspective on this because only boxing sets had cards of black athletes in decent numbers in the Jim Crow era.

There is a definite shortage of four 1910 T226 Red Sun boxing cards: Jack Johnson, Joe Gans, Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford. All were black fighters. No hard evidence as to whether they were short printed by the Louisiana company or simply thrown away when found, but there are very few of each in existence today. FWIW, I do not think it coincidental that every black man in the set is affected and given how few of these cards are out there, I think the intentional SP hypothesis is the more likely one. After all, those fighters were on numerous sets in the 1895-1912 period and those cards are not in such insanely short supply. They are found in the same approximate quantities as the other cards in the sets, which does not indicate a pervasive race-based trashing of cards.

There are numerous examples in boxing cards of black men being treated equal to white men with whom they competed. The most abundant boxing cards from 1921-1948 are Exhibit cards, and there were many black fighters in those sets. Although there was a form of gentleman's agreement after Jack Johnson's reign that kept the heavyweight title in a racial lockdown for 22 years, in 1937 Joe Louis won the title, a full 10 years and a world war before Jackie Robinson's debut. It seems to me that in boxing cards, with rare exceptions, if the man was given a chance to compete and did well, he was respected. Look at the back of the 1948 Leaf Louis card, which says Louis is "considered greatest heavyweight of all time."

At about the same time, the same parent company super printed Jack Johnson for T218 as the sole superprint in the set.

Eracism

Does anybody know if there's a difference in population of the 1916 Zeenut Jimmy Claxton card with respect to any other common 1916 Zeenut card? My thought is that if there's a huge known difference, then it's very possible people discarded the Claxton card due to his heritage. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess there's a higher population of graded 1916 Claxton Zeenut cards (than other players from that year) due to the notoriety of the card.

What about the N172 George Treadway cards? I've found those come up for auction at about a normal pace as other common cards. The price has gone up a little and that's probably due to the information available to the collecting public about the discrimination he suffered. He had a heck of a season in the National League in 1894.

These blotters were just the sort of thing I collected when prewar cards started to get beyond my reach. I can't believe that they are now $2500 items.

Interesting topic. I doubt it was a major issue considering the early Jackie promos with Old Gold Cigarettes and Bond Bread. That's definitely an outlier considering the circumstances with him at the time. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of cards for other african-american stars at the time... just think about the Campy, Doby, Paige (doubt his SPs were a result of his race), Doby cards from about the same time.

To me, the biggest travesties are the fact that Campy cards are drastically undervalued to this day. I don't think it has anything to do with racism but how can a 3x MVP in a major market, on a storied franchise, with an amazing story, have early cards available for peanuts is beyond me. Also, it's a real shame that the average american still doesn't know who Larry Doby is. At least he got into the HOF while he was living.

Larry Doby was a neighbor of mine in Montclair, NJ. I'd say 3/4 of the people in town had no idea who he was. Terrible. His son Larry Doby, Jr. does a wonderful job keeping his legacy alive.

If you looked at the top 50 or so cards that are discussed ad infinituim on this board you would have a difficult time imagining that African-Americans have been in MLB since 1947 or that they are any good at the sport. Just sayin.

Adam, that is all true about the Boxing cards of the 1920s.

But I also have a bunch of those cards, largely Jewish boxers, and the backs of those cards say "Nationality: Hebrew" or "Nationality: Hebrew-American."

Seriously? I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that the first time!

This seems far from true. Jackie, Mays, Aaron are what, 3 of the top 8 or so guys collected?

Pretty cool that Monclair had Doby & Yogi living there

Fully agree....

Larry Doby debuted with the Indians a mere 11 weeks after Jackie Robinson did with Brooklyn. Just 11 weeks difference, and virtually nobody knows who he is!

Here's a video we did a while back that deals with vintage pennants, but same basic topic as is being discussed here. Perhaps some of you will find it interesting. Here's the link...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US1RRRSWzNE

Hi Adam, I always lived the t9s. Sadly I sold before the prices went ballistic. Anyhow, they were a.premium and hand ordered , so is there any evidence the black boxers were ordered less frequently? I only remember hearing Johnny Marto was difficult. A short Italian who likely identified as Caucasian for those who don't know the set

Oh ya what about prewar ? Eh?? Eh????

Except that if you look at the other fighters, they are frequently identified via race or ethnicity as well in the card bios. Ethnic rivalry was great for the box office. It wasn't a denigrating call-out to identify a fighter by race or religion or nationality, it was actually good business. Jewish fight fans, for example, were rabid and numerous, and they would actively support their co-religionists. There was even some attention paid to the fact that Jack Dempsey had a Jewish great-great-grandmother (he mentions it in one of his autobiographies), and Max Baer wore the Star of David on his trunks, ostensibly in honor of a Jewish grandfather but mostly because it was really good business to be seen as a Jewish heavyweight. Italian-American fighter Salvatore Mandala changed his ring name to Sammy Mandell to sound more Jewish. Jimmy McLarnin was nicknamed "Jew Killer" because he KOd a number of HOF Jewish fighters. He got KTFO'd by my cousin, Ray Miller, another Jewish fighter.

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...Miller%203.jpg

Ray in turn lost the battle of Chicago Jewish lightweights to HOFer (and war hero) Barney Ross:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...s%20Poster.jpg

T226 - the black fighters are short printed.

T218 - one of the 4 black fighters is the only superprint.

All other T card sets from the ATC - no evidence of super or short printing of black subjects. If anything Johnson, Langford and Jeanette appear to be more common than most but I don’t think anyone has been able prove the printing was uneven (the ability to request doesn’t necessitate different print runs or mixing sheet layouts; they reserved the right to substitute cards for what was on hand). Johnson appears to me to be the easiest subject in the entire set by a wide margin.

Jackie. Mays. Aaron. Clemente. Paige. Black players + Mantle absolutely dominate the most popular postwar vintage cards. This claim is complete fiction.

Awesome story about your cousin, Adam, and nice anti-racist memorabilia!

Valid points about the cards, although I have not seen any other hyphenated cards, like "Roman Catholic-American", "Muslim-American," or "Protestant-American." I have also seen Jewish-American. But what confounded/amused me was to refer to someone as "Hebrew". Maybe it was a sign of the times, and maybe that is how we were referred to, but I thought that language was last used by the Pharaohs! I had thought that its usage in the early part of the century leaned toward the derogatory (but maybe it's just me).

I love Campy's cards and there are some great ones. Here's my favorite:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...63f12e98_c.jpg

There were many cards that identified the fighters with hyphenates. Here is "Irish-American" Tommy Loughran:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...20Loughran.jpg

The only religious call-outs were the Hebrews. There is also this Exhibit wrestling card from the 1930s:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi.../Levin%202.jpg

It is the only card in that series that uses a religious label.

Different times and different sensitivities.

Seems to me that we've had a gradual move towards the groups in question setting their own terms of reference, and resetting them over time. Check the cards of the black fighters: "colored" was the phrase of the day. "Hebrew" was one of the polite terms used at the time. Abe Attell was nicknamed "The Little Hebrew". There were a lot more derogatory phrases available to describe "Hebrew" fighters, same as there were for "colored" fighters. It's all contextual. I mean, when I grew up "Negro" was archaic but not impolite--your grandma would use it--but the word of the times was "black". That's what I was taught to use. That held true for about 25-30 years or so. In Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing (1989), the characters didn't tell each other to "stay African-American", they told each other to "stay black"; that was the term in 1989. About 15-20 years ago, the term "African-American" picked up and my "black" usage was considered archaic and even somewhat demeaning. I switched it up. Recently, it went back to "black" because African-American was too USA centric, and I was told by my Gen Z kid to switch it up again. I am sure Jackie Robinson would have been just fine to be called a "Negro" in 1947; lord knows he was called a lot of other things. In 1977, it was different, and it woud have been mildly offensive. Not punch in the mouth offensive, but more like drunk uncle at Thanksgiving offensive.

So true....

and a few religious circa 1940s, Mel Ott, blotters ...

"The 1948 baseball photo with a radical message of acceptance"
 

This interesting, really good read about Larry Doby appears in today's Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sport...-world-series/

I think the Wash. Post permits non subscribers to access one article per day (or per week) before it invokes a paywall. If I am wrong, please LMK, and I'll cut and paste this piece.

As a chronicler of the whole history of Cubs baseball cards, the Anson thing is incredibly tough for me. Anson was a huge star and would be the perfect grandfather of Chicago baseball, except for that whole "who he was" thing. I don't ignore his cards, but instead lean into the Anson/Banks contrast. Anson perpetuated the color barrier and Ernie Banks, at least for the Cubs, broke it. Ernie looks even better in comparison.

And I definitely support the team's decision to leave him out of the Cubs HOF. Now if they would just put in Wild Bill Hutchison and Bill Nicholson.

cards
 

and then there were those mid 60s " tract " cards....they were called-
with a religious slant

THIS is beyond words, especially for a product made in Minnesota.

In the late 1960s baseball digest magazine when profiling Major League prospects would routinely include the players race.

Yeah, ask Buzz Aldrin about this. Second man on the moon, minutes after Neil Armstrong.

Maybe a little closer to home, Barry Bonds might make the list.

/ducks while people throw stuff at me.

This is an interesting historical observation.

Thanks.

While I wasn't a true Chicagoan (I didn't live in the city) but I spent a great deal of time there and worked on the north side for several years, I had never heard of Sparta Stadium. I had to look it up and didn't realize that there was a stadium at this location.

This was a pretty cool little sports "nugget" of history. Next time I am that way I need to pay more attention and celebrate what used to be there.

I'll preface this saying that I'm not explicitly saying this card is "racist", but my teenage son was sorting some cards a couple months ago and brought to attention the back of Hank Thompson's 1950 Bowman card. He said, in more words or less: "Was it okay to use the term 'Negro" that loosely?" 1950 was 30 so odd years before my time so without getting in too long of a lesson that night my best response was "well the cards were made for kids to sell bubble gum so yeah... that was pretty tame and kosher for the time." It also gave me a nice segway to start teaching him more about the Negro Leagues as we have since then.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...2e01b71a_z.jpg

Lots to unpack in this thread. I missed it originally so I am glad it was revived.

For one thing that Stahl-Meyer Campy is awesome for sure.

The Larry Doby talk reminded me of my tour of the NLBM in KC a few years back. Was part of a small group lucky enough to be have the director, Bob Kendrick, lead us around. He had a lot to say about Doby and what he went through. It was quite the tour.

Back in the day, set collecting was something a lot of the kids did. So, even if the racist ones pulled black players from the packs, they still had to keep them, right ?? :D Even the doubles of black players were probably kept (so they could be traded away for the players you needed to complete the set!)

And Rizzuto


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Rizzuto lived in Hillside, NJ
as Ted Z used to comment about

Continuing with Doby...

Doby actually got his start in baseball with integrated semi-pro teams in New Jersey. He played in the Passaic-Bergen League with the Smart Sets in 1941 and Curtiss-Wright in 1942, and with Glen Rock of the Bergen County League in 1942.

He was considered the greatest all-around athlete in the history of Eastside HS (Paterson NJ) and on February 19, 1942, there was a large banquet held in his honor. On July 12, 1943, the his former team the Wright Aeros held "Larry Doby Day" for him (though he couldn't make it to the game as the Newark Eagles booked a game for that day last-minute.)

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by "loosely." To my knowledge, in 1950, the word 'Negro' was not offensive in any sense whatsoever. That didn't come until much later. The U.S. Supreme Court still routinely issued opinions, into the mid-1980s, using that term (not quoting from earlier sources but simply as a description of a person's race). Of course they were out of touch with what was standard in the '80s. But it's an indication for what was standard language when the then-elderly members of the Court were much younger.

Here is the back of the 1936 WWG DiMaggio

Indeed. I'm actually prejudiced against players without caps but I still keep their cards in my collection with the others.

While the word may be unfashionable these days, it's still very proper and must not therefore be considered offensive. Ask the distinguished gentlemen behind the United Negro College Fund.

If you looked at the top 50 or so cards that are discussed ad infinituim on this board you would have a difficult time imagining that African-Americans have been in MLB since 1947 or that they are any good at the sport. Just sayin.

Stop it Karine Jean-Pierre. Fake news. Mays and Jackie are arguably as popular, to collect, now as Mantle and Ruth. Aaron and Jeter are up there as well.

1911 t9 Turkey red Boxers were ordered by the customer. Are there any lower pops among the players?

Love the boxing items you show about your cousin.

As for Jack Johnson, I know he dated white women and flaunted it. I saw a documentary on him that insinuated his love preferences affected his boxing career. Would that affect card sales and manufacturing?

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Johnson is the only superprint in T218, his green card issued in two series, and I believe printed on its own sheet. He’s also the most common T9

Exactly!

The argument can be made that he was the most popular boxer in the series...yet racism

SMH

Being popular at entertaining doesn't mean an absence of racism. It's constantly explored in media, books, and movies. "Do the Right Thing" has a rather straightforward examination of it.

When it comes to cards, especially given the eras being discussed when it comes to manufacturers and businesses, it is worth exploring the availability and distribution of cards of players of certain ethnicities. This is an era where even drilling down on whiteness was a thing, Jewish/Irish/Italian/etc.

The card industry has a hard enough time trying to figure out who actually put out sets, their history lost and only partially discovered by putting it's discussion out in the wild to try to piece together more clues about what was going on at the time.

It is absolutely on the table to discuss the availability, popularity, and distribution of cards during a racially weird era of being an American.

Ignoring discussing these things is a disservice to our history and how Americans decided to be a society during this era.

Something I know you know, but others seem to forget, is the way that the leagues were really separate entities back then. The AL and NL did not play each other, other than the World Series. And there were AL fans and NL fans.

Larry Doby was 11 weeks after Jackie Robinson, but that understates his reality. No teams that Doby had played against had played against Jackie Robinson or any other black player in an official game (they may have in Spring Training of interracial barnstorming game). In basically every situation he entered, Doby was the first, in the same way that Jackie was. The only difference I am aware of is the level of national coverage.

Additionally, Jackie's entrance into the game was far more orchestrated. In 1946 he played in Montreal which was specifically chosen for its general acceptance of black people. He also always had a black teammate while there, initially Johnny Wright and later Roy Partlow (I think I may be forgetting one other). He had a year in the Minors to prepare for the Major League experience. Doby, on the other hand was thrown in, all alone, with little prep and no teammate.

I've been looking for a Doby pre-MLB (edit: Type I) photo for a while (military or Negro Leagues). So far just have this...

Jack Johnson definitely was the most popular subject in 1910-1911. They super-printed him when they got his contract signed (America Lithographic was the film distributor for the Johnson/Jeffries fight and I presume but have been unable to conclusively prove his contract rights were secured at or around the time of that contract - Johnson was not part of the first batch of image rights the lithographers secured, but another African-American, Joe Jeannette, was). They even redesigned the T3/T9 checklist late in the process just to squeeze Johnson in, and also added him late to T218-1, going to quite some effort to include him at all, and then even more to superprint him across 2 series.

It is also definitely true that T226 short-printed the black subjects to a very heavy degree, I would just say that is the exception to the rule rather than the rule. A black subject is the sole t218 superprint and black subjects are printed regularly in T9, T218, T219, C52, T118, T220-1, T220-2, T223, T225, T227, and probably others I'm not thinking of off the top. At the same C. 1910 time, black subjects are in E75, E76, E77, E78, E79 (Johnson is on 3 of the 21 cards) and E80, without any rarity or SP'ing either. T226 is the only example of T card short printing of black subjects. It's the odd one out, the exception to the pattern.

T226 is one of the sheets I would most like to discover or piece together because it's probably very unusual. Red Sun, despite what baseball collectors have said, was not a regional Louisiana brand (just as Mecca was not a New York regional brand because the factory was there), primary source documents make it clear and obvious it had broad distribution and availability. Regional brands really only existed in the ATC on a temporal basis, test markets for new launches - successful brands got distributed broadly. A lot of things could be the reason for the short-printing, but that the 46 white subjects are printed normally and the 4 blacks very abnormally are clear. Its a shame, because I realistically am only going to have a complete set of the white dudes for T226, would be great to uncover documents telling us or pointing to the answer for this sets SP'ing but my archival digging has not produced them.

Well said. I love Jackie Robinson, and not to diminish him and all he endured, I just never have understood why Larry Doby isn't revered as well. I know someone had to be the first, and that's Jackie Robinson. I just feel Larry Doby is somehow glossed over.

+1

People think of Larry Doby as having had barriers broken down for him by Jackie Robinson, but as you point out, because the AL and NL were so separate, the players and fans in the in the AL basically treated Doby as the 1st to break the color barrier.

Doby was also overshaded by a different Robinson--Frank Robinson became the 1st black Manager in 1974, and four years later, Doby became the 2nd black Manager (for the White Sox).

Umm, that is because this is the prewar (i.e. pre-integration) card section. Postwar cards are found in the Postwar Card section and if you look at the pre-1980 section there you will see vibrant, ongoing, long-term threads on Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson. In the post-1980 section there are ongoing threads about Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Larkin. No shortage of discussion of cards of the great black players, just in the sections of the forum that cover the eras in which they played.

I have a Facebook page called "Baseball History Through Lineup Cards" where I highlight lineup cards in my collection and tell some stories of baseball history. I recently posted about this:

Larry Doby had a habit of being second in a world that only has the attention span to really know about the first. And because of it, he remains one of the most underappreciated people in the story of baseball history.

On July 5, 1947 in the top of the 7th inning of a 5-1 game between the White Sox and Indians, and runners on 1st and 3rd, Larry Eugene Doby stepped up to the plate for the Indians. He was a military veteran, having spent time at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Treasure Island Naval Base and time in the Pacific Theatre. He had attended college at Virginia Union University. The day before he had been playing with the Newark Eagles. On this day, he stepped up to the plate, and promptly struck out.

There are many aspect of Larry Doby's journey that mirrored Jackie Robinson's. Their university education. Their military experience. Their time spent in the Negro Leagues. They both played against teams who had never faced a black ballplayer in a professional game, as Robinson played in the NL while Doby played in the AL, at a time when there was no interleague play outside of the World Series.

There are differences of course. Jackie Robinson was signed a year earlier and played a season in the Minors, while Doby was playing in the Negro Leagues until immediately before. But maybe the biggest difference is that Jackie was first.

Jackie Robinson was signed to be a trailblazer. Branch Rickey planned every detail. He made sure that Jackie had black teammates while he was in the Minors in Montreal, signing John Wright, and later Roy Partlow.

In contrast, Doby was signed by Bill Veeck, the legendary showman who owned the Indians for just a few years. Who was known for his off-the-wall ideas. There was no preparation. Doby was thrown into a league who largely did not want him there. He was challenged to stand on his own two feet. To blaze a path similar to Jackie's but without the reknown and focus.
And like Jackie, and a shocking number of early integrators, Doby overcame the adversity and played at a Hall-of-Fame level, an honor bestowed in 1998, just 5 years before his passing.

28 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier as a Dodgers player, Frank Robinson became the first black manager. He was towards the end of his career when he had been traded to the Indians near the end of 1974, and in 1975, he became player-manager. Robinson would go on to manage for 17 years total, spread across the 70's, 80's, 90's and 2000's.

Doby meanwhile, had followed up his career becoming a scout for the Montreal Expos in their inaugural 1969 season. He was their minor league instructor in 1970 and their batting coach from 1971-1973. In 1976, Bill Veeck bought the White Sox (for the second time) and hired Doby. In 1978, after Veeck fired Doby's former teammate and fellow HOF Bob Lemon from the managerial position, Doby took his place. In doing so, on June 30, 1978, he became the second black manager in baseball.

The White Sox were playing sub-.500 ball for the 74 games before Doby became manager. In the remaining 87 games of the season, he was unable to turn the team around. And after the season, Veeck decided to hire Don Kessinger as manager for the 1979 season. Kessinger himself would only manage for little more than half the season, before resigning. His doing so made way for a 34-year former player with almost no MLB playing experience and no managerial experience to become manager. This manager, the fourth in two years, would finally stick and Tony LaRussa would manage for the next 35 straight seasons, (albeit not all with the White Sox) winning 3 World Series.

Doby would never manage again. He returned to the role of batting coach for a season before resigning, and this largely marked the end of his time in the game. One of the great heroes of baseball, but a man who seemed to always be overshadowed.

Those who knew him though, knew who he was. Bob Feller stated, "He was a great American, served the country in World War II, and he was a great ballplayer. He was kind of like Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, because he was the second African-American in the majors behind Jackie Robinson. He was just as good of a ballplayer, an exciting player, and a very good teammate."

This lineup card is the only one I have ever come across from Doby's time as manager. It was used on August 27, 1978 in a 6-0 win against the Cleveland Indians. This copy was the bottom copy on the lineup card pad, and because of how faded it was, Doby signed his name in pen and someone (presumably Doby) rewrote the lineup out.

On Martin Luther King Day of 2025, we remember one of the great black pioneers of baseball, a sport whose integration King recognized as paving the road for his work.

Love what Bob Feller said about Larry Doby.

Great points that I didn't realize about Larry Doby. Thanks for bringing them up.

Brian