[Jason19th]

With 42 set to come out next week I want to show a couple of items related to Jackie and baseball integration. I would love to what other members have along these lines. These may not be the most valuable item for a monetary sense, I would argue that they may be some of the most important baseball artifacts from a historical stand point

1. Cover of the first issue of Our Sports magazine. This was a short lived (5 issue) publication put out by Jackie while he was still an active player. Can you imagine a player today publishing such a controversial mag during his career

2. Interior editors comment from 1 above

3. 1903 Scorecard Harvard v Brown. Notable because with fairly little fanfare Harvard fielded a black short stop (William Matthews) who not only stared on the diamond but also became one of the first black attorneys general

4. 1907 Postcard from an integrated Wisconsin semi-pro team featuring George Wilson who had stared with the Page Fence Giants in the 1890's and played on a team with Honus Wagner as the color line was finally barring blacks from the minors in the 1890's

5. Photo of Larry Doby (who I would ague went through just as much as Jackie but gets little of the recognition-- few remember that he came up just a couple of months after Jackie and he did it with no minor league time

6. Petition to have blacks admitted to the majors. I would guess that few of the people who signed this knew that the organization had ties to the Communist party