The Integration of the Pacific Coast League by Amy Essington

Author:Amy Essington [Essington, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO003030 Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0707-4
Publisher: Nebraska
Published: 2018-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Pacific Coast League Integrates, 1950–52

I’ve never had bad feelings toward anybody; I was just glad to be able to play when I did.

—Artie Wilson, quoted in Eric Enders, “The Last .400 Hitter”

On October 31, 2010, the man who hit .400 with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948 passed away in Portland, Oregon. Artie Wilson, born in Jefferson County, Alabama, had journeyed through ninety years, many of which were spent on the baseball diamond. Although he struggled with Alzheimer’s at the end of his life, he could still root for his favorite team, the San Francisco Giants. In 1951 he played nineteen games with the New York Giants, but his baseball career included five seasons in the Negro Leagues and ten in the Minors. When he arrived in San Diego in 1949, Artie Wilson joined a team that John Ritchey had already integrated. Moving to Oakland, Wilson integrated that team and, with Bob Boyd, would integrate the Seattle Rainiers in 1952. Artie Wilson would play for six of the eight teams of the PCL and would end his professional baseball career with Portland in 1962. Wilson was only one of two players not born in the West who would choose to live there for the rest of his life. Artie Wilson’s career took him from the Negro Leagues to the Minor League to the Major League and back to the Minors. His career bridged segregation and integration. Although he may not have had the Major League career he could only dream of as a child in Alabama, Wilson played an important role in integrating the Pacific Coast League. Artie Wilson’s career, which included playing for multiple teams in various leagues, exemplifies the reality of many of those who played during the period of integration.

After the first team of the Pacific Coast League integrated, it took only five seasons for the remaining seven teams to add players of color to their rosters. The PCL integrated at a faster pace than the Major Leagues, which did not integrate all sixteen of its teams until 1959. By August 1950, in their third season of integration, 60 percent of the PCL teams had signed at least one player of color, whereas the Major League, in its fourth year of integration, had players of color on 25 percent of their sixteen teams. In 1951 the PCL teams fielded more black players than any other Minor League.1 The Pacific Coast League was the first league to integrate all of its teams. During the 1950, 1951, and 1952 seasons the Sacramento Solons, the San Francisco Seals, the Hollywood Stars, and the Seattle Rainiers each added players of color to their rosters. The integration of all eight PCL teams in just five years shows that the process had not only gained momentum but, by reaching all of the teams, become part of a social movement for change in the West.

Major League Baseball continued its slow pace of integrating teams in the 1950s. Sam Jethroe became a Boston Brave on April 18, 1950.

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