The Montreal Royals, the top minor league team in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, broke baseball’s color line on Oct. 23, 1945, by signing shortstop Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro leagues. The Associated Press reported that the Dodgers’ president, Branch Rickey, said he had given a lot of thought to discrimination since his coaching days at Ohio Wesleyan University in the early 1900s.
Chris Lamb, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, is the author of “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball.”
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