Branch Rickey’s Law: How New York State’s Ives-Quinn Act Opened the Door for Jackie Robinson

Abstract

The breaking of baseball’s color barrier in 1945 was an important victory in the long, ongoing struggle for racial equality in America. Over the years, it has been a fertile subject for historians, scholars, and artists. Most of these works focus on Jackie Robinson, the ballplayer who heroically integrated our national pastime, and Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who defied Major League Baseball’s surreptitious policy of segregation. Certainly, focusing on two “great men” makes for a simpler, more digestible story, but before they could do their “great things,” activists, labor leaders, politicians, clergymen, and journalists had laid the groundwork for their achievement. These unsung heroes were fighting for much more than equality on the baseball field—and largely due to their pressure, New York became the first state in the nation to ban discrimination in the workplace on March 12, 1945. It was this law, which passed with overwhelming, bipartisan support, that I contend was dispositive in desegregating our national pastime.