The American Indian Integration of Baseball

Jeffrey Powers-Beck has written a most important contribution, not only to an understanding of the integration of baseball but also to an explanation of the role of sport in American Indian acculturation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Long before Jackie Robinson broke the modern so-called color line in major league baseball, there were numerous American Indians playing baseball at the highest level. Powers-Beck not only recounts how well-known American Indian athletes such as Lou Sockalexis, Jim Thorpe, Rudy York, Albert Bender, and John Meyers, the latter two better known to fans by their derisive nickname “Chief,” coped with racism and ethnic taunts but also relates the stories of lesser known but locally popular American Indian ballplayers such as Moses Yellow Horse, Louis Leroy, and George Howard Johnson. Of equal importance to the vivid personal accounts are the histories of baseball at Indian industrial boarding schools, especially Carlisle and Haskell, and the barnstorming team known as the Nebraska Indians, whose style of play and ability to entertain fans later influenced the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League and the touring House of David squad

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