A Cuban Tests Baseball's Color Line

Abstract

In 1905 a named Luis Padron began a decade-long assault on baseball's color line that took him to seven teams in eight minor leagues and included close shaves with at least three major league teams. Controversy about his racial identity pursued Padron from job to job, yet his talent was such that into his mid-thirties there was always someone willing to take a chance on him. Considering that Jim Crow baseball was still in its youth, his career tested (and probably helped to establish) the assumptions and unwritten rules of the developing regime of segregated ball in the United States. And yet until quite recently this story has remained virtually unknown to baseball historians. 1When Padron made his debut in the minor leagues, it had only been 26 years since William Edward White played one game with Providence in the National League and 21 years since Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Weldy had briefly integrated the majors with the Toledo club of the American Association. It had only been 16 years since the last African American (Fleet Walker again) played at the top level of the minors; only seven years since the Celeron, New York, club of the Iron and Oil League had been the last all-black team to compete in an otherwise white league; and only seven years since Bert Jones and Bert Wakefield played in the Kansas State League, the last African Americans to appear openly in white organized baseball in the United States until Jackie Robinson.2Just four years before, during spring training in 1901, John McGraw, then playermanager of the American League's Baltimore Orioles, had attempted to pass off the Columbia Giants second baseman Charlie Grant as an Indian named Tokohama. Although Grant's identity was exposed by late March, McGraw made one more attempt to bring him to the Orioles in May before league or club officials finally vetoed the move for good. In any case, McGraw's persistence indicates that there was still some uncertainty about how solid the color line really was in the first decade of the 20th century.3For decades, a much better established trope in baseball (as well as in society at large) was the notion of American blacks passing as Latino or Spanish. Bliss Perry's 1895 novel The Plated City focused on a black ballplayer (modeled on Frank Grant, probably the greatest African American player of the 19th century) attempting to pass as a Spaniard to play in the major leagues. More specifically, and blackness had a longstanding and complicated relationship in American baseball, dating back at least to 1886. That year a club of black professionals, originally based on Long Island, adopted the name Cuban Giants, and became the most famous African American team of the 19th century. The invocation of foreignness was probably not so much intended to deceive fans as to lend the team an exotic flair.4 They reportedly sometimes spoke a Spanish-sounding gibberish on the field, yet as Adrian Burgos points out, none of the Giants ever adopted Hispanic names in box scores and press reports.5 Instead, their supposed Cubanness was likely understood as a theatrical gesture by most of their audience, one that, like their comedy routines and shadowball exhibitions, served simultaneously to entertain and to defuse racial tensions.6Although it was never used as an actual passing strategy by black American ballplayers, the loose association between and blackness greatly affected American perceptions of ballplayers just after the turn of the century.7 By 1900, the League had been fully integrated, and the All-Cuban teams of Abel Linares that began to tour the United States in 1902 included players of varying hues and ethnic groups, many of which did not fit neatly into American racial categories.8 Consequently, while Cubans probably faced somewhat laxer racial gatekeeping than did American ballplayers, it is also true that even the lightest-complexioned Cubans were liable to become subject to racist suspicions. …