When Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey brought about the integration of Major League baseball in 1947, they sounded the death knell of the Negro Leagues. Like many players in the old Negro Leagues, Kansas City Monarchs first baseman Buck O'Neil was too old to play in the majors in 1947, and thus the demise of black baseball shortened his playing career. But no one was happier with baseball integration than Buck O'Neil, who later recalled: "as to the demise of the Negro Leagues—it never should have been, a Negro League. Shouldn't have been." Given the history of race relations in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Buck O'Neil is sadly wrong—racial segregation in baseball probably could not have been avoided.

On September 18, 1869, the Pythian Baseball Club of Philadelphia became the first recorded all-black team to play an exhibition game against an all-white...