Two prominent black baseball players were inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
According to CBS News, seven more members were inducted into the Hall of Fame on Saturday, including a professional baseball player and a player who has unselfishly supported the game even in the face of discrimination.
For one of the soldiers, this honor has been waiting for more than 100 years. John W. Jackson, who plays Bud Fowler, was actually the first black player to enter the white league when he started playing professionally in the 1870s.
Jackie Robinson is thought by many to have broken the color barrier, but it was Bud Fowler who started playing white players before the Negro League even existed.
Bud Fowler posing in a Keokuk, Iowa baseball club uniform, 1885. He was the first professional African-American baseball player. (Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)
Born in 1858, Fowler played with his white teammates for ten years before race issues forced him to hang up his boots.
In the 1920s, the Negro League showed Americans that big baseball wasn’t about race, and John Jordan “Buck” O’Neal was one of many great players on the circuit.
O’Neal played for the Kansas City Monarchs and eventually became a major league scout. He was also the first black coach in major clubs when he joined the Chicago Cubs.
Buck O’Neal, the first goalkeeper of the Almendares Scorpions of the Cuban Winter League, poses for this baseball card released in Havana in 1948. (Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, Getty Images)
O’Neal died in October 2006 and was unable to play that year, but nevertheless agreed to perform at the ceremony in front of the 17 players who were acquitted at the time.
“I’ve done many things that I love,” he told the crowd. “But I prefer to be here and now, representing these people who are helping to bridge the gap of prejudice. … And I was proud to be a Negro league player.”
Source: Breitbart
