Compare And Contrast The Reconstruction Era And The Early Days Of Baseball

1.1. Reconstruction era and the early days of baseball
Having experienced 250 years of slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment brought hope to African Americans living in the United States. It did not manage to put an end to horrible living conditions, severe treatment and the destruction of individual rights after all.
The era of Reconstruction was characterized by the efforts to bring peace and help Blacks’ integration into the society. The new circumstances went hand in hand with the shift of the whole social and economic system. It can be asserted that the relocation of the economic centres generated the social shifts at that time. The industry was rapidly growing in the North, while the agrarian South faced hunger, fear and disorder. The newly

The Ku Klux Klan was organized, and its members took violent actions against them. Riots were set up; houses and crops were destroyed. Southern whites attempted to prevent Negroes from voting. The Court insisted that the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed not the right to vote, but the abolition of discrimination. The Northerners enthusiasm to support them reduced. Finally, the disfranchise movement reached its goal: Blacks were excluded from elections. Laws approving segregation were passed. Intermarriage was forbidden, and other discriminatory laws were set up. The first Jim Crow law was enrolled in 1885. This law prescribed the segregation on trains, in schools and Blacks were not allowed to go to hotels and restaurants (Franklin 238). A well-known case of this time is Plessy v. Ferguson in 1892, when a man called Homer Plessy was imprisoned for refusing to leave the “Whites Only” car of a train on the East Louisiana Railroad (McNeeze 10). He went to the Court, but he was found guilty. From this incident, the “separate but equal” doctrine emerged, and lasted until the 1950’s: The Court decision in The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case invalidated laws allowing segregation in public schools (Klarman

This was the year when the earliest black professional baseball team, the Cuban Giants was founded. Although they were extremely popular, “attendance was not satisfactory” because of the irregular schedule of the team (Foster 9).
In this era of black baseball, no league structure was applied, and teams were playing lots of barnstorming exhibition games in order to cover the expenses of the team (Foster 9).
Until 1887 blacks could play in integrated teams, however, they were treated unfairly. One of the most notable black players was Moses Walker who had a lot in common with Jackie Robinson: Not only did he play in the Major League, and was well-educated, but he also received lots of threatening letters. When player-manager Cap Anson refused to play against his team, a gentleman’s agreement was initiated which excluded African-American players from the Major League (Foster