Branch Rickey’s Law: How New York State’s Ives-Quinn Act Opened the Door for Jackie Robinson
Citation
Crook, Keith. 2022. Branch Rickey’s Law: How New York State’s Ives-Quinn Act Opened the Door for Jackie Robinson. Master's thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education.Abstract
The breaking of baseball’s color barrier in 1945 was an important victory in the long, ongoingstruggle for racial equality in America. Over the years, it has been a fertile subject for
historians, scholars, and artists. Most of these works focus on Jackie Robinson, the ballplayer who
heroically integrated our national pastime, and Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn
Dodgers, who defied Major League Baseball’s surreptitious policy of segregation. Certainly,
focusing on two “great men” makes for a simpler, more digestible story, but before they could do
their “great things,” activists, labor leaders, politicians, clergymen, and journalists had laid
the groundwork for their achievement. These unsung heroes were fighting for much more than equality
on the baseball field—and largely due to their pressure, New York became the first state in the
nation to ban discrimination in the workplace on March 12, 1945. It was this law, which passed with
overwhelming, bipartisan support, that I contend was dispositive in
desegregating our national pastime.
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