In 1945, baseball sat at a crossroads. No, not to Robert Johnson sell your soul to the devil for a blues guitar kind of crossroads, but the kind of crossroads where the old guard was dead. The old way of

doing things was becoming obsolete and a brighter future, a more colorful future, a future

with a quality of baseball where the best in the world were finally going head to head. Well, that was finally within reach.

World War II had ended. Our troops came home, both black and white, the same together,

and baseball's first commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, was dead.

Landis spent 24 years upholding the, quote unquote, gentleman's agreement,

the unwritten law in Major League Baseball that kept teams from signing black ball players.

If you asked him, Landis would say,

there's nothing that says an owner can't sign a player of any color.

Yet for over six decades and the entirety of Landis's tenure,

black ball players were turned away, but pressure was building. Through the public and through the press.

As you've heard in our last episode of Black Diamonds, the call was loud. It was time to integrate

baseball. When Landis died in 1944, Major Lampus died in 1944,

Major League Baseball's owners look for a replacement

who had the ability to influence Washington, D.C. as commissioner,

in part due to the war,

and the fact that so many owners lost players to the draft.

The first vote in April of 1945 featured several prominent government candidates.

Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson, former postmaster General James Farley,

Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Hannigan, among others.

None were elected commissioner. And that's when Yankees' co-owner Larry McPhail took to the soapbox

and advocated for his own candidate. Kentucky Senator Albert Benjamin Happy Chandler,

...