Major Leagues
The major leagues of baseball were completely dominated by white players. Racism ran rampant among all levels of the game, mainly because of the way teams and leagues were managed in baseball's early years. Teams were run and controlled by the players rather than owners. This often gave the players power to persecute blacks who dared to enter the sacred realm of professional baseball. Often, it was not the pressure of the general public that brought black players to leave professional teams, but their fellow players and sometimes their own teammates as well. White players thought of themselves as better than black players; therefore, they believed that they would not have to play with black players.Black players had once played in the earliest major leagues of baseball, but that had been in the nineteenth century. As time went on, however, Cap Anson,an extremely talented but prejudiced player, lead the way to a methodical exclusion of blacks from any sort of professional or organized baseball.