Mr. Robinson's history lesson

One of Major League Baseball's most significant events was the debut of Jackie Robinson 60 years ago. His breaking of the sport's "color line" has come to represent a milestone in American history, an early victory in the civil rights movement.

Students learn about Jackie Robinson, but they're never given information about how the barrier against him and others like him came to be. I was reading an excerpt from Mr. Robinson's autobiography, "Baseball Has Done It," and thought I'd provide a history lesson in his own words:

"I was not the first Negro in the major leagues. In 1884 Fleetwood Walker caught 41 games for the Toledo Mudhens of the big-league American Association, while his brother Weldon played the outfield in six games.

"That June the Chicago White Stockings rolled into Toledo for an exhibition game. ... Their manager and first baseman was Cap Anson, who would turn handsprings in his grave if he knew that I share a niche with him in baseball's Hall of Fame. ... He was a great ballplayer but a heartless man.

"In 1884 the nation was still recovering from the aftermath of the Civil War. Southern senators and congressmen were whipping up a fury of bigotry ... in much the same vituperative language that many Southern demagogues use today. Whether Cap Anson was poisoned by their venom I do not know, but he walked on the field in Toledo that June day, saw the Walker brothers in uniform and stalked off, taking his team with him. A large crowd was in the stands. Charlie Morton, Toledo's manager, promised to fire the Walkers the next morning. The game was played.

"Thereafter Anson saw red at the mere mention of a Negro in baseball. He launched a one-man crusade to rid the game of all but whites."

Robinson's information is based on the recollections of Sol White, a baseball star of the 1880s who was forced to play in segregated leagues, primarily because of Anson.

"Anson's vendetta reached a climax in the winter of 1887-88," Robinson wrote. "He appeared at major- and minor-league meetings, urging the adoption of a rule that would require owners to fire Negroes on their rosters and never again to contract with them. None was then in the majors; twenty-five in the minors were deprived of their jobs, among them Sol White and Weldon Walker."

Keep turning those handsprings, Mr. Anson.

Trivia question 15: The Toledo team referenced by Jackie Robinson carried the same nickname that the current minor-league team in the Ohio city does today. What is the nickname?