Robert W Stone

Pumpsie Green and Boston's Struggle to Integrate the Red Sox Robert W Stone

In 1959, twelve years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier, the Boston Red Sox were the only team in all of Major League Baseball without a single black player on their roster. With mounting local and national pressure, the Red Sox ultimately signed a young African American utility infielder named Elijah "Pumpsie" Green. Even before he arrived, Green's presence in Boston was inextricably bound to an immense burden of pressure and discomfort rooted in city and nationwide race relations, the historically strained relationship between the Red Sox and Boston's African-American community, and divergent expectations and concerns projected upon him by the press, the Red Sox, and baseball fans both black and white. This lecture, published here for the first time, places the integration of the Boston Red Sox within a contextual framework and offers a scholarly examination of this little known piece of American sports history.