One of the first things President Donald Trump did after his second inauguration was invalidate an executive order from former President Joe Biden that prohibited discrimination against transgender people, especially those playing sports.
How did the major sports institutions react? They lined up behind Trump’s transphobia. In February 2025, the NCAA banned transgender athletes from women’s sports. Late last month, the Olympics followed suit.
Sports are not on the vanguard of social change, as we’re asked to believe every April 15 on Jackie Robison Day.
The disappointing responses from the NCAA and International Olympics Committee serve as yet more evidence that sports are not on the vanguard of social change, as we’re asked to believe every April 15 on Jackie Robison Day.
Historically, and much to our detriment, those who lead sports leagues and associations have been followers at best. The leaders of the NCAA and the IOC have showed us that.
But we in the media created a mythology that the games we love are the tip of the spear in social progress, and we’ve done that in large part by distorting Robinson’s arrival in Major League Baseball in 1947 after the league spent 80 years or so segregating itself for white men only. The MLB doesn’t deserve its reputation as a revolutionary social change agent in this country. To the contrary, much like leaders of the NCAA and the IOC have bended their knee this Trump era, it had a long, regrettable history of reactionary politics. Indeed, its embrace of segregation served as a model for other leagues that conformed to, and didn’t confront, a racially partitioned America.
Not long after the MLB’s first pitch in 1876, it was integrated. Moses Fleetwood Walker, a Black man who attended Oberlin and Michigan, suited up for the Toledos. His brother Weldy Walker followed him in the big league for a while.
But the United States was in the process of rolling back Black people’s rights and their nascent participation in democracy. President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction by withdrawing from the South federal troops who protected the formerly enslaved. The move seeded American apartheid enforced by extrajudicial violence by white people against those they once shackled.
If Black people were being excluded from democracy, then why not exclude them from baseball? Near the end of the 1880s, Cap Anson, the “greatest hitter and greatest National League player-manager of the 19th century,” according to his Hall of Fame plaque, convinced his fellow managers to enter one of those so-called gentlemen agreements to deny men of African descent the continued freedom to play the major league game.
Anson’s regressive lobbying to segregate baseball is not included on his Cooperstown inscription. But it is undoubtedly his biggest contribution to baseball — and to sports writ large. To be sure, the two other big sports of the time, horse racing and boxing, eventually followed the precedent Anson set in baseball.
If Black people were being excluded from democracy, then why not exclude them from baseball?
Horse racing, this country’s first big sport, was dominated in the antebellum and post-Civil War South by Black jockeys; they disappeared by the early 1900s. A National Bureau of Economic Research brief noted, “The key push to exclude Black jockeys came when White jockeys began violently attacking their African American counterparts by boxing them out during races, running them into the rail, and hitting them with riding crops.”
“Soon after the attacks began, African American jockeys found they could not get rides.”
Boxing refused to let Black men fight for its crowning title, heavyweight champion of the world. It relented only for Jack Johnson, a Black man, to topple a white man in 1908 and become the first Black emperor of masculinity. The boxing world responded by persecuting Johnson and returned to its unwritten racist rules until the 1930s.
In 1933, the NFL, which was born in 1920 as an integrated professional football league, decided to segregate as well. It shut the locker room door to Black men and kept it closed for the next 13 years until Kenny Washington (who was Robinson’s offensive backfield teammate from UCLA) and three other Black football players were offered NFL contracts.
That was 1946. Robinson was in Canada playing for the Dodgers’ minor-league affiliate Montreal Royals. The Dodgers were only taking baby steps toward re-integrating baseball with Robinson as the game’s racial guinea pig. And it lagged well behind the U.S. government.
After all, in 1944, the Supreme Court declared whites’ only primaries unconstitutional, and in the summer of 1946, it said the same about segregated interstate bus travel: that it was unconstitutional . Before the MLB integrated, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a 1941 executive order desegregating the armed forces, and all-Black Tuskegee University in 1943 graduated its first Army flight cadets, who became known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
Sports was behind the times, not ahead, and baseball was behind some of the other sports.
Sports was behind the times, not ahead, and baseball was behind some of the other sports. Even America’s popular music at the time, jazz, was ahead of the game, with Benny Goodman adding Black pianist Teddy Wilson in 1935 to make his trio one of the first integrated bands and the club Cafe Society in New York daring to welcome Black and white patrons in 1938. There were a few sportswriters then calling on baseball to desegregate. But league officials ignored them.
It’s fitting that we celebrate Robinson. But we ought to be able to do so without promoting the propaganda that sports organizations in general, and the MLB in particular, have been at the forefront of social change.
As the recent capitulations from the NCAA and the IOC remind us, sports, however exciting and inspiring, have not been the social justice trendsetters we have made them out to be.
Kevin B. Blackistone is a longtime national sports columnist and professor of the practice at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.