TAMPA — The world forgets, but Bob Mitchell never did.
Jackie Robinson’s arrival in Brooklyn in 1947 may have changed the way Major League Baseball looked to outsiders, but it did not change the reality for many African American players in the game. Many remained ignored, marginalized and stuck in baseball’s backlands even as the world assumed the color line had become a relic of bygone days.
Yet by 1954, the year Mitchell made his Negro League debut, half the teams in Major League Baseball still had not integrated.
And it took another 50 years, and Mitchell’s noble persistence, before MLB finally acknowledged its complicity and debt to players still toiling in the post-1947 Negro Leagues by providing them a pension.