ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Fifty years ago Monday, more than 44,000 baseball fans at D.C. Stadium saw something they had never seen before.
They saw a black man enforcing law and order in a Major League Baseball game.
Nearly 20 years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the men in blue who keep order in the game turned black when Emmett Ashford umpired the Washington Senators’ game against the Cleveland Indians.
And, just like Jackie Robinson and the African-American players who followed him, baseball would be better for the presence of Ashford.