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KEY TO LIKELIHOOD OF CONSPIRACIES

5 Oswalds: There was a high-powered conspiracy committing people to silence, which in time was proven. (100% likelihood)

4 Oswalds: I believe there is highly credible evidence to support a conspiracy theory. (75% likelihood)

3 Oswalds: Many people have valid reasons to believe this conspiracy theory, although others can point to equally good reasons not to believe it. (50% likelihood)

2 Oswalds: There is plenty of motive, and plenty of opportunity for co-conspirators to flourish, and even I’m skeptical. (25% likelihood).

1 Oswald: There is not much real evidence, and primarily less- credible people believe the conspiracy theory (1% likelihood).

#1

Baseball avoided integration in the 1930s and 1940s by an unwritten agreement

On April 15, 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers penciled Jackie Robinson into their lineup and single-handedly integrated Major League Baseball. Robinson’s dignity, courage, and talent is well-known by sports fans and non-sports fans alike, as is the story of how the Dodgers’ General Manager Branch Rickey signed him. But the question remains: why wasn’t Major League Baseball and its affiliated Minor Leagues integrated sooner?

In 1947, baseball was the most popular professional sport in the United States by an incalculably wide margin. When organized baseball finally did integrate, critics warned that in segregated southern cities, there would be opposition and a loss of fans.

“Ballplayers on the road live close together. It won’t work,” said Rogers Hornsby, a retired baseball star, when asked about integration in 1947.

According to Arthur Ashe’s 1988 book, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, 1919-1945, even an outstanding war record could not help African Americans break into the Major Leagues in 1919. “Rube Foster, owner of the Chicago American Giants, the most dominant force in black baseball, had challenged the organizers of the white Federal League in 1915 to integrate, but he was turned down,” Ashe wrote. “Race riots in the ‘Red Summer of 1919’ had further reinforced the gentleman’s agreement among Major League owners that integrated baseball was not a good idea.”

In his 1982 book, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball, legendary broadcaster Red Barber wrote that organized baseball had its own legal structure, separate from the laws of the land. “Baseball did not want or intend to have Negroes in it,” Barber wrote.

It was a white man’s game except for an occasional Indian or a Cuban. Whenever some writer would press Commissioner Landis as to when a Negro would be allowed to play in organized baseball—and rest assured that in the Negro Leagues there were some wonderful black players fully capable of playing in the Major Leagues—the Judge would say, “There is nothing in the laws of baseball that prevents a Negro from playing in it.” And he would change the subject or walk away, or both.

Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (so named because his father, a Union surgeon, was crippled during the battle on that Georgia mountain in the Civil War) was in absolute authority over baseball from 1920 till his death on November 25, 1944. The first—and maybe most famous—action that Landis took was to give lifetime bans to eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. But Landis also banned a common practice in the 1920s: He banned Major Leaguers from barnstorming in the off-season and playing against Negro League teams.

Of course, there can’t be a conspiracy of just one man. And it would be unfair to assign sole responsibility for segregation in baseball to Landis. But the commissioner sure didn’t help to advance matters. Despite saying words that said otherwise, Commissioner Landis did everything he could to keep the color line unbroken.

Landis wasn’t alone in his thinking, either. Alvin Gardner, president of the Texas League (a vital Minor League which fed into the majors in the 1920s), was quoted as saying, “I’m positive that you’ll never see any Negro player on any of the teams in organized baseball in