Posted By:
jay behrens For those of you that are interested but not a member of SABR, here an interesting point about W E White being the first Black ball player posted ny Greg Bond:
The last sentence of Professor Tygiel's comment, though, is to me a contradiction. If W.E. White was passing for white when he played his game for Providence then to his contemporaries he was simply
another white short-term substitute. With the benefit of 125 years of hindsight and the luxury of digitized census records, we can be fairly confident of White's mixed racial heritage, but, to me, it seems anachronistic to label him with our contemporary racial designations. If his colleagues and contemporaries understood him to be "white," then I think we, as historians, also need to understand him as another white baseball player. (Admittedly with a more interesting background than many of his contemporaries)