Baseball's Forgotten Pioneer

Decades before pro baseball was officially integrated, an Oakland Oaks player became the first to break baseball's color barrier in 1916. His name was Jimmy Claxton and he was African-American. Claxton had to rely on some chicanery to get around baseball's blatantly racist rules of that era, posing as a Native American in his brief, historical stint as an Oakland Oak. Read all about it in Garth Kimball's excellent article on our Baseball Oakland History page, or by clicking here.