Away from the flashing lights of Hollywood, down the East Coast and throughout the South, historically Black colleges are still competing in baseball, just as they did in Robinson’s day. But the state of HBCU baseball has changed dramatically, even within the last quarter-century.
Although Robinson completed his storybook college athletic career at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Black student-athletes in his time were almost exclusively limited to Black colleges. Even as Black athletes began to participate in sports in majority institutions in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, White athletes were slow to filter into HBCU sports. That’s still the case in 2013, but baseball is one of the exceptions to that rule.
