Mitchell Nathanson is a professor of law in the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at the Villanova University School of Law. He is the author of several books, including Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original (Nebraska, 2020), God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen, and A People’s History of Baseball. His most recent book Under Jackie’s Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind was published this month by Nebraska.

On this day in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke Baseball’s color barrier when he made his historic MLB debut. Every year on April 15, Baseball honors Jackie’s legacy by celebrating his life, values and accomplishments (MLB).

Under Jackie’s Shadow is a collection of tales told by the men who lived them in the 1960s and 70s—Black men who spent their professional baseball lives in the Minor Leagues. These men entered a world that was opened to them only because Robinson took the field on this day in 1947. As Robinson often said and so many ignored, the failure to address the racial issues existing within big league front offices, coaching staffs, and scouting departments made the game less than it could have, should have, been. Harrowing, beautiful, and maddening, these stories are vital to our understanding of race not only in baseball but in the United States as a whole.

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Under Jackie’s Shadow, where Mickey Bowers, retired baseball player, scout, coach, and manager, discusses his experience with the Philadelphia Phillies.

My grand mom

Used to always say,

Take the bad things

Turn them into good things,

And enjoy the good things

That came out of the bad thing.

Some of the truest stories in baseball are never told.

When I was a kid, from 1956 to 1960, I lived in Germany with my parents. And over in Germany we didn’t have a television. We had Radio Free Europe, and my mother used to read me stories from the Encyclopedia Britannica that my dad bought for us. So living in that environment, I really didn’t know any of the stuff that was going on in the United States of America, such as the segregation policies down South and Dr. King and people fighting for Black rights. We lived on an army base and it was like we had our own little family there. If you were in the military, you lived according to your dad’s rank. My dad was a sergeant so we lived with the sergeants. If my dad would have been an officer we would have lived with the officers.

When I came back from Germany in 1960 we moved to an army installation at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And we never had any problems as far as Blacks and whites there.

My friends—I mean the guys I grew up with, ate with, slept over their houses, played football and baseball with—we never talked about Black and white. I didn’t really experience segregation until I signed with the Philadelphia Phillies. It was like I was in a protective environment. In high school, most of the kids were military people. The school was 98 percent white and I never had one problem with anybody. I had about fifteen to twenty college football scholarship offers. Now when I look back on my life, I wish I would’ve gone to college to play football because I would have matured a little bit, understood some of the things that were going on in the world, things I wasn’t privy to prior to signing with the Phillies.

Because when I signed with Philadelphia, some of the things that I personally experienced, some of the things that I saw, some of the things that other African American and Hispanic players experienced, were a shock to me. It was really a shock to me.

The Phillies, I think, took the whole cake. Had I known that the Philadelphia Phillies were the way they were, there wouldn’t have been enough money in the world for me to play baseball in Philadelphia. But at the time I was happy I got a shot with the Phillies when they drafted me because my parents were from Pennsylvania. My dad and all my aunts and uncles lived in Oxford, Pennsylvania. The Church of God in Kennett Square, where all the hothouses are, that was my grandfather’s church. He built that church. So, I said, when I get to the big leagues my family can come down and see me play.

I played third base in high school. Never, ever played the outfield. But they told me they drafted me as an infielder-outfielder and they wanted me to play the outfield because I had speed. I was the fastest man in the Phillies organization. People say playing the outfield is easy. It’s not. It’s hard, especially right field because the ball gets a lot of action on it. I did the best I could, but I had my issues out there. I told Dallas Green, the assistant farm director, I said, “You guys drafted me as an outfielder. I never played outfield in my life. I don’t know how to play the outfield.” But they stuck me in right field and I had problems playing the ball off the bat.

One thing I could do was hit. I could hit for power and I could hit for average. Elmer Valo told me, “You know, Mickey, you’re a natural hitter. I know you can go up there in the big leagues and hit twenty, twenty-five home runs and hit for average, and help us defensively.” And, Dallas Green said, “You come to spring training, you may make one of these ball clubs.”

Dallas Green managed me my first year in Huron, short-season A ball in the Northern League. 1968. One day he wrote on a picture of me: “future Major League baseball player—Mickey Bowers.” And that really meant something to me.

The next year I ended up going to Spartanburg. Before I left I was told, “You go to Spartanburg and have a good year and there’s no telling what we’ll do for you.” But one of the players—one of the older players—told me, “When you go to Spartanburg, you make sure you look out for Mickey Bowers because these guys in Philadelphia, they’re not gonna look out for you.”

So I went to Spartanburg and had a fairly decent year down there. I hit .308. I hit some home runs and stole some bases. I was up around five hundred times and I think I struck out maybe fifty-five times. I did my thing down there, you know, but had some problems with some of the managers.

Bob Malkmus was my manager there. He was a very religious person and he tried to influence players about Christianity, which I never felt was the right thing to do, even though, you know, my family were Pentecostals. I felt that a person should have the right to decide which church, which denomination, they wanted to worship in. He would sometimes quote stuff from the Bible. The way that he acted and the things that he did not only made me, but others uncomfortable. We’d talk about it. But nobody would ever approach him about that because as a player—Black or white—you just didn’t do that.

And then he wrote a scouting report that I didn’t get to see until much later, which said that I didn’t care about winning; all I cared about was my batting average and if I got a hit during the ball game. That was the farthest thing from the truth. Yes, I cared about my batting average because I wanted to make sure that I was performing at a level where I could advance myself; I knew from talking to these older players, like Grant Jackson, Johnny Briggs, and all those guys that if I didn’t do the job, I would never have an opportunity to go anywhere. And I knew that no one’s going to say, Okay, we’re going to bring Mickey Bowers up to the big leagues because he’s my good friend and he doesn’t worry about his batting average. So, yeah. I used to write my batting average down every day in my locker to look at, but I didn’t think that was a bad thing. It kept me motivated.

The report also mentioned that Dick Allen was my role model. They didn’t like me trying to be like Dick Allen, acting like Dick Allen, you know, trying to emulate his swing in the way he hit the ball. They didn’t like that. Well, you know, maybe they’d have liked it had I tried to emulate Mickey Mantle, but at the time they didn’t have too many Black players that we could look up to. Hank Aaron was in Atlanta, Dick happened to be in Philadelphia. So who am I going to cheer for? I’m going to cheer for Dick Allen. I liked wearing number 15 because he wore number 15. I tried to emulate him, hit the way he hit. I couldn’t swing that big bat like he could, but I had a little pop. I was unaware of all the racism that was in professional baseball at that time. I was really a naive kid and I sit down now and I think about some of those things, you know, and I laugh. I laugh.