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Retro Baltimore: How Orioles’ arrival helped integrate Baltimore hotels in 1950s

mike klingaman, baltimore sun
·4 min read

The 1954 Orioles were a hapless bunch, losing 100 games in their first season. But the impact of that fledgling team 70 years ago transcended baseball. The arrival of those Orioles of yore helped hasten the demise of segregation that marked Baltimore’s hotels.

At the time, Black people were barred from staying in the city’s best hotels — the Emerson, Lord Baltimore and others — a nonissue in all other big league towns. The Orioles’ entry into the American League thrust the city into the national spotlight and exposed its social mores, warts and all.

Only in Baltimore would African American players of visiting clubs have to stay apart from their teammates, usually at the Black-owned York Hotel on Madison Avenue. Fearing a backlash, in early April 1954, Gov. Theodore McKeldin — a staunch integrationist — called for the Hotel Association of Baltimore to lift its ban on Black athletes, or risk inviting “a lot of unfavorable publicity” for the city and state.

The HAB refused. Its attorney, Charles Harris, argued that the hoteliers needed to make a profit and were convinced “the general public does not want to have mixed patronage at the hotels.”

As McKeldin predicted, when baseball season began, the hotels’ snub of visiting Black players stained Baltimore’s reputation and hurt its economy. Upon hearing of the hotels’ stance, a bevy of conventions took their business elsewhere.

At the time, four of the eight AL teams were integrated, though barely: the Orioles (pitcher Jehosie Heard), Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia A’s. Reportedly, most Black players grudgingly accepted the city’s restrictions, believing integration was near. One who spoke out was Chicago’s Minnie Minoso, a Cuban-born outfielder who decried staying at the York, while teammates lounged at the Emerson Hotel.

In his autobiography, “Fighting For Fairness,” the late Sam Lacy, sports editor of the Baltimore Afro-American, wrote of Minoso’s frustration.

“I have no one to visit with, no teammates to play cards with. It is terribly lonely,” Minoso told Lacy. “I wish Baltimore was not in the league, I do.”

Most white players who opposed the hotels’ racial bias nonetheless shrugged it off, said Don Larsen, an Orioles pitcher in 1954.

“I didn’t like [the hotel ban]; that wasn’t right. But that’s the way it was,” Larsen told Bob Luke in the latter’s 2016 book, “Integrating The Orioles.” “We all had to live through that. You wanted to be a little bit of a family.”

While the Orioles themselves did nothing overtly to foster change, their very existence drew attention to the issue and spurred civil rights activists to carry on.

“We claim to be such fine sportsmen in our community, why can’t we be good sports and insist that the hotels accept some of our fine Negro athletes?” read a letter in The Sun from Patrick Zempower, chairman of the civil rights committee of the Maryland Industrial Union. “Good old American indignation to injustice will bring an end to discrimination and all its ugly implications.”

As the 1954 season wore on, civil rights leaders drew attention to the hotels’ policy. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, even asked American League officials to intervene on behalf of Black players.

In December, one hotel — the Sheraton-Belvedere — broke ranks and opened its doors to African Americans; a month later, pressured by its peers, the hotel’s management caved and reinstated the ban.

The Sun reported little of the issue, but the Afro American kept it in the headlines. In June 1955, at a dinner at Morgan State College, McKeldin vowed to press on against restrictions, and guest speaker Branch Rickey, a baseball executive who’d helped Jackie Robinson break the game’s color line in 1947, “warned against the philosophy of fear,” The Afro-American reported.

Finally, on July 12, 1957, the hoteliers acquiesced — in part.

“The [HAB] decided to accept visiting colored baseball players and delegates to established conventions meeting in the city,” the Afro-American reported. “As far as the acceptance of other [Black] patrons is concerned, it will be a matter left to the discretion of the individual hotels.”

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The move drew praise from the five AL teams, besides the Orioles, that rostered Black players: Chicago, Cleveland, the New York Yankees, the Washington Senators and the Kansas City Athletics.

“I’m … thankful to everyone who had a hand in bringing it about,” said Hank Greenberg, Cleveland’s general manager.

What triggered the turnabout?

“There was a lot of pressure and we felt we had to go along with the way the public felt,” Nelson Busick, president of the Lord Baltimore, told The Sun. “We’ll particularly stress conventions and ballplayers and do it a step at a time.”

In truth, the timing of the policy change was no surprise. Eleven days later, on July 23, major league officials awarded Baltimore the 1958 All-Star Game, which brought to town a host of celebrated Black athletes such as Elston Howard (Yankees), Willie Mays (New York Giants), Hank Aaron (Milwaukee Braves) and Ernie Banks (Chicago Cubs). Clearly, baseball — and the Orioles — had moved the integration needle.

Baltimore Sun researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this article.