When we contemplate the past quite often some things are particularly hard for us to fathom or even understand. When one considers, for example, that women have been eligible to vote for barely a hundred years in the United States it boggles the mind, or that just over a hundred years ago the Wright Brothers first flew a very crude and simple craft when today we are able to fly into outer space. Another thing that makes me shake my head every year at about this time is when I think that until seventy-eight years ago African Americans were banned from playing in the Major Leagues.
That sad chapter in our history has been corrected, and while Jackie Robinson is rightfully placed at the front of the pantheon for that achievement, there very well may have never been a Jackie Robinson if there was not first Texan Andrew “Rube” Foster. Born in Calvert, Texas to an American Methodist Episcopal minister and his wife in 1879, Foster became a baseball star, and as a young man gained the reputation as one of the hardest throwing pitchers in the state—black or white. The fact that he was African American meant that he could not be a member of white teams, so Foster began his professional career in 1897 with the Waco Yellow Jackets, a barn-storming black independent team.
He was immediately a star, a player that huge throngs surged to see pitch. A star needs a big stage, and so Foster left Waco in 1902 to sign with the Chicago Union Giants, another independent all-black team owned b.