On October 24th, 1945, newspapers announced that the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson to their Montreal farm team, effectively ending segregation in professional baseball. General manager Branch Rickey did not participate in the signing ceremony, but he quickly made sure that the press knew he was the one behind it.

What went underreported at the time were the behind-the-scenes efforts of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and the City’s Committee on Unity, led by Dan Dodson, a professor within the Educational Sociology Program at NYU…. The Mayor’s correspondence files and the records of the NYC Commission on Human Rights in the Municipal Archives help tell the little-known story of the political pressure at play in breaking the color line in baseball.