<P> Right after the vote, the sports weekly Sporting Life stated, "Several representatives declared that many of the best players in the league are anxious to leave on account of the colored element, and the board finally directed Secretary (C.D.) White to approve of no more contracts with colored men ." A lengthy 2016 essay that focused on claims of Anson's alleged influence on the vote cited the Sporting Life report and showed that several historians have been lax by not conveying that Anson's influence on the vote is a matter of speculation . </P> <P> On the afternoon of the International League vote, Anson's Chicago team played the game in Newark alluded to above, with Stovey and the apparently injured Walker sitting out . Some historians with a negative view of Anson rewrote the sequence of events that day to undo the fact that the league vote took place at a meeting that was convened in the morning, before the game that afternoon . Anson biographer Howard W. Rosenberg, concluded that, "A fairer argument is that rather than being an architect (of segregation in professional baseball, as the late baseball racism historian Jules Tygiel termed Anson in his 1983 Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy), that he was a reinforcer of it, including in the National League--and that he had no demonstrable influence on changing the course of events apart from his team's exhibition - game schedule ." The year 1887 was also the high point of achievement of blacks in the high minor leagues, and each National League team that year except for Chicago played exhibition games against teams with black players, including against Newark and other International League teams . </P> <P> Some of Anson's notoriety stems from a 1907 book on early blacks in baseball by black minor league player and later black semi-professional team manager Sol White, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2006 . White's claims against Anson, such as that, "Were it not for this same man Anson, there would have been a colored player in the National League in 1887," were analyzed at length by Rosenberg in his 2006 Anson biography and are referenced in a few places in his 2016 essay . </P> <P> After the 1887 season, the International League retained just two blacks for the 1888 season, both of whom were under contracts signed before the 1887 vote, Frank Grant of the Buffalo Bisons and Moses Fleetwood Walker of the Syracuse franchise, with Walker staying in the league for most of 1889 . </P>

When was the color barrier broken in football