Leroy Paige:

But there is more to Satchel’s legacy than eye-popping records. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit if not an Uncle Tom, he was something else entirely - a quiet subversive, defying Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. He refused to play in a town unless it supplied lodging and food to him and his teammates, a defiance for which young civil rights workers later would get arrested.

Satchel’s loudest claims for equality came on the field. He pitched spectacularly enough, especially when his teams were beating the best of the white major leaguers, that white sportswriters turned out to watch black baseball. He proved that black fans would fill ballparks and that white fans would turn out to see black superstars. He drew the spotlight first to himself, then to his all-black Kansas City Monarchs team, and inevitably to the Monarchs’ rookie second baseman Jackie Robinson. As one veteran Negro Leaguer put it, Jackie may have opened the door to the new racial reality when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, but it was Satchel who had inserted the key a full generation before.