William Edward White (1860-1937) was Major League Baseball's first black player but passed as white at the time.
White was the son of a white Georgia businessman, Andrew Jackson White, and a mixed-race enslaved woman, Hannah. He was one of three chlidren the couple had. They lived together as a family.
White played only one game with the National League's Providence Grays on June 21, 1879 when he was a 19-year-old student at Brown. The Grays won the game 5-3 with White scoring 1 run. It's unknown why he never played another professional game.
White went on to marry a white woman in Chicago with whom he had 3 children.
White seemed to have had a serious setback in his later years. Separated from his wife, he was reportedly living in a flophouse in his final years. He died in 1937 of blood poisoning after breaking his arm from a slip on an icy sidewalk.
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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience. Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog! Thanks for reading. And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Copyright 2014.
