Baseball cards also break color barrier.

A selection of 60 baseball cards celebrating many of the athletes who broke the color barrier in major league baseball is on view through June 17 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The cards trace the integration of baseball from 1947-61.

"Breaking the Color Barrier in Major League Baseball" opens with a 1914-15 card of Branch Rickey as a baseball player. Three decades later, it was Rickey who--as general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers--signed Jackie Robinson of the Negro American League's Kansas City Monarchs to a minor league contract with the Montreal Royals, and then promoted him to the big leagues the following season, where Robinson won the Rookie of the Year award and helped lead the Dodgers to the National League pennant. The installation includes six Jackie Robinson cards.

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Among the other renowned athletes are African-Americans such as Larry Doby (who was the first black man in the American League as part of the Cleveland Indians), Leroy "Satchell" Paige, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks, as well as Hispanic players such as Orestes "Minnie" Minoso and Hector Rodriguez. The exhibition ends with Elijah "Pumpsie" Green, who in 1961 joined the roster of the Boston Red Sox, the last team to integrate.

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All of the cards come from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, the largest and most comprehensive collection of American trading cards ever assembled privately in the U.S. Burdick, an electrician by profession, deposited more than 300,000 items at the Metropolitan between 194363, including thousands of baseball cards for which he developed a system of record-keeping that remains in use today.