gentlemen's agreement

It covers the period from just before the majors instituted a gentlemen’s agreement banning African Americans from playing with white players, to the Negro leagues becoming one of America’s biggest Black-owned businesses, to its demise.

In the late 19th century, when organized professional baseball began to stabilize into what it is now Major League Baseball, a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” excluded Black athletes from participating.

Oxfam similarly criticized an “old gentlemen’s agreement of World Bank and IMF appointments,” saying it should have been a more transparent and merit-based global process.

It was not even a law, but a “gentlemen’s agreement” enforced by, among others, Edmund Bacon, the city’s powerful planning director from 1949 to 1970 and the father of the Bacon brothers.

McCarthy then went further, pledging to fast-track the bill’s consideration as part of a “gentlemen’s agreement” earlier this month that won over most of the 21 holdouts, including Roy, who were blocking him from becoming speaker.