 Negro League historian John Holway termed Landis "the hard-bitten Carolinian Kennesaw Mountain Landis".In a 2000 article in "Smithsonian" magazine, writer Bruce Watson states that Landis "upheld baseball's unwritten ban on black players and did nothing to push owners toward integration".A number of authors say that Landis banned major league play against black teams for fear the white teams would lose, though they ascribe various dates for this action, and the Dodgers are known to have played black teams in and around their Havana spring training base as late as 1942.