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In 1946 , the NEL and the International League - which both included Farm Teams of the Brooklyn Dodgers - were the first two 20th Century organized baseball leagues to permit African-Americans to play. The following season, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby would integrate the major leagues. The New England League played its first game in 1886 , with clubs in Massachusetts and Maine . Its first champion was the Portland club. The league was inactive in 1889-90, then resumed play from 1891 to 1915 (with the exception of 1900). When the minor leagues were assigned classifications in 1902 , the NEL was graded Class B, at that time two levels below major league status, equivalent to Class AA today. Disruption caused by the outlaw . A 1933 revival was followed the Next Season by a name change to the ''Northeastern League'' - and another shutdown that would last through the end of World War II . Finally, in 1946 with the postwar baseball boom, the New England League was restored as an eight-team, Class B circuit. Its most notable member, located in Nashua, New Hampshire , was a Brooklyn farm club where, in 1946, African-American players and future Dodger greats Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella made their debuts as part of the handful of men who broke the Baseball Color Line . The players succeeded on the field and were very complimentary in remarks about their Nashua experience in later years. It should be noted, however, that they faced taunts and racial epithets in visiting ballparks, even though New England was far removed geographically from the supposed locus of racial tension, the Southern United States . Nashua was the most successful member of the New England League, winning three consecutive playoff championships from 1946-48. But by the middle of 1949 , it became clear that the New England League was not viable. The league began the season with its usual complement of eight teams, but four clubs (Providence, Fall River, Lynn and Manchester) disbanded by mid-July, and the league closed for the final time at season's end. Its final regular-season champ was the Pawtucket Slaters, a farm club of the Boston Braves , but the Portland Pilots, a Phillies affiliate, won the playoffs, thus bookending the championship earned by the Maine city's entry in the NEL's maiden season 63 years earlier. REFERENCES
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