First black baseball player to retaliate physically?

In 1949, Rickey 'took the wraps' off Robinson and gave him permission to fight back, and he did.

http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/30/when-jackie-robinson-fought-back /

Perhaps not coincidentally, Robinson’s MVP year, 1949, was the first season that his boss Branch Rickey lifted the rule about turning the other cheek. “From that moment on,” Robinson writes in Baseball Has Done It, “I defended myself against anti-Negro insults with all the force at my command.” As Martin Luther King gave way to Malcolm X, Jackie was no longer so embraced by white audiences. “What’s made you change your attitude, Jackie? I liked you much better when you were less aggressive,” he reports hearing from a (white) umpire in 1954. “I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me,” Robinson responded. “All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.”

For a half-decade beginning in the liberty year of 1949, Jackie Robinson was not just a great pioneer and an all-star talent, he was the very best player in baseball, according to the newfangled valuation statistic Wins Above Replacement. Finally provided a level playing field where he could vent his emotions just like any other ballplayer, Robinson strode the baseball world during the time of Ted Williams and Stan Musial and Yogi Berra and beat them all at the National Pastime. It wasn’t about showing up; it was about kicking ass.