During the half-century that baseball was divided by a color line, Black America created a sporting world of its own. Black teams played on city sandlots and country fields, with the best barnstorming their way across the country and throughout the Caribbean.
A century ago, on Feb. 13, 1920, teams from eight cities formally created the Negro National League. Three decades of stellar play followed, as the league affirmed Black competence and grace on the field while forging a collective identity that brought together Northern-born Blacks and their Southern brethren.
Although Major League Baseball was segregated from the 1890s until 1947, these teams played countless interracial games in communities across the nation.
After World War II, Jackie Robinson hurdled baseball’s racial divide. But while integration—baseball’s great experiment—was a resounding success on the field, at the gates and in changing racial attitudes, Negro League teams soon lost all of their stars and struggled to retain fans. The teams hung on for a bit before eventually folding.
A league of their own
Given the injustices of the 1890s—sharecropping, lynchings, disenfranchisement, and the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson—exclusion from Major League Baseball was hardly the most grievous injury African Americans suffered. But it mattered.
Their absence denied them the chance to participate in a very visible arena that helped European immigrants integrate into American culture. While the sons of White immigrants—John McGraw, Honus Wagner, Joe DiMaggio—became major leaguers lionized by their nationalities, Blacks didn’t have that opportunity. Most Whites assumed that was because they weren’t good enough.
The Negro Leagues gave Black ballplayers their own platform to prove otherwise. On Feb. 13, 1920, Chicago American Giants owner Rube Foster convened a meeting at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City to organize the Negro National League. A Texas-born pitcher, Foster envisioned a Black alternative to the major leagues.
Northern Black communities were exploding in size, and Foster saw the league’s potential. Teams like the American Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs regularly competed against White teams, drew large crowds and turned profits. Players enjoyed higher salaries than most Black workers, while Black newspapers trumpeted their exploits, as did some mainstream media.
Other leagues cropped up; the Negro National League was soon joined by the Negro American League and the Negro Southern League. Some years, the Negro National and Negro American Leagues played a Negro League World Series. The leagues also sent their best players to the East-West All-Star Classic, an annual exhibition game in Chicago.
But the Negro National League’s ascent was stunted after Foster was exposed to a gas leak, nearly died, and suffered permanent brain damage. Absent his leadership and hammered by the Great Depression, the league disbanded in 1931.
A proving ground
Gus Greenlee, who ran the popular lottery known as the numbers game, revived the league in Pittsburgh in 1933 after a sandlot club called the Crawfords, which included the young slugger Josh Gibson, approached him for support. He agreed to pay them salaries and reinforced their roster with the addition of flamethrower Satchel Paige.
Greenlee went on to build the finest Black-owned ballpark in the country, Greenlee Field, while headquartering the Negro National League on the floor above the Crawford Grill, his renowned jazz club in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
Pittsburgh soon became the mecca of Black baseball. Sitting along America’s East-West rail lines, the city was a requisite stop for Black entertainers, leaders and ball clubs, which traveled from cities as far away as Kansas City.
Its two teams, the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, won a dozen titles. Seven of the first 11 Negro Leaguers eventually inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame—stars like Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard and Satchel Paige—played for one or both squads.
The sport, meanwhile, became a major source of Black pride. Satchel Paige and the Crawfords famously defeated St. Louis Cardinals ace Dizzy Dean in an exhibition game in Cleveland, just two weeks after the Cardinals had won the 1934 World Series. Overall, Negro League teams won far more games against White squads than they lost.
“There was so much [negativity] living over [us] which we had no control [over],” Mal Goode, the first Black national network correspondent, recalled. “So anything you could hold on to from the standpoint of pride, it was there and it showed.”
Sacrificed on integration’s altar
For Major League Baseball, no moment was more transformative than the arrival of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 paved the way for African Americans and darker-skinned Latins to reshape the game.
But integration destroyed the Negro Leagues, plucking its young stars—Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Roy Campanella and Ernie Banks—who brought their fans with them. Major League Baseball never considered folding in some of the best of the Negro Leagues players, and its owners rejected the Negro National League owners’ proposal to become a high minor league.
The Negro National League paid a price for integration: extinction. The league ceased play after the 1948 season. Black owners, general managers and managers soon disappeared, and it would be decades before a Black manager would get a chance to steer a major league ball club.
Major League Baseball benefited from talent cultivated in the Negro Leagues and on the sandlots that sustained the sport, especially in inner cities. But when those leagues crumbled, prospective Black pros were relegated to minor league teams, often in inhospitable, southern cities. Many Negro League regulars simply hung up their cleats or played in the Caribbean.
The playwright August Wilson set his play “Fences,” which tells the story of an ex-Negro Leaguer who becomes a garbage man, in Pittsburgh. “Baseball gave you a sense of belonging,” Wilson said in a 1991 interview. At those Negro League games, he added, “The umpire ain’t White. It’s a Black umpire. The owner ain’t White. Nobody’s White. This is our thing.”
The story of African Americans in baseball has long been portrayed as a tale of their shameful segregation and redemptive integration. But for African Americans, integration was also painful. Although long overdue and an important catalyst for social change, it cost them control over their sporting lives.
Rob Ruck is professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. This was originally published in The Conversation.
Support Black local news
Help amplify Black voices by donating to the MSR. Your contribution enables critical coverage of issues affecting the community and empowers authentic storytelling.
