Negro (Baseball) Leagues

Since its invention in the mid-19th century, baseball has often served as a reflection of American society and culture. This certainly has been true when it comes to the history of race relations in the United States. Despite racial discrimination, some blacks played alongside whites in the early major and minor leagues in the late 19th century. By the 1890s, however, with the rise of official and legally sanctioned racial separation, black players had been locked out of “organized” (white) baseball. A short-lived “League of Colored Baseball” surfaced in the South as early as 1886, while a mostly northern National Colored League sputtered into a brief existence in 1887. In 1910 and 1911, a proposed National Negro Baseball League of America also failed to get off the ground. Nevertheless, many black teams competed regularly in the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century, with the best teams meeting in an informal “colored championship of the world,” a black version of the white World Series. [Page 526]Black teams competed in loosely organized state and regional leagues during these years, especially in the South, where most blacks lived at the time and where the milder climate permitted year-round baseball. Many of the best black players from northern teams spent their winters in Jacksonville and Palm Beach, Florida, where they played on resort hotel teams while also working as waiters.

The first successful effort to organize a league of big-city black teams came in 1920, when the National Negro League (NNL) was formed in Kansas City, the inspiration of Rube Foster, a former star player and later owner of the Chicago American Giants. Composed mostly of midwestern teams, the NNL soon found a counterpart in the Eastern Colored League, formed in 1923, with teams from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Brooklyn, and Richmond. The two leagues began playing a Negro World Series in 1924. Black baseball thrived for some years in the 1920s, but the Eastern League folded in 1928. As the Great Depression deepened, the NNL collapsed as well in 1931. By 1933, however, with an infusion of “gangster capital” derived from the “numbers” rackets in the black ghettos of urban America, the NNL was revived. Gus Greenlee, the chief numbers racketeer in Pittsburgh, took the lead in rebuilding the league, which included teams from Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Newark. A competing East-West League emerged about the same time, advanced primarily by another Pittsburgh sports promoter, Cumberland “Cum” Posey, but the league fell apart after only one season. In 1937, the Negro American League (NAL) was established, representing teams from Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, and Birmingham, among others. Over the years, some teams dropped out and others joined; the Negro Leagues generally lacked the financial stability of the white major leagues. The massive migration of southern blacks to northern cities that began in earnest in the 1920s provided the large spectator base that supported the Negro Leagues from the late 1930s to the demise of organized black baseball in the mid-1950s. Held in Chicago's Comiskey Park, the annual East-West All-Star Game between the NNL and the NAL became a major event for black America, drawing up to 50,000 spectators, considerably more than the multigame Negro League World Series between NNL and NAL pennant winners. Black communities had great pride in their Negro League teams.

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