The Negro Leagues & other Historical Tidbits

The baseball of the Negro Leagues and of black teams before the era of league play, was neglected in its time by the greater society, and has been largely forgotten since.

Organized Baseball has taken credit for a pioneering role in the modern civil rights movement and, indeed, it did provide us with such thoroughly admirable heroes and role models as Jackie Robinson, and the equality strong, dignified, courageous, and talented men – Larry Doby, Monte Irvin and others – who soon followed him.

But Organized Baseball was white baseball until 1946. An occasional “Cuban” or “Indian” may have slipped through the cracks in the owners’ “Gentleman’s Agreement,” but virtually all of the great black ballplayers whose primes came before World War II were consigned to segregated play, their skills, their stories and their personalities unknown even to most rabid fans.

We believe these men, their teams, and their feats deserver recognition. And we believe that most baseball fans who are given a change to examine the record will find it fascinating and compelling.

Prior to the 1970 release of Only The Ball Was White by Robert Peterson, baseball historians knew little about the subject, and there was no recognition of the black leagues within the mainstream story of our National Pastime. Peterson’s pioneering work, along with John Holway’s oral history, Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues, began to expose historians and researchers to a world of great teams, wonderful players and the rich history of apartheid baseball in the United States.

The founding of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) in 1971, and the creation of the Negro Leagues Committee soon thereafter, fueled the research. A host of books on the leagues have appeared since 1970 and interest in black baseball has exploded.

Only now, after more than two decades of concerted research by many dedicated students of the game does our accumulated data on the Negro leagues allow us to offer this caliber of guide on the subject.