The professional baseball leagues, founded in 1920, that Black players built and ran while the major leagues kept them out.
Barred from organized white baseball by an unwritten color line, Black players spent the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on independent barnstorming clubs whose bookings and gate receipts were largely controlled by white promoters. Andrew “Rube” Foster, a dominant pitcher who had founded the Chicago American Giants in 1911, argued that only a league owned and run by Black men could change that. On 13 February 1920, Foster and fellow club owners met at the YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, and organized the Negro National League, with teams in Chicago, Cincinnati, Dayton, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and St. Louis. Its motto was “We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea.”
The league prospered at first; Foster’s American Giants drew nearly 200,000 spectators in 1921. The Great Depression brought the first Negro National League down in 1931, but Black baseball revived with a new Negro National League in 1933 and the Negro American League in 1937. The East-West All-Star Game, first played in Chicago in 1933, became the showcase of Black baseball, and by 1942 some three million fans a year attended Negro league games. Stars including Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Turkey Stearnes made their names in these leagues.
Integration ended the leagues it vindicated. Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, who had played for the Kansas City Monarchs, in August 1945, and Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers on 15 April 1947. Larry Doby, Paige, and others followed, the best talent moved to the majors, and the Negro leagues dwindled away. On 16 December 2020, Major League Baseball designated seven Negro leagues operating from 1920 to 1948 as major leagues, bringing the records of some 3,400 players into its official history.
See also: Jim Crow, Great Migration, Brown v. Board of Education
Sources
- National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, “The Negro National League Is Founded.” Link
- Major League Baseball, “The Negro Leagues: History.” Link
- National Park Service, “Places of Black Baseball.” Link
- Major League Baseball, “MLB Officially Designates the Negro Leagues as ‘Major League’” (press release, 16 December 2020). Link
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