Neil Lanctot - Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution

Negro League
Baseball

Copyright 2004 Neil Lanctot
All rights reserved

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lanctot, Neil, 1966

Negro league baseball : the rise and ruin of a Black institution / Neil Lanctot.
p. cm.

ISBN 0-8122-3807-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Negro leaguesHistory. 2. BaseballUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.

GV875.N35 L36 2004
796.357640973dc22

2004043547

Sunday, August 13, 1944, was a sweltering day in Chicago. The 98 heat, however, hardly deterred the 46,000-plus baseball fans at Comiskey Park who had purchased tickets not to see the struggling fifth-place White Sox but to enjoy the East-West game, an annual promotion featuring black all-star teams representing the Negro National and Negro American Leagues. While the West eventually took the contest by a 7-4 score, the outcome was less significant than the phenomenal attendance, which surpassed every major league game played that day.

On the surface, the game was an unparalleled triumph for the NNL and NAL owners, who grossed nearly $56,000 for the promotion. After a decade of nonexistent profits, black professional baseball had truly come into its own by 1944, enjoying consistently strong attendance for league games. Yet the East-West game was riddled with problems, reflecting the industrys vulnerability and instability even at its healthiest period. Satchel Paige, black baseballs most marketable commodity, failed to participate after a dispute involving allocation of the games profits. A threatened strike nearly resulted in the games cancellation until the owners yielded to the players demands for increased wages. Finally, in the aftermath of the game, two all-stars bolted their teams to join an outlaw promoter and were eventually followed by several other league performers.

The key figure behind the strike and player jumps was Gus Greenlee, an African American entrepreneur from Pittsburgh who was involved in a number of enterprises, both legitimate and illegitimate. As Greenlee sat in his box seat that August afternoon at Comiskey Park, he likely experienced a mixture of pride and dismay. The promotion he had helped establish eleven years earlier and the institution he had simultaneously helped preserve had evolved into substantial money-making propositions. Yet despite his crucial involvement, Greenlee now found himself shunned by his fellow owners and unable to reclaim his position in black professional baseball. Hoping to reemerge as a force in the industry, Greenlee engineered a desperate series of moves that weekend in Chicago designed to undermine the established leagues.

Buoyed by wartime profits, most owners remained confident of their ability to withstand the threat of Greenlee or any other rival promoter. Few realized, however, that their segregation-driven monopoly on black talent and fans would come to an abrupt end in only fourteen months with the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Within four years, the leagues would be struggling to survive and within ten, the East-West game and the industry itself would be virtually irrelevant.

The rise and fall of black professional baseball provides a window into several major themes in modern African American history, illustrating the initial response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Unofficially banned from the white major and minor leagues in the late nineteenth century, blacks responded by establishing their own professional organizations and ultimately succeeded in creating, in the words of writer Gerald Early, a more elaborate and enduring institutional relationship with baseball than with any other sport. Providing entertainment for thousands of fans throughout the country, baseball functioned as a critical component of the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the north and south. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional teams and leagues operated for several decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.

Few would disagree that baseball occupied an undeniably important social and economic role in black communities. Yet Negro League baseball, unlike other major black institutions such as the press, churches, colleges, insurance companies, and protest groups, remains poorly understood by both serious historians and the general public. Although well intentioned, too many accounts of black baseball have been marred by reductive analyses, an appalling number of inaccuracies, and a tendency to categorize the principal administrative figures (both white and black) into a simplistic hero/villain dichotomy. Moreover, like a good deal of baseball history in general, the literature has often focused on the exploits of individual players and teams without attention to historical context or the actual administration of the leagues themselves.

My motivation in writing this book was to transcend earlier accounts and provide a much-needed scholarly non-nostalgic look at the inner workings of the eastern-based Negro National League (19331948) and the black baseball industry in general during three crucial periods of its growth: the Depression, World War II, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights era. Yet achieving this goal proved more difficult than I anticipated. The principal league figures are long deceased, and only a modest amount of documents, interviews, and correspondence have survived.

Facing these barriers, I initially turned to the weekly black press which remains perhaps the most valuable source of information on the African American experience during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than relying exclusively on the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, as many other historians have done, I attempted to read virtually every sports page of every black newspaper located in a league city. As I read multiple accounts of various developments and events, I was slowly able to piece together the outline of a still-fragmented story. I was also able to reconstruct, to a limited extent, the lives of the entrepreneurs who operated these leagues, although detailed accounts of their backgrounds generally remain elusive to historians.

With a basic understanding of the industry and its leaders in place, I then moved on to other primary sources. I interviewed several former players, scrutinized existing financial records and correspondence, and unearthed material from court and federal records. By the time my research was complete, I had a greater appreciation of the complexities and nuances of black baseball that previously have been largely overlooked.

This book traces the national development of the black baseball business from its lowest ebb in the worst days of the Depression to its extinction during the early years of the Civil Rights movement. The eleven chapters are primarily structured chronologically, tracing the three distinct phases of the industrys growth: failure (19331940), success (19411946), and irrelevance (19471960s), with close attention to larger contextual developments shaping each period. (By industry, I refer to the organized structure of professional black baseball consisting of both the Negro American and Negro National Leagues, although the focus here is on the more profitable NNL.) , however, depart from the chronology to treat two vital issues thematically: the experiences of players, owners, fans, and writers and the relationship between Major League Baseball and the Negro Leagues.