The rise and fall of Negro Leagues baseball is told in a new documentary, "The League."
For nearly 30 years, it was the only professional outlet for Black baseball players. When Jackie Robinson integrated the majors, it was the beginning of the end.
The Homestead (Pittsburgh) Grays, photo credit: AI_HikesAZ
I’m a baseball fan. I have been for as long as I can remember. I grew up first in Oakland before the A’s moved there from Kansas City, so the San Francisco Giants were my team. I idolized Willie Mays. When my family moved to L.A., I maintained my allegiance. My brother became a Dodgers fan, which seems apostatic to me and became a source of conflict. Still, the Dodgers games we would go to as a family are some of my happiest childhood memories.
Baseball lost its status as the national pastime years ago. Football is far more popular. The Super Bowl is a far bigger event than the World Series. But baseball is still my principal sporting interest even as my allegiance transferred to the Yankees when I moved to New York in the late 1970's. I go to as many as 30 games a season because I believe the game is best appreciated in person. I’ve probably been to 500 ball games in my life, and I like to think I know the game - not just the players, but its rules (some of which are pretty arcane), strategies and intricacies.
The first time I went to the National Baseball Hall of Fame was in the early Covid summer of 2020. I was awed by some of the exhibits (DiMaggio’s Yankee Stadium locker with his jersey hanging in it!). In the room lined with the plaques honoring the inductees, appropriately bathed in dramatic lighting, it felt almost sacred.
Last March, I visited the Negro Leagues Hall of Fame in Kansas City for the first time. It was a very different experience. The Cooperstown hall is a shrine to baseball's greatest players, milestones and figures. The Negro Leagues Hall of Fame similarly honors the greats from that league, but chronologically and cumulatively it tells a story that’s more important than just baseball. It tells a story about America.
The new documentary, The League, by Sam Pollard (maker of the documentary MLK/FBI) and executive producers Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (Summer of Soul) and Tariq Trotter (Descendant), recounts the rise and fall of the Negro Leagues, which existed from the 1920’s through the 1950’s.
The film features insightful observations by historians and journalists, riveting archival interviews with former players, and some amazing old video and still photos (supplemented by re-enactments that I found a bit much at times). It is woven together into a compelling narrative, much of it I suspect unknown to even hardcore baseball fans.
Moses Fleetwood Walker, photo credit: National Baseball Hall of Fame
In its earliest years in the 19th century, Black players did play beside white players (one person comments in the film that that was okay just as long as there were more white players than Black on a team). Earlier this year, I wrote about one of them, Moses Fleetwood Walker. He would be the last Black major leaguer until Jackie Robinson because baseball owners acquiesced in 1884 to Cap Anson, the game’s biggest star and virulent racist who refused to play with or against Black players.
The Negro Leagues were first organized just after the First World War. The documentary tells how it developed a more dynamic, faster, more innovative version of the game than what was played in the majors. Enormously popular with Black fans, teams sprouted up in major midwestern and east coast cities. The New York Black Yankees. Philadelphia Stars. Chicago American Giants. Kansas City Monarchs. Pittsburgh had two teams, The Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. In the 1930s, the teams would routinely play double and even triple headers.
Exhibit at National Negro Leagues Hall of Fame
National Negro Leagues Hall of Fame, Kansas City, Missouri
"They had no idea they were making history," Bob Kendrick, president of the National Negro Leagues Hall of Fame, says in the film. "Man, they didn't care about no history. They just wanted to play ball."
How good were the Negro Leagues? In 1934, the St. Louis Cardinals, led by the great pitcher, Dizzy Dean, won the World Series. Afterward, they traveled the country playing 11 games against four Negro Leagues teams. The Black teams won the majority of those games, according to The League.
Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis subsequently banned barnstorming major league teams from playing Negro Leagues teams.
It’s especially poignant but also jarring to hear former players about the joy of playing winter ball in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. There, they say, they faced little or no racial discrimination. In the U.S., they sometimes had to sleep on the team bus or in a stadium locker room because no hotel would take them.
"Players said a (Black) man could just be a man and not have to pay the social consequences for," says a former Negro Leagues umpire about playing outside the country.
They had to leave America to feel free from the bigotry and restrictions in their own homeland.
“When you’re out of your own country and you find everything so much better, it’s a revelation in a way if you’ve never experienced it,” says Max Manning, who played for the Monarchs.
Commissioner Landis was an ardent foe of integrating the majors. When he died in late 1944, that helped open the way for Jackie Robinson to join the Dodgers in the National League and Larry Doby with Cleveland Indians in the American League in 1947.
Josh Gibson, from exhibit at National Negro Leagues Hall of Fame
Some of what is recounted in The League was familiar to me. I knew about superstars such as Josh Gibson, Buck O'Neil, Cool Papa Bell. What was new were the fascinating tales of visionary, charismatic Black owners such as Rube Foster of the Chicago American Giants, Cumberland Posey of the Homestead Grays, Gus Greenlee of the Pittsburgh Crawford and, later, Effa Manley, who co-owned the Newark Eagles with her husband, Abe. Manley is the only female inductee in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
I knew, of course, about the historic breakthrough of Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers, followed a few weeks later by Larry Doby debuting with the Cleveland Indians in 1947. I didn’t know that the Dodgers' legendary general manager, Branch Rickey, signed Robinson from the Kansas City Monarchs, as well as Roy Campanella from the Baltimore Elite Giants and Don Newcombe from the Newark Eagles, without compensating their teams.
Exhibit at National Negro Leagues Hall of Fame
In the film, journalist Mark Whitaker says, “Branch Rickey opposed that from the very beginning. In fact. He mocked the idea that Jackie Robinson had any contractual obligation to the Kansas City Monarchs or that the Negro Leagues were even a real league.”
Over the years, Rickey has been portrayed as a progressive champion of Black civil rights for signing Robinson. That certainly was groundbreaking, But he was first and foremost a ruthless and famously tight-fisted businessman. Raiding the Negro Leagues for cheap talent while the other teams still held back was a smart business move.
Effa Manley, co-owner of the Newark Eagles, photo credit: EricEnferemo
“I never felt that he was right to take those valuable players and not give us a nickel for them,” Effa Manley says. “I felt that was very wrong and we should’ve had some compensation. But we were in no position to protest and he knew it so he just completely outmaneuvered us, outsmarted us, or just plain raped us. I don’t know how you’d describe it.”
The documentary argues that this financial blow and the mass defection of Black fans to the newly integrated majors led to the collapse of the Negro Leagues. It all happened astonishingly fast. Its eastern division was gone within two years of Robinson’s debut in the majors. The remaining teams staggered on mortally wounded until they dissolved in 1960. It was the end of an era.
The League is an important film that recounts what is really a piece of the bigger story of the long struggle by Black Americans to survive and thrive in the face of oppression, and to force America to reckon with and live up to the ideals on which it was founded. There is so much of our American history that isn't taught, that is sometimes hidden intentionally. There is value, as George Orwell once said, in facing up to unpleasant facts. Watch The League and learn.
Hello Ron;
Great story, believe me this is an on-going situation that is just one-aspect of why we as a people have to do everything 2xs better, 2xs longer, 10xs greater, just to be noticed and acknowledged at all in a positive light.
I have a great mentor and friend, Mr. Sheldon Curry, Retired Assistant City Manager, of the City of Inglewood, in California, who recently published a book (1800+) pages called "Tell Me Again Why These (Mostly) Black Players Are Not in the Hall of Fame? Is it Racial?????", and has now been transformed into an E-Book on Amazon.com/Kindle store, with his name - CURRY, Sheldon.
I hope you get the opportunity to read it - it is a great read.