[ In an eye-opening documentary The League, director Sam Pollard
tells a fully-rounded tale of how Black baseball used to thrive. By
the 1940s, baseball was the third largest economic institution in
Black communities.]
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‘A STORY THAT DIDN’T USED TO BE TOLD’: THE RISE AND FALL OF
BASEBALL’S NEGRO LEAGUES  
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Andrew Lawrence
July 5, 2023
The Guardian
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_ In an eye-opening documentary The League, director Sam Pollard
tells a fully-rounded tale of how Black baseball used to thrive. By
the 1940s, baseball was the third largest economic institution in
Black communities. _

The Newark Eagles in dugout in 1936., Photograph: Magnolia Pictures
// The Guardian

 

Sam Pollard inherited his love for baseball from his father, a fan of
the St Louis Cardinals – Black America’s team in the 1960s.
Growing up in New York just made it a long-distance affair. “They
had some phenomenal players,” Pollard recalls to the Guardian.
“Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Bob Gibson, Bill White. And then when I got
to be 14, 15 years old, I really wanted to understand their lineage.
Where did they come from?”

Decades later, the director retraces that Black baseball genealogy in
The League – a new Questlove-produced documentary on the rise, fall
and last impact of the Negro Leagues, the professional baseball
association that sprang up in the long shadow of Jim Crow. It’s a
history famously touched on in Ken Burns’s seminal
docuseries Baseball [[link removed]]. But
in The League, the B-story becomes the main thread.

Drawing from file footage and archived player interviews, the
103-minute film unpacks the “gentlemen’s agreement” struck among
white major league owners at the turn of the 20th century to keep
America’s pastime white, while celebrating the Black visionaries who
nonetheless formed teams and leagues and found financial symbiosis in
segregation. By the 1940s, baseball was the third largest economic
institution in Black communities, the League notes. “And the teams
thrived because Black people had their own stores, their own
restaurants, their own means of entertainment. All that money was
circulating within the community,” says Pollard. “That’s a story
that didn’t used to be told.”

Which is to say: the story of the Negro Leagues is one oft told
through the personal journeys of Satchel Paige (the first Negro
Leaguer to pitch in a World Series), Buck O’Neil (MLB’s first
African American coach) and other change agents. Best known of course
is Jackie Robinson, the exceptional case who gave Black newspapermen
like the Chicago Defender’s Wendell Smith reason to make the
argument for a wider desegregation movement. The League foregrounds
these established heroes and lesser known legends like Rube Foster
(the wily player-manager behind the Negro National League), Effa
Manley (the shrewd businesswoman who built the Negro League’s Newark
Eagles into a championship outfit) and the umpire Bob Motley – whose
son, Byron, first nudged Pollard about this project as the director
was immersed in docs on Martin Luther King
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Woods
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Watch here [[link removed]] 

At that time, around 2017 or so, Pollard found his love for baseball
plunging right as Black representation in the major leagues
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cratered. While some of that decline traces to Black athletes
gravitating to get-rich-quicker sports like football and basketball,
it’s also the byproduct of a competition culture that discourages
individuality and flair – a tradition that now has put Major League
Baseball in the desperate position of rubber-stamping rules amendments
intended to make the game faster and more exciting.

Watching The League’s black-and-white highlights of Black players
executing double-base steals, turning flashy double plays and
otherwise exciting the crowd, it’s hard not to imagine what baseball
could have been if a Black sensibility had taken root and blossomed as
it has in the NBA. “The Negro Leagues brought an acrobatic skill and
finesse to the diamond,” says Pollard, noting how that approach to
the game somewhat lives on through the White Sox slugger Tim Anderson,
Angels one-man wonder Shohei Ohtani and other modern superstars.

As much as today’s household names owe their careers to Black pros
who played multiple games a day while barnstorming the country and
slept in their clubhouses when white-owned fleabag motels turned them
away, the League makes the case that there was far more to gain from
Robinson sticking with the Kansas City Monarchs. His crossover into
the mainstream with the Brooklyn Dodgers at the end of the second
world war was a double whammy for the Negro Leagues, one that turned
their balance sheets red as major league owners cherrypicked from
their biggest draws without having the professional courtesy to buy
out their existing contracts.

As Manley tells it, only the Cleveland Indians’ Bill Veeck had the
decency to approach her about purchasing the contract for the Newark
star Larry Doby, the second man across baseball’s color line. And
even then Veeck was offering cents on the dollar. It wasn’t great
for Robinson’s health, either. In one archival interview in the doc,
he says his doctor urged him to give up the game, fearing the pressure
and racist invective he endured in and outside the lines might trigger
a nervous breakdown. By age 53, he was dead from a heart attack.

 

African American baseball players from Morris Brown College, Atlanta.
Photograph: Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Had Negro League teams been duly compensated, they might have survived
the talent drain a few years longer. Had everyone held the line,
though, they might have forced a wholesale merger with Major League
Baseball similar to the one the American Football League forced with
the NFL by 1970. Instead, they withered into a Harlem
Globetrotters-esque sideshow before dying off entirely by the 1980s.
As integration prompted Black professionals in other industries to
desert the city centers they were forced into, those once thriving
communities became ripe targets for urban renewal. Even Smith’s
Black press wound up a casualty of the very changes it was once so
desperate to see.

Over the past few decades Major League Baseball has paid respect to
the legacy of the Negro Leagues, retiring Robinson’s number across
the board while outfitting current teams in throwback livery. But
there’s always something about those tributes that feels smug, like
a batter mashing a home run and slow-trotting around the bases to
really milk the pitcher’s humiliation. “Your logic in the way you
describe this is exactly right,” Pollard says. “It’s like, ‘We
won the war. We’re gonna give you a little bit of a break.’
That’s sorta my feeling too.”

The story of the Negro Leagues is undeniably bittersweet, but The
League brings valuable lessons at a time when Las Vegas bookmakers and
Saudi investment are threatening another seismic shift in American
sports culture. For baseball fans who have drifted from the game in
recent years (ahem), the film is as good a reason as any to reinvest.
The director is taking his rekindled fandom bird by bird. “As soon
as the Orioles get back to town, I’m going to a game,” says
Pollard, a Baltimore resident now. “I started going to games again
because Camden Yards is right next to me, and it’s a great stadium.
The Negro Leagues got me back in it.”

* _The League is out in US cinemas on July 7 and available to rent
digitally on July 14 with a UK date to be announced_

_[Andrew Lawrence is senior features writer for the Guardian US, based
in Atlanta. Twitter: @by_drew [[link removed]]]_

* baseball
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* Negro Baseball League
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* sports
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* Negro Leagues
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* Racism
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* African Americans
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* Black Baseball
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* Black athletes
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* jim crow
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* Black communities
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* segregation
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* MLB
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* civil rights movement
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* Paul Robeson
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