My son wrote this book review for his class at college. I wanted to share it. In his book Invisible Men the author Donn Rogosin examines the story of a forgotten part of American history, pro baseball’s Negro Leagues. We often hear about Jackie Robinson (see the story on Robinson’s exploits at UCLA) and just assume he was the first black pro baseball player. What we don’t hear about is that Robinson was one of many Big League players who got their start in the Negro Leagues before WWII and integration.
Rogosin’s interest in this topic began in his teaching days when he interviewed a former player from the Negro Leagues, Willie Wells, in his hometown Austin, Texas. Rogosin realized that there were scarcely any histories about the Negro Leagues. He believed that this story “was a magnificent part of American history that needed to be remembered,” and that “Negro League baseball was far bigger than a baseball or a sports story…that it was an essential part of the American experience.” Rogosin argues that the integration of black baseball players into the major leagues was a forerunner of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Rogosin writes of the black baseball players of the 1900s-1940s, “When their baseball victories came against white opponents, they undermined segregation itself.” In other words, it was a story that needed to be told.
Over the years Rogosin interviewed dozens of black players from the Negro Leagues. Rogosin writes that the players in the Negro Leagues were self-deprecating, “They didn’t think of themselves as forerunners of the civil rights movement, or that they played a role in it, but they did.” He goes on to explain that he wrote the book to open a window on life in general in America for blacks before World War II. “Negro baseball operated in a segregated world. But the walls of segregation were porous and…Negro league baseball attacked those walls ideologically, economically, and emotionally.”
Rogosin describes the rise of the Negro League and the individuals who were instrumental in its success, including Rube Foster and the first woman to own and run a professional sports organization in America, Effa Manley. Many of the Negro League teams were in northern cities, where there had been a large influx of black Americans to fill factory jobs during the First World War. These people represented a burgeoning middle class in America. They had the income to do many of the same things white Americans did, including supporting baseball teams. For many of the poor, uneducated players who came from the south, baseball gave them the means to support their families, and as they went north to play, they became part of the class of black Americans with rising economic means and rising expectations. They began to expect to be treated fairly and equally. Rogosin describes how during the off-season black teams would tour the Midwest and West, where there were no professional baseball teams, and where the spectators were universally white. The white players who played against these black teams grew to admire the skills of the black players. For black Americans the growth and success of the Negro League gave them hope: “black people, crushed by segregation, desperately needed models to emulate; and they required men and women who cast large shadows, large enough to make known the truth of black talent.” People like Rube Foster and Effa Manley became role models, not as players, but as successful professionals. The growth of the Negro League helped spur the sale and the spread of black newspapers, which helped unite black culture nationally and further advance black expectations of equality. Negro League teams “evolved into a vital component of community building.”
The growing success of the Negro League and the talent of the black players were noticed by white owners in major league baseball. They knew that integration was coming. The commissioner of major league baseball said of blacks in 1945, “If they can fight and die on Okinawa, Guadalcanal, in the South Pacific, they can play baseball in America.” What owners were looking for was the right player, not necessarily the best player. Ultimately, it was Jackie Robinson who shattered the barrier of segregation. When the civil rights movement swept America, black baseball players from the Negro League were finally given their dues and the best ones were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, decades after they played.
Maybe the greatest sign that the success of Negro League baseball and the integration of major league baseball came to affect desegregation and the civil rights movement in America is the fact that baseball integrated before the U.S. Army or American schools integrated, becoming the first large institution in the United States to do so.
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