Sol White: An appreciation (original) (raw)
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During Jim Crow, the sport of baseball served as an important arena for African American resistance and negotiation. As a (mostly) black enterprise, the Negro Leagues functioned as part of a larger African American movement to establish black commercial ventures during segregation. Moreover, baseball’s special status as the national pastime made it a significant public symbol for African American campaigns for integration and civil rights. This dissertation attempts to interrogate the experience and significance of black baseball during Jim Crow during the first half of the twentieth century. Relying on newspapers, magazines, memoirs, biographies, and previously published oral interviews, this work looks at resistance and political critique that existed in the world of black sport, particularly in the cultural production o f black baseball. Specifically, this dissertation argues that in a number of public and semi-public arenas, African Americans used baseball as a literal and figur...
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During the last decade, a number of athletes began engaging in social activism. In the aftermath of George Floyd's death, that wave of protest became a tsunami, energizing collegiate and professional athletes and reverberating across society. But baseball, once in the vanguard of sports activism, remained on the sidelines. As the national pastime, it reflected the country's turn toward social Darwinism and segregation at the turn of the 20th century. After World War II, when Jackie Robinson reintegrated the major leagues, it was a catalyst to change off the field. This essay addresses that politicized past and its more quiescent present.
The Demise of African American Participation in Baseball: A Cultural Backlash from the Negro Leagues
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Sixty years ago baseball was a major business and cultural force for African Americans. But the end of the Negro Leagues and the desegregation of baseball heralded a new era that marked the beginning of a cultural drift between baseball and African Americans. This paper will explore the social factors embedded in the Negro Leagues that gave baseball cultural relevance for African Americans and what is impeding those factors from operating again.
The Hall Institute of Public Policy—New Jersey, 2007
When Negro National League officials agreed to close operations for 1932 due to the hard realities of the Great Depression, the usually minor Negro Southern League and the newly-created East-West Colored League became black baseball’s “major leagues.” The season, however, was littered with confusion. The black press was disillusioned with the collapse of the National League, and the season was greeted with a mix of skepticism and hope in newspapers throughout the country. As the season progressed, the press divided over the winners, losers, and viability of playing. The East-West League could not complete its season, but its counterpart could, and differences of opinion between the newspapers over the legitimate champion of the Southern League and the legitimate world championship series demonstrated a clear divide along the Mason-Dixon Line. Different black audiences received different messages about the state of their baseball, leaving both contemporary and historical observers with different perceptions of what really occurred. The first goal of this paper is to evaluate those messages to pick out local and regional patterns of coverage, based in part on the Negro League teams they chose to declare champions. In Monroe, Louisiana, hub of the poor cotton-farming region in the state’s northeast corner, a team made its bid for one of those championships. The Monroe Monarchs played in a very different culture than did, say, the Pittsburgh Crawfords or New York Black Yankees. A decade prior to the 1932 season, the town had been named the “lynch law center of Louisiana.” The black community within and without the team’s Casino Park lived a cloistered, hardscrabble existence in a fully segregated society. Only the white daily press survives from Monroe’s 1932, but an analysis of that press’s coverage of the African-American community demonstrates that the community was doing better as the year progressed—and as its team continued to win. The second goal of this paper is to provide that analysis. Monroe’s white press helped create both white and black perception in the town, both within black baseball and without. The third goal of this paper is understand what perception was really being created. To do that, the paper will analyze the front pages of one of Monroe’s white dailies, along with those of the Louisiana Weekly, the state’s most widely circulated black weekly, to gauge the priorities of each and the dominant messages they provided to their audiences. In total, the paper seeks to evaluate the relationship of the black and white press in the creation of the black baseball fan’s mindset in the economic wasteland of the 1932 South.
2014
Swanson, Ryan A. When baseball went white: reconstruction, reconciliation, and dreams of a national pastime / Ryan A. Swanson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-3521-2 (hardback: alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8032-5518-0 (epub) isbn 978-0-8032-5519-7 (mobi) isbn 978-0-8032-5517-3 (pdf) 1. Baseball-United States-History-19th century. 2. Racism in sports-United States. 3. Discrimination in sports-United States. 4. African American baseball players-United States-Social conditions. 5. United States-Race relations. I. Title. g863.a1s955 2014 796.35709034-dc23 2013046027 Set in Minion Pro by Renni Johnson. Designed by A. Shahan.
Nine, 2005
Since baseball began in the nineteenth century, race has played an important role in who played, where the game was played, who watched, and other key issues related to the growth of the sport. In the twentieth century, race both offered opportunities and prevented them for ballplayers, fans, owners, and others involved in the game. The question of race and baseball, particularly as it affects one American city, Boston, is the topic to be explored in different ways by Howard Bryant, Glenn Stout, Richard Johnson, and Jules Tygiel. Each of the three texts discussed here explores the relationship between baseball and America through a different lens. The common thread found in all three revolves around the role of race from the nineteenth century until the present. None of these texts tells the story by itself, but each has something to contribute to the conversation. Extra Bases, by Jules Tygiel, offers the broadest scope of these three texts. Tygiel's essays, originally published between 1984 and 2001, are examined here Review Essays 165