Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1902-1931: The Negro National and Eastern Colored Leagues

Introduction

xi Introduction In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball had been a special game among African Americans. The black game’s institutional development evolved as part of African American community building in the pre–Civil War era. It was transformed into a commercialized amusement by a generation of African American entrepreneurs who attempted to work within the parameters of a biracial institutional structure. Volume I of this history, Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860–1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary, analyzed the forces that led to black baseball becoming a commercialized amusement and traced the ways the sport’s business development was part of blacks’ overall struggle to compete within the framework of the US economy. The second volume continues the story from 1902 to 1931. These first three decades for black professional baseball were in many respects an era of triumph and disillusionment. Despite a costly trade war, an inequitable relationship for some black club owners with whites, and other vicissitudes, the black baseball business consolidated its position as the leading team sport among African Americans. Overall attendance and profits increased, allowing the black game to travel along the same path the white Major Leagues traveled to form leagues and develop a postseason championship series. Increased newspaper coverage led to the emergence of new heroes like Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston , Dick Redding, and John Henry Lloyd, who won the acclaim of the public and the press. In spite of black baseball’s significant progress, the collapse of the Negro Leagues by 1931 symbolically represented a dream deferred in the overall African American pursuit for freedom and self-determination. xii ◆ Introduction This volume utilizes the analytic framework implemented in the first one. I pay particular attention to the black baseball magnates’ decisionmaking process, the ways in which they marketed and promoted their clubs and leagues to their target audiences, and the way they endeavored to develop their leagues and simultaneously maintain their symbiotic business relationship with white semiprofessional teams. This study will naturally pay close attention to social and cultural developments, particularly how race intersected with black baseball’s institutional development and how it shaped the business relationship with white baseball clubs and park managers, Cuban club owners, and among themselves. This point will be important not only to clarify black baseball’s submission to some wider mentalité but also to examine the ways in which these African American magnates may have insulated themselves from the forces external to the decision-making process and thereby either filtered, misread, or distorted the arguments of their constituents . Therefore, in this volume, I examine the choices that confronted black baseball entrepreneurs to show why the Negro National League and Eastern Colored League took on the organizational and structural development that they did. At the forefront was the continued effort by a new generation of black baseball entrepreneurs to transform the sport into a commercial enterprise by working within the parameters of a biracial institutional structure. They operated their segregated enterprises (black and Cuban teams) within the fabric of the mainstream economy (professional baseball ). These entrepreneurs continued their symbiotic business relationship with white semiprofessional teams at a time when the respective club owners were attempting to develop a more stable institutional structure to maximize revenues. Simultaneously, black baseball entrepreneurs continued to develop their own rivalries and championships and began to transform their unconventional playing style to embody a more competitive game on the field that reflected the white Major Leagues. Transforming the game on the field represented the pursuit by African American entrepreneurs to form black baseball as a business enterprise in their own way of operation, as opposed to emulating the white game. This new generation of black baseball entrepreneurs Introduction ◆ xiii perpetuated the legacy of nineteenth-century African American efforts to create business enterprises to advance their own economic interests. They were not merely passive victims, allowing internal and external forces to influence their business development; they imposed themselves on the internal and external forces that came their way. Black baseball experienced tremendous growth and expansion in the opening decade of the twentieth century. Several black, as well as Cuban, teams emerged to challenge established teams like the Philadelphia Giants, the Leland Giants, and the Cuban X Giants for players and gate receipts. Black team owners confronted challenges similar to those that conventional black businesses faced, most notably the ways in which a separate black economy...