A Case of Cultural Forgetting: Black Newspapers' Presentation of Black Baseball in 1932

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."¹ Disillusionment with the Negro National League collapse, apprehension about the ability of the leagues to complete a season, complications of player trade disputes, and low attendance figures led to a muddled portrait of black baseball in 1932. The black press only fed the disillusionment and apprehension of its readers, aiding what would become a historiographical lapse in coverage of the season. Their initial bias and eventual apathy only added further confusion as they attempted to clarify the championships, legitimacy, and politics of the foundering Negro Leagues.

The topography of baseball newspaper reporting in 1932 is herein defined through the analysis and statistical sampling of a set of nineteen black newspapers. Those newspapers are then divided into various regional locations in some instances and circulation coverage areas in others (see table 1). The sample is largely the result of availability. Each of the newspapers listed in table 1 provides either complete or near-complete surviving coverage for the 1932 calendar year. Availability, of course, necessarily omits some publications that would immensely benefit such a study. Nashville, Tennessee, and Monroe, Louisiana, for example, play significant roles in the 1932 season, yet the black newspapers for those cities (the Nashville Globe and Independent and the Southern Broadcast, respectively) no longer survive.² Only the Negro Southern League (NSL) completed league play for a full season. The East West folded before the close of the season's first half. As a consequence, the statistical analysis only treats coverage of the NSL. The categorizations and calculations that follow all stem from the original core list of nineteen newspapers.³

That core list greeted the 1932 season-particularly the formation of the

Table 1.

1932 Black press sample set, divided by region and circulation

assumed major league concentrated in the northeast, the East-West Colored Baseball League-with skepticism. As early as July 9, the Baltimore Afro-American reprinted a John L. Clark article originally written for the West Penn Service that insinuated that the league's organizer, Cumberland Posey, was forming the league as a countermeasure to the success of the Pittsburgh Crawfords.⁴ Posey's Homestead Grays (a Pittsburgh team) competed for dollars and notoriety with their crosstown rival, and the mogul's attempt to form the league was, for Clark, a direct attempt to omit the competition from league play. His critique went further. Clark charged that "Washington, Newark, New York, Norfolk, and Kansas City are likely to be excluded. In spite of the fact that Cleveland and Detroit [included teams] had poor gate attractions last year, they will get preference over the five teams just mentioned. They will be preferred because Cum can dictate to them, which fact dovetails with the prime objective." W. A. Greenlee, owner of the Crawfords, echoed Clark's sentiments in late February. "You probably know," wrote Greenlee in a widely published letter to the press, "that Posey's interest in a league came after the Crawfords had their first successful playing season." The criticism seemed valid, as Posey purchased a controlling interest in the East-West Detroit entry and stocked the team with Homestead players.⁵

The league began with weekday games and Sunday doubleheaders, with a planned split schedule. In his zeal to exclude the Crawfords (as well as other dominant teams in the region, such as the newly reformed New York Black Yankees), Posey even invited the barnstorming Cuban House of David club to participate. The league had so much trouble without a core of the best available teams that its demise appeared inevitable to most as of late June. New York Age columnist Lewis E. Dial decried the league's omission of a New York team, as well as its indifference toward the press. Bill Gibson, columnist for the Baltimore Afro-American, assumed the...