The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press, 1871-1890 (review)

Although the majority of segregated black baseball was played before the advent of the Negro leagues in the 1920s, little has been written about those nascent days—Sol White's History of Colored Base Ball (1907) and Michael Lomax's more contemporary Black Baseball Entrepreneurs (2003) being among the few exceptions. Informed discourse on baseball's long relationship with the visual arts has also been rare. James E. Brunson III admirably attempts to cover both subjects in his new book, The Early Image of Black Baseball.

Brunson, an art historian at Northern Illinois University and an accomplished painter in his own right, has sifted through nineteenth-century media accounts of games, teams, and players to determine how black baseball was represented in the popular culture of the day. Brunson explores mainstream depictions of African American athletes, as well as how the burgeoning black press portrayed the "colored sporting world."

By focusing on post-Civil War editorial cartoons in Harper's Illustrated Weekly, "true crime" pictorials in the National Police Gazette, and Thomas Worth's misguided Currier and Ives lithographs, Brunson shows how the popular media usually treated African Americans as either buffoons or as dangerous threats to society. He offers up not only trenchant analysis of how these often repugnant images were physically composed and constructed, but also explains the effect they had on their era.

Equally fascinating is Brunson's discussion of black artists Moses L. Tucker and Henry Jackson Lewis, both of whose work appeared in the pages of the Indianapolis Freeman. The two illustrators each grappled with the dilemma of satirizing African American behavior while avoiding coarse and offensive stereotypes—Tucker's broad caricatures of ballplayers and other sporting figures had a distinct humorous touch, but the joke was definitely at the white establishment's expense. Jackson's more subtle cartoons carried with them a subcontext of urban danger and sexual desire.

Close examination is also given to social figures like the "dude," the "sport," and the "mack," who, along with waiters, barbers, working girls, and madams, made up the black sporting fraternity of the nineteenth century. Brunson recounts how writer and dude James Smith surreptitiously chronicled the drinking, fighting, infidelity, and other illicit behaviors of his peers through a Cleveland Gazette column entitled "Our Man About Town." No dilettante, Smith fell victim to many of the vices he exposed; as his own paper noted, Smith "will do better with his brush than on a crap [sic] table" (76).

Professional African American baseball has often been said to date back to the 1885 formation of the Cuban Giants, but as St. Louis Black Stockings owner Henry Bridgewater exclaimed in 1883, "I know what I am talking about. I have been playing professional base ball for about twelve years" (197). Brunson too knows what he is talking about. He delves into the stories of relatively unknown nineteenth-century African American teams, including the Black Stockings, the Chicago Uniques, and the Cleveland Blue Stockings, uncovering a rich and heretofore undiscovered country of outstanding ballplayers who toured the country and competed for championships long before Rube Foster was born. We can only hope more researchers will follow Brunson's lead and dig deeper into this era.

Unlike many recent Negro-league histories which recycle a small selection of familiar photographs ad nauseam, most of the sixty illustrations in The Early Image of Black Baseball have never been reproduced before. Meticulously researched and well documented, Brunson's opus is an academic work and thus not a volume easily skimmed through. The reader's patience is well rewarded however by the author's unearthing of several obscure facts. If you have been looking for a book that covers the careers of lost stars Frank Grant and George Hopkins, look no further. It would have been nice, though, to see more of Brunson's own visuals reproduced, such as the beautiful watercolor that graces the...