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  • Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar by Roberta J. Newman and Joel Nathan Rosen
  • Jim Overmyer
Roberta J. Newman and Joel Nathan Rosen. Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. 239 pp. Cloth, $60.00.

Momentous positive changes to society often also produce a downside when something with value of its own gives way to progress. Racial integration in the United States after World War II had this effect, as increasing recognition of the African American as a full-fledged American tolled the death knell for much of the country’s black-oriented economy.

Black-owned and black-operated insurance companies, newspapers, hotels, and nightclubs, for example, were diminished or forced out of business when their clientele began to be courted by white-owned competitors who now actively sought African American business. The same thing happened to Negro League baseball. Professors Newman and Rosen analyze the rise and fall of the black leagues from sociological and economic perspectives. Although they both have written much about the sport, they have, in this case, produced a baseball book that does not contain a single game account or score. They are investigating something else: how the Negro Leagues fit, then didn’t fit, into black America.

The existence of segregation—either by law or by fact, depending on where in the United States blacks lived in the early twentieth century—also created a segregated economy “based primarily on the speculation that ‘separate but equal’ was not a temporary condition but rather a fixed and permanent fact of doing business in America” (3–4) that encouraged an economic “ecosystem” of black-owned businesses “surviving in the shadow of the mainstream” (12).

Newman and Rosen do two important things to put the business of black baseball into perspective as part of a greater economic and philosophical system. They appropriately categorize it as part of the entertainment business and discuss the entire subject of preintegration black economics in terms of the dichotomy between the two race leaders of the day: Booker T. Washington, who advocated Negro advancement by people of color working “in place” to improve their economic status and thus become accepted by the white majority, and W. E. B. DuBois, whose considerably more disruptive philosophy urged African Americans to develop their own race consciousness and identity.

Successful preintegration entrepreneurs were known as “race men” (and sometimes women), who followed the path of collective action to advance the black cause. The founders and leaders of the Negro Leagues, who provided high-quality sports entertainment to black fans who could not follow their race’s best players in the segregated major leagues, fit this type. The authors provide capsule [End Page 131] biographies of these men (and one woman, Newark Eagles co-owner Effa Manley), from the well-known figures such as Andrew “Rube” Foster, founder of the first successful black league, and William “Gus” Greenlee, who built his own ballpark (a rarity) for his Pittsburgh Crawfords and succeeded Foster as a league founder, to men whose names may not ring a bell in the twenty-first century, like Felix H. Payne, a Kansas City entertainment and newspaper mogul who owned a team there in the first decade of the twentieth century.

A discussion of Greenlee and Payne—who financed their legitimate businesses, including presumably their baseball teams, with the proceeds from illegal activities, primarily numbers betting—leads to a lengthy discussion of the critical importance of the proceeds from gambling to a secondary black economy that was often denied access to loans from white-dominated banks: “From the outside looking in, these rackets had the appearance of run-of-the-mill criminal enterprises. But on the inside they functioned as neighborhood savings and loans, credit unions, and investment banks” (28).

There also is examination of the importance of white entrepreneurs to the Negro Leagues. They provided game-booking services to black teams driven to playing extra games outside their leagues’ schedules to boost their finances. On the one hand, the white men contributed a valuable service to the Negro Leagues for a cut of...

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