In its earliest years, the National League was not segregated, and a few teams included Black ballplayers, but in 1887 major and minor league owners adopted a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” that no new contracts would be given to Black players. In 1920, pitcher and manager Rube Foster founded the first of the Negro Leagues, the Negro National League, to organize professional Black baseball, which was played at a very high level. Other professional Negro leagues followed, and for decades the stars of the game played in the Negro Leagues, until the National League and American League began to slowly accept Black players, starting with Jackie Robinson in 1947.
Joining me in this episode is Dr. Leslie Heaphy, Associate Professor of History at Kent State University at Stark, Vice President of the Society for American Baseball Research, founding editor of Black Ball, and author of The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Boogaboo (Fox Trot),” composed by Jelly Roll Morton and performed by Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers Camden, New Jersey, on June 11, 1928; the music is in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons.The episode image is from the fourth Negro League East-West All-Star Game at Comiskey Park in Chicago on August 23, 1936; the photograph is in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons.
Additional Sources:
The Reconstruction Era & its Aftermath
The Southern Plantation System
Slavery & Incarceration in New Orleans
The Jazz Maestros of Jim Crow America
Log Cabin Republicans and the Gay Right
American Posture Panic
The History of DARE
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Eleanor Roosevelt's Visit to the Pacific Theatre during World War II
Eliza Scidmore
Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century
Tammany Hall, FDR & the Murder of Vivian Gordon
The Combahee River Raid of 1863
The History of Ice in the United States
The History of Blue Jeans
The History of Pinball
The History of US Foreign Disaster Relief
LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science
Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship
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