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y II
Day 12
15
5
Negro Leagues Baseball was a collection of major and minor-league
baseball leagues that were the first to showcase black team sports on
intertwined with the African American and American experience not only
a national scale. Launched in 1895, the leagues, as with jazz, became
as a cultural element, but as a lucrative business endeavor.
team
The leagues were not under central management, and schedules and
composition
League,
were changeable from season to season. Appearance
and disappearance of leagues was common: the National Colored Baseball
for instance, collapsed after only two weeks of operations. Latins,
especially Cubans, were also a significant presence on teams. In these
ways, the Negro Leagues were quite similar to their white counterparts
which would eventually consolidate into Major League Baseball.
Blacks near the beginning of the 20th century had only a fraction of
whites' purchasing power, so the emergence of the Negro Leagues might
have seemed unlikely. However, the Negro Leagues had two main draws
that accounted for its business success. The first was a deep reserve of
athletic talent. After blacks were formally excluded from white leagues in
the 1880s, the Negro Leagues were the sole organization through which
black players could work professionally. The quality of Negro Leagues
20 players was high, and substantiated through exhibition matches between
Negro Leagues and Major League teams: over the years, both had their fair
share of wins and losses in these matches. Another reason for the success of
the Negro Leagues was an increasingly affluent black fan base. Driven by
American industrialization, blacks were concentrating in major cities such
as New York City, Chicago, and Atlanta. Usually barred by custom-and in
the South by law-from attending many white entertainment outlets, blacks
turned to Negro Leagues games. As a result of these factors, by the 20th
century the Negro Leagues were earning a combined millions of dollars.
This profitability ended with the desegregation of Major League Baseball.
Black fans began attending Major League games, starving the Negro Leagues
of its core revenue source. By 1951, the Negro Leagues had ended, although a
succession of black star athletes in the Major League had begun.
