African Americans at Bat for Civil Rights in ‘The League’

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When Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color line in 1947, he already had made a remarkable record in the Negro National League. But as the documentary The League makes clear, Robinson was not the first Black in professional baseball. In 1884, Moses Fleetwood Walker played for the Toledo Bluestockings, and Black team members were not unknown in other early professional ball clubs until Jim Crow took the pitcher’s mound. 

In 1887, Pop Anderson, manager of the Chicago Whitestockings (later the Cubs), refused to play against any team with Black athletes in its ranks. His stand mirrored the increasing dominance of segregation as America’s apartheid rapidly coalesced in law and custom. 

In The League, by award-winning director Sam Pollard (Eyes on the Prize), baseball is a fractal of Black participation in America, a pocket history of racial struggle from post-Civil War through the Civil Rights movement. As The League stresses, African Americans responded to enforced segregation by constructing self-sustaining communities within the walls of segregation, vibrant neighborhoods with Black churches and Black-owned businesses of many sorts, including newspapers such as the nationally circulated Chicago Defender. Even before the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, the Defender called on its readers to leave rural Southern poverty for greater opportunities in the urban North. One of those opportunities was provided by the Negro League’s network of teams, providing employment for Black athletes, umpires and crews as well as inspiring entertainment for Black audiences.

The key figure behind the Negro League was Andrew “Rube” Foster, a talented pitcher and entrepreneur who founded his own team, the Chicago Giants, in 1910. Two years later, against the backdrop of widespread white violence against Black communities, Foster brought together the management of other Black ball clubs from around the U.S. to form the Negro National League.

While professional baseball remained the muggy sport of long summer afternoons, Foster innovated, and his ideas have only gradually been accepted by the major league. He insisted that baseball should be a base-stealing, faster moving sport. He captured the imagination of fans to the extent that Black churches altered their service to fit the Negro League’s schedule. The competitive skill of the League’s players was a source of Black pride and an inspiration to move society forward as well as the eventual springboard into the majors for players such as Jackie Robinson.

The League screens July 9, 10 and 12 at AMC Mayfair.