Negro
Leagues
Impact on
Society
Research Paper:
History 241
Forrest Andrews
November 21,2014
At the beginning of the 20th Century, baseball was America’s game; people came from all
around the country and huddled around radios to hear their favorite team’s games. This time,
however, in history was not easy for Americans, two world wars were fought, seemingly
everyone lost their money during The Great Depression, and most importantly, both African
Americans and woman were in a constant struggle to gain equality. Many people looked to
baseball as an escape for this world, but this was difficult for black people, because they were not
allowed to play the game that many of them loved. Then the Negro leagues formed, and
suddenly, African Americans had their outlet, and many loved it. Steven Goldman describes the
beginning of the Negro Leagues with this statement:
“The Negro Leagues, a blanket term that covers no particular corporate entity or circuit
but rather applies to the world of segregated baseball as a whole, was born of racism and
Jim Crow. Yet, the black game has, years after its demise, retained affection, adherents,
and aficionados and maintained a place in popular memory. No other vestige of the Jim
Crow era has accrued the kind of goodwill reserved for Negro League baseball.”
This quote shows that the Negro Leagues left such a significant mark on society that it is still
referenced today.
Even though the Civil War officially ended slavery and let African Americans be the
equals of whites in the eyes of the Constitution, that does not mean that centuries upon centuries
of racism and segregation was going to leave the minds of previous slave owners. Even federal
law officials still had these roots, as expressed by Goldman (2014) “In 1857, Supreme Court
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, campaigning hard for his spot in the American Scum Hall of
Fame, wrote that Negroes were “so far inferior [to whites] that they had no rights which a white
man was bound to respect.” The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments all said that blacks and whites
were equal, but no white person took that seriously, they all thought they were above blacks, and
black people were powerless to change this fact.
Baseball desegregated five years before Brown v. Board of Education happened, but even
though they were early to desegregate, they also were early to completely segregate. This is
clearly spoken through this text:
“However, baseball must also admit to being ahead of the nation in drawing the color
line, institutionalizing the practice ahead even of some southern state governments. The
few blacks who are spoken of as having played in the white leagues, Moses Fleetwood
Walker, his brother Weldon, Bud Fowler, Frank Grant and a few others, were always the
exception rather than the rule, the first broad ban on Negroes having been enacted by the
