Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar

by Roberta J. Newman, Joel Nathan Rosen

Overview

Winner of the 2014 Robert W. Peterson Award for Excellence in Negro League Research from the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference, sponsored by Negro Leagues Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research

Roberta J. Newman and Joel Nathan Rosen have written an authoritative social history of the Negro Leagues. This book examines how the relationship between black baseball and black businesses functioned, particularly in urban areas with significant African American populations—Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, and more. Inextricably bound together by circumstance, these sports and business alliances faced destruction and upheaval.

Once Jackie Robinson and a select handful of black baseball’s elite gained acceptance in Major League Baseball and financial stability in the mainstream economy, shock waves traveled throughout the black business world. Though the economic impact on Negro League baseball is perhaps obvious due to its demise, the impact on other black-owned businesses and on segregated neighborhoods is often undervalued if not outright ignored in current accounts. There have been many books written on great individual players who played in the Negro Leagues and/or integrated the Major Leagues. But Newman and Rosen move beyond hagiography to analyze what happens when a community has its economic footing undermined while simultaneously being called upon to celebrate a larger social progress. In this regard, Black Baseball, Black Business moves beyond the diamond to explore baseball’s desegregation narrative in a critical and wide-ranging fashion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626742253
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	03/03/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	254
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Roberta J. Newman is master professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her work has appeared in the journals Cooperstown Symposium: 2009-2010 and NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. Joel Nathan Rosen is associate professor of sociology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes Toward Competition and From New Lanark to Mound Bayou: Owenism in the Mississippi Delta. He is founding coeditor of a five-volume collection that explores the forging and maintenance of the reputations of celebrity athletes: Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace; A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes; Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations; More than Cricket and Football: International Sport and the Challenge of Celebrity; and The Circus Is in Town: Sport, Celebrity, and Spectacle, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
Joel Nathan Rosen is associate professor of sociology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes Toward Competition and From New Lanark to Mound Bayou: Owenism in the Mississippi Delta, and coauthor of Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar, published by University Press of Mississippi. He is founding coeditor of a five-volume collection that explores the forging and maintenance of the reputations of celebrity athletes: Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace; A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes; Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations; More than Cricket and Football: International Sport and the Challenge of Celebrity; and The Circus Is in Town: Sport, Celebrity, and Spectacle, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Heading Downtown Monte Irvin ix

Rediscovering a Total Institution Earl Smith xiii

1 Black Business and Consciousness in Context 3

2 Capitalizing Black Baseball and the African American Economic Ecosystem, 1914-1929 24

3 The Depression, Black Business, and Black Baseball Revisited, 1930-1939 60

4 The Second Wave and the Business of Black Baseball, 1939-1946 92

5 Desegregating Baseball and Its Economic Implications, 1946-1948 120

6 Black Baseball's Post-Robinson Challenge, 1949-1963 151

Postscript: What Has the Promise Wrought? 183

Acknowledgments 191

Notes 195

Selected Bibliography 217

Index 225

Editorial Reviews

"Black Baseball, Black Business is terrific! It examines the Negro Leagues in the context of other black businesses of the period and offers a provocative view of baseball's integration saga. With Jackie Robinson and all the African Americans who followed him into baseball, much was gained. All these years later, however, it is increasingly clear how much was lost."

—John Thorn, Official Historian, Major League Baseball

From the Publisher