“Operating their segregated baseball teams within the context of white semiprofessional clubs did have its consequences. Racial prejudice among players and team owners led to the development of a color line. In other words, players of color were denied entry into the Major and Minor Leagues. It led to several black entrepreneurs’ forming their own independent clubs. Black baseball did not have any leagues or associations where they could develop or revise rules, settle disputes, and control their own game. With no leagues or associations, black clubs did not play the game within the traditional sense of pursuing a pennant or sponsoring a season-ending championship. Within (in) this context Andrew “Rube” Foster forged the initial black baseball enterprise within the United States.”
— Michael E. Lomax from his “League Of Their Own” chapter in Before Jackie Robinson: The Transcendent Role of Black Sporting Pioneers (Nebraska Press)
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There seems to be this unabridged happiness floating around now that MLB declared Negro League statistics from 1920-1948 would officially be “allowed” (my word, not theirs; “integration” was the word Front Office Sports used) into the historical statistical records of Major League Baseball.
The “incorporation” (again, “officially”) finalizes a decades-long fight for players from a racist era to be recognized as equals. Even in this age where equality has become an ideological and societal construct, it all makes the word “finally” come to mind. But that would be missing the point.
Because as much as a wrong has been righted here, there’s that tinge of “allowance” and “integration” and “incorporation” that doesn’t sit well. First off, look at how long it took MLB to get here and secondly, the underlying feeling of a “favor” was just done and a “Thank You” is expected.
The “achievement” of gaining “full authentication” into yet another American institution through generation-after-generation of denial and erasure — after being told by seven different MLB commissioners between 1951 when Happy Chandler resigned to 2015 when current MLB commish Rob Manfred took the reins — can only be greeted with in-differential joy. The joy that often accompanies all African-American excellence when attached to the terms “first Black …” and again, that word, “finally.”
Don’t worry be happy, right? Damned if we say it. You can slap us right here. On sight. Yet, we gotta rejoice. We got no choice. Part of the American dream is acceptance, part of the American existence is disregarding most times how that acceptance came, what comes with it or how long it took. It took University of Maryland journalism professor Kevin Blackistone on ESPN’s “Around The Horn” to say exactly what needed to be said the way it needed to be heard: “Negro Leagues were never less than major … and the Major Leagues maybe were not as major as we mythologized them to be.”
More than anything it’s about context. Not the context of Josh Gibson now being statistically greater than Babe Ruth or Sandy Koufax now being open to be considered and called the white Satchel Paige or Martin “El Inmortal” Dihigo being legitimately in the Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle debates, but the context of everything (the fight, the struggle, the persistence, the longing, the requesting, the asking, the begging and all of the shared indignities aligned with that) it took to make the inclusion permanent; the context of how long it’s really going to take many people to acknowledge the legitimacy of the players the stats are attached to even when the game they worship tells them that they should. Change, when conceptualized in this context, often changes nothing.
Now before a conclusional jump is made, this is not a new or the latest version of a people stretching out victimization or being unappreciative. Far, far from both. This is a small basic self-aware, human-rooted reaction to no longer being thankful, satisfied or feeling blessed with just being considered, with just being here. We’ve been here long enough. And just because an announcement changes a current condition it doesn’t immediately erase the sins and inequities of the past. Like baseball, we’ve played this game too long — and lost.
What is often lost is that this is so much more than baseball. As sociologist Harry Edwards frames it, the Negro Leagues, just by its existence, is the most celebrated all-Black sports organization in American history — not just a sports league. “A true resistance movement against the degradations of second-class citizenship.” So getting recognized and becoming visible in Major League Baseball’s historical record is nice, cool and all that, but to officialize and “legitimize” something that we, the excluded and disregarded, had already done for over a hundred years in our minds, souls, hearts and spirits, is not a need for celebration. It’s about MLB and America truly understanding that this is more about and for you all than it is about or for us.