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