EARLY BASEBALL: A DEPRIVED PASTIME

Baseball is America’s national pastime, and rightfully so. For nearly six months of the year baseball floods television screens across America and the globe. But for many decades baseball was separated as white and black baseball. The segregation brought about many African American stars that go sadly unrecognized today. However, baseball was one of the first sports to openly welcome blacks with proper recognition in a national sport.

Hitting a circular object smaller than nine inches in circumference with a 34 inch wooden stick doesn’t sound too hard, but it is. In baseball, batting .300 is considered a good average. That means making contact and safely reaching base three out of ten times is good. Wow, wish I could pull a thirty percent on Rev. Clarks’ test and be congratulated on a good job! Let’s face it, it won’t happen. There is so much skill involved in baseball, simply strength and physical fitness is not enough. Being able to spot a 95 MPH fastball coming out of a pitchers hand from sixty feet six inches and being able to turn on the ball to send it 400 feet is just amazing. Let alone if he can hold back on the following pitch which is a whole twenty MPH slower and still smash it over the outfield wall. It i

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Typically, such games were played between squads of "all-stars" from both leagues.

Since the integration of the American and National Leagues, the skill level of the game has advanced to an unrivaled level. In 1937, teams in the South and the Midwest formed the Negro American League.

When Gus Greenlee organized the new Negro National League in 1933 it was his firm intention to field the most powerful baseball team in America. In 1933, a second Negro

National League was formed, and was the only black professional league operating until 1937.

The depression years were especially difficult times for black baseball. Quite a number of African Americans did play alongside white athletes on minor league and major league teams. One attempt to bypass the color barrier was Baltimore Oriole’s manager John McGraw. Furgeson case was held; the United States Supreme Court upholds Louisiana’s law requiring "separate but equal" public facilities for blacks. During the late 1800’s there were many different baseball leagues. By the turn of the century the color barrier was firmly in place. The two finally became one, how it should have always been. However, the first player who actually played in the Major Leagues was Moses Fleetwood Walker.

In 1896, the year the famous Plessy vs. There were separate schools for blacks and whites, separate restaurants, separate hotels, separate drinking fountains and separate baseball leagues.

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