Quote:
Originally Posted by CBeisbol
Except baseball wasn't a field in which young black men could expect to succeed - being barred from the biggest most successful two leagues.
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Do you really believe that is true?
Don't you think that any young black man of the time who had the honor of playing for the Kansas City Monarchs (especially a young black man without an education who perhaps had as his other alternatives only an array of back-breaking and thankless jobs), would have deemed himself a success?
I would suggest that for Black Americans during much of the history of the Negro Leagues (pre-integration) there was a clear path to success by being a baseball player and that even though much of the path was rocky, low-paying, and agonizing (not unlike the path to the MLB), to finally suit up to play for Rube Foster's American Giants or the Detroit Stars of Turkey Stearnes or the aforementioned Monarchs was to be a great success indeed.
While the color bar was despicable, I think we do a great disservice to the vibrant Black culture of the time, of which the Negro Leagues were such a powerful symbol, when we conclude that it was only playing in the white major leagues that defined success in the sport. The top Negro Leagues, and certainly the very best Negro Leagues' teams, were incredibly successful, drew huge crowds, were covered in major (Black) newspapers around the nation, and the players in those leagues were hugely adored and emulated and revered, even if tragically little known to most White Americans of their time.
Edit: Let me put this a slightly different way. From all of my reading about the Negro Leagues, I get the distinct impression that the men who played in it, and the people in this country who followed it, did not consider it an inferior league. So for them there was no shame, no second-class status, in being a player at the highest level of baseball available to a person with darker skin in this nation. Sure they thought it was wrong that they couldn't play, at least not in an organized, official capacity, against the other greatest baseball players in America. But they knew they were just as good. It is only from the perspective of the dominant, majority white culture that one could say that they were barred from playing at the highest level. They knew better.