Negro Leagues

The Negro Leagues were American professional baseball leagues comprising predominantly African-American teams. more...

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The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be used narrowly for the seven relatively successful leagues beginning 1920 that are sometimes termed "Negro Major Leagues".

The first professional team, established in 1885, achieved great and lasting success as the Cuban Giants, while the first league, the National Colored Base Ball League, failed in 1887 after only two weeks due to low attendance. The Negro American League of 1951 is considered the last major league season and the last professional club, the Indianapolis Clowns, operated amusingly rather than competitively from the mid-1960s to 1980s.

History of the Negro leagues

Amateur era

The first baseball game between two named black teams was held on September 28, 1860 at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Weeksville of New York beat the Colored Union Club 11–0. In 1862, a newspaper reporter looking for a game between two white teams stumbled upon a game between black teams and covered it for his paper. At the time, baseball was commonly deemed recreation around which social gatherings were held.

Immediately after the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and during the Reconstruction period that followed, a black baseball scene formed in the East and Mid-Atlantic states. Comprising mainly ex-soldiers and promoted by some well-known black officers, teams such as the Jamaica Monitor Club, Albany Bachelors, Philadelphia Excelsiors and Chicago Uniques started playing each other and any other team that would play against them.

By the end of the 1860s, the black baseball mecca was Philadelphia. Two former cricket players, James H. Francis and Francis Wood, formed the Pythians, who played in Camden, New Jersey, at the landing of the Federal Street Ferry, because it was difficult to get permits for black baseball games in the city. Octavius Catto, the promoter of the Pythians, decided to apply for membership in the National Association of Base Ball Players, normally a matter of sending delegates to the annual convention; beyond that, a formality. But at the December 1867 convention, the Association passed a resolution that excluded "any club which may be composed of one or more colored players." In some ways Blackball thrived under segregation, with the few black teams of the day playing not only each other but white teams as well.

Catto was murdered by a white man four years later, while leaving the Institute for Colored Youth (October 10, 1871). With his death came the death of the best Negro team of the time.

Read more at Wikipedia.org