Finding the History of Black Baseball

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Lawrence D. Hogan is a senior professor of history at Union County College in New Jersey. An expert on the history of black baseball, Hogan is the author of Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball.

After a speech in Chicago about “Pride & Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience,” a traveling exhibit organized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and the American Library Association Public Programs Office and made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hogan spoke to atyourlibrary.org about his research.

What led you to become interested in the history of African American baseball?

The black press led me to become interested in the history of African American baseball, although baseball as an interest goes back—people ask me that question frequently, and I always say I think I probably started to love baseball when I was in my mother’s womb, because I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. I wrote a book, a dissertation on the black national news service, back in the 1970s. It was the history of a news service that serviced the black press during its heyday, during its Golden Age. Great papers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American. And I was writing an institutional history, but I couldn’t stay away from the sports pages, and I discovered black baseball on the sports pages of those great black weeklies. And anyone who does history of this sort must go to the black press for the history. It is presented in such magnificently rich ways, and I was hooked. And then I started to meet the ballplayers in the early 1980s on levels that go very deep inside me personally and professionally, in terms of the history that I have gotten from them. That was the experience that really hooked me and has kept me at this for as long as I have been doing it.

In your history as a writer of several books, have you used libraries to help you do research?

Libraries have been essential to the doing of this history, in fact, being the repository so often for the black newspapers that thankfully were microfilmed back in the 1950s, early ‘60s. I was at Indiana University, doing my PhD work, when I started the project. I ended up traveling to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, which I have frequented so often.  I’m close to it now, where I live and teach. There are some very good primary source collections in some of those archives that I have mentioned, and they have been very important for the telling of the story.

Do you use your university library?

I use my university library extensively. When I was out on the job market for the first time in the ‘70s, they coached us, when you’re interviewed always ask about the library, the holdings. I’m at a community college, Union County (N.J.) College. Through interlibrary loan, I secure things that were just unsecurable… the newspapers come in on microfilm for me.

Where did you get the Defender microfilm?

I actually get the Defender microfilm from a whole host of places. From the University of Rochester, it comes in sometimes. From Schomburg I used to get it. Certainly in Washington, at the Library of Congress. I have researched there, not so much the newspaper but into holdings that they have of special periodicals. The other place, of course, that was so wonderful for me, was the Chicago Historical Society.

Did the Defender archives have the daily box scores?

The paper itself does have the box scores. It’s part of the project of the Hall of the Fame that I was a part of. Two of my colleagues, Larry Lester and Dick Clark, combed through, with a team of some 30 researchers across the country, all of the black papers, trying to establish a solid statistical base for black baseball. They succeeded. There is a solid statistical base, and the basis for it is the box scores that appeared in the black papers, like the Defender and the Afro-American.

How do you objectively compare black baseball and white baseball?

The comparison is best made, I think, in games played by black teams against the white teams across the years in postseason play and barnstorming games. Very clearly the black players more than held their own. And there are other ways of taking that measurement as well. Look at what happens when finally the door opens and that first generation of black players comes into the majors: Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks. Every one of them is a star almost immediately with hardly any minor league experience.

Additional Resources

A Biographical Dictionary of the Baseball Hall of Fame
by John C. Skipper
This work includes essays about the lives and contributions of all members of the Hall of Fame, including players from the Negro Leagues who were inducted in the 2006 class.

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip through Buck O’Neil’s America
by Joe Posnanski
A memoir of Posnanski’s road trip with Negro League veteran and Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil through Kansas City (where Buck played for the Kansas City Monarchs), to New York, and to Minneapolis (for Buck O’Neil Day at the Metrodome).

We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball
by Kadir Nelson
This Coretta Scott King Author Award-winning youth title showcases the pride and comradery of the Negro Leagues, celebrates triumphing on one’s own terms and embracing adversity, even as it clearly shows the “us” and “them” mentality bred by segregation.

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