ABSTRACT
Baseball’s history is America’s history, and this fusion is no small part of the sport’s revered status as the “national pastime,” however mythic that status has become. Black baseball’s history, typically treated as little more than a footnote in the sport’s larger narrative, can and perhaps should be considered as a chronicle of race relations in America, of “the strange career of Jim Crow,” as C. Vann Woodward put it.1 This shadowy history’s timeline begins when federal troops were withdrawn from the South, which in 1877 was home to approximately 90 percent of America’s blacks. The exodus marked the end of Reconstruction and of the brief, post-war status of blacks as wards of the government. Systematic disenfranchisement resulted throughout the South, pushing black community life to the margins of society.
