ABSTRACT
Baseball, variations of which could be found on American playgrounds for more than a century, soared in popularity in the early 20th century. If black ballplayers wanted to play the sport professionally, they had to create their own all-black teams and play in all-black leagues. In many ways the Negro Leagues were a great success: teams like the Kansas City Monarchs, a perennial powerhouse in the Negro National League (NNL), were extremely profitable, and large crowds turned up to see the annual East-West all-star game. The talent pool among black ballplayers was indisputable, and the size and affluence of black populations in major cities was on the rise. But it took the experience of World War II, where black soldiers helped to defeat racist and genocidal regimes, to fully dramatize the gap between America's democratic ideals and its racist reality. The integration of major league baseball spelled doom for the NNL; the league folded completely in 1957.
