Negro league baseball

The Negro leagues were professional baseball leagues primarily in the United States comprising teams of African Americans. 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 in 1920 that are sometimes termed "Negro Major Leagues".

In the late 19th century, the baseball color line developed, excluding African Americans from play in major baseball leagues and affiliated minor leagues (collectively known as organized baseball). The first professional baseball league consisting of all-black teams, the National Colored Base Ball League, was organized strictly as a minor league but failed in 1887 after only two weeks owing to low attendance. After several decades of mostly independent play by a variety of teams, the first Negro National League was formed in 1920 by Rube Foster. Ultimately, seven Negro major leagues existed at various times over the next thirty years. After integration of organized baseball began in the late 1940s, the quality of the Negro leagues slowly deteriorated; the Negro American League's 1951 season is generally considered the last Negro league season, although the last professional club, the Indianapolis Clowns, operated as a humorous sideshow rather than competitively from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced that based on recent decades of historical research, it classified the seven "Negro major leagues" as additional major leagues, adding them to the six historical "major league" designations it made in 1969, thus recognizing statistics and approximately 3,400 players who played from 1920 to 1948. On May 28, 2024, Major League Baseball announced that it had integrated Negro league statistics into its records, which among other changes gives Josh Gibson the highest single-season major league batting average at .466 (1943) and the highest career batting average at .372.

During the formative years of black baseball, the term "colored" was the established usage when referring to African-Americans. References to black baseball prior to the 1930s are usually to "colored" leagues or teams, such as the Southern League of Colored Base Ballists (1886), the National Colored Base Ball League (1887) and the Eastern Colored League (1923), among others. By the 1920s or 1930s, the term "Negro" came into use which led to references to "Negro" leagues or teams. The black World Series was referred to as the Colored World Series from 1924 to 1927, and the Negro World Series from 1942 to 1948.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People petitioned the public to recognize a capital "N" in negro as a matter of respect for black people. By 1930, essentially every major US outlet had adopted "Negro" as the accepted term for black people. By about 1970, the term "Negro" had fallen into disfavor, but by then the Negro leagues were mere historic artifacts.

Because black people were not being accepted into the major and minor baseball leagues due to racism which established the color line, they formed their own teams and had made professional teams by the 1880s. The first known baseball game between two black teams was held on November 15, 1859, in New York City. The Henson Base Ball Club of Jamaica, Queens, defeated the Unknowns of Weeksville, Brooklyn, 54 to 43.

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, which had an African-American population of 22,000. Two former cricket players, James H. Francis and Francis Wood, formed the Pythian Base Ball Club. They 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. At the end of the 1867 season, "the National Association of Baseball Players voted to exclude any club with a black player." 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. "Black teams earned the bulk of their income playing white independent 'semipro' clubs."