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Extracted from the book A Calculus of Color, this article examines the early, powerful effects of major league desegregation on the Negro Leagues. Black fans largely abandoned black baseball games to follow black players on white major league teams. As Negro League attendance plummeted, franchises began to fold, and the leagues, once seen as beacons of successful black enterprise, came to be viewed as unwanted artifacts of Jim Crow. Integration moved forward on terms dictated by the Organized Baseball establishment. A few black players joined the 16 major league teams over a 12-year period, but the owners changed nothing else. While Negro League team entrepreneurs lost money and identity, Organized Baseball's ownership and management remained exclusively white, a character that persisted for decades.
IN A CALCULUS OF COLOR: THE INTEGRATION OF THE AMERICAN LEAGUE (McFarland, 2015), the author seeks to address what seems an awkward gap in the scholarship of baseball and race. Certainly there are outstanding books on the exciting, yet grim, history of the Negro Leagues-books chronicling the great players, the excellence of play, the difficulties of management. There are also any number of striking books on the integration of the major leagues, ranging from close studies of Jackie Robinson's ordeal to critical analyses of Boston's stonewall reluctance. There really is no book, however, uniting these themes in any but a superficial way. A Calculus of Color explores the relationship that existed between segregated black and white baseball, the unequal parallels that subsequently shaped and severely limited efforts to end the discrimination.
Though generally portrayed as an event bearing enormous cultural impact, the integration of major league baseball was in fact a slow, painful, and exceeding limited process, reflective of a history America would as soon forget. Before the Second World War, the racial divide that defined American society was a harsh and exploitive fact of life. The Great Migration of black people from the South to the Northern cities, begun very early in the twentieth century, resulted in dramatic urban tension, often turned violent. The new arrivals struggled to attain expanded opportunity; traditional white residents sought to fence them in to confined neighborhoods and second class occupations. Jim Crow, the varying sets of discriminatory laws legislating "separate but equal"...