#Shortstops: The business of the Negro Leagues

But these players were not simply waiting around on the sidelines prior to 1947. African Americans had been playing baseball since the beginning of the game’s development, through military, college and industrial teams, as well as barnstorming. In 1920, Rube Foster, along with fellow team owners, created the Negro National League, the first organized league of its kind. Shortly thereafter, rival leagues like the Southern Negro League and the Eastern Colored League formed, and black baseball flourished across the country.

One Negro League team that experienced significant success was the Newark Eagles. Abe and Effa Manley co-owned the Eagles from 1936-1948, with Effa handling the vast majority of the baseball business operations. She was a savvy businesswoman and a staunch advocate for her players, and was deeply dedicated to civil rights.

As baseball began to integrate, the breaking of the color barrier proved to be a double-edged sword for many of the Negro League teams who took great pride in seeing their players sign with major league teams, but who subsequently lost many of their stars – often without warning or discussion from those big league teams.

In April of 1946, Effa began correspondences with Branch Rickey Sr., the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Happy Chandler, the Commissioner of Baseball, in response to the Brooklyn farm club signings of Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella.

Her letter to Rickey is quick to first clarify support of baseball’s integration, noting that “We are intensely interested in colored ballplayers being given fair opportunities in ‘Big League’ baseball…We are proud of Newcombe, and we wish for him a most successful career with The Dodger chain.”

She goes on to clarify: “However we would be even more enthusiastic, if in extending this well merited recognition, you had only done the owners of The Newark Eagles the courtesy of negotiating with us for the services of this valuable player.”

The letter concludes with a request for a conference to “attempt to formulate a mutually agreeable policy to cover any situation in the future when you may desire to secure the services of any of our Newark Eagles players.”

A few weeks later, Manley wrote to Chandler, after apparently failing to receive a response from Rickey, reiterating her belief that “it is most important that some plan can be discussed whereby possible litigation and ill-feeling can be avoided and some orderly procedure established for the drafting or purchase of our players by those teams over which you have authority.”