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I played with a very good friend of mine.

He and I used to pretend like we were playing

against eight other guys and we played with anything

that we could to pretend like it was a baseball

and we used broomsticks.

I don't know that you would call it baseball.

But we did the best we could.

A baseball is round, the bat's the same, you know?

If you have talent, no matter what color you are,

and if you can play, you can play.

Baseball is the greatest game that's ever been invented.

I think there's always been

in African American life

a real appreciation of improvisation.

You figured out other ways of being able to succeed.

And a perfect example of that is what they did with baseball.

And that's the story really of the Negro Leagues.

"Prince" Joe: I hear Black people talking

about church, I talk about the Negro Leagues.

So much depth. You had all kind of stars.

There was a camaraderie, man.

You finished playing a baseball game?

And, man, you go to the nice places

within the Black community,

and all of your people were there.

They're so loving, you know?

Greatest thing that ever happened

to me in my life.

Negroes didn't play ball 'cause they were making money.

They played the ballgame because they loved to play it.

The Negro Leagues, I think is a story

about what Black Americans were able to achieve

at a time when they only had themselves to rely on.

They are a proud bunch of men

who play between the white foul lines.

They accepted their role as a part of a movement

before we coined the term "Civil Rights Movement."

Bob K: To go to a Negro Leagues game,

you could feel the immense pride

that Black folks had about this product

known as the Negro Leagues.

To a large degree because they understood

that it was something that was inherently ours.

Now, it was shared with the rest of the world,

but it was still ours.

The stories

about the American Negro Baseball League

were always good news.

People would say, "Did you hear about the League?"

And you always knew that they meant

the Negro Baseball League.

♪ Yeah ♪

Bob M: I wish you could have seen all that I have seen.

For over ten years,

I was an umpire in the Negro Leagues.

When I first heard about the leagues

as a young man,

I knew I wanted to be a part of that world,

closer to all of my heroes.

♪ Yeah! ♪

♪ Did you see Jackie Robinson Hit that ball? ♪

♪ It went zoomin' Cross the left field wall ♪

Bob M: Getting my dream job as an umpire

in the Negro Leagues allowed me to see, firsthand,

some of the best players in the game.

Some of the greats never achieved renown,

but there were quite a few

celebrated Major League ballplayers

who got their start in the Negro Leagues.

♪ Satchel Paige is mellow So is Campanella ♪

♪ Newcombe and Doby too ♪

♪ But it's a natural fact When Jackie comes to bat ♪

♪ The other team is through ♪

Bob M: We didn't realize it at the time,

but the great ballplayers of the leagues

would transform the game.

Jackie Robinson is recognized

as the first professional African American ballplayer

to play in the Major Leagues.

Well, we know that in 1884,

Moses Fleetwood Walker

played for a professional team, the Toledo Blue Stockings.

So there were African American professional ballplayers

in the 19th century.

African Americans have been playing baseball

for as long as White people have been playing baseball.

As the sport began to take hold in popularity,

post-Civil War, Black people were there always.

There were organized Black teams,

and they barnstormed.

They played against other Black teams.

They played against White teams.

There were Blacks who did play

with Whites on teams. But the team was majority White,

it may have one or two Black players on it

and that seemed to be something that was more acceptable

to the White paying public.

If they only have one or two Black players

as opposed to a team

that might have majority Black players

and one or two White players.

But as we move forward through history,

we see that segregation starts to tighten its hold.

In 1887,

the character named Adrian "Cap" Anson

who's up in the Hall of Fame right now,

one of the fathers of professional baseball,

is scheduled to play in Newark

against the Newark Little Giants.

Anson is a racist.

There's no question he's a racist

because two Black players,

one of them named George Stovey, a pitcher,

and the other Moses Fleetwood Walker.

Anson sends word ahead,

"If those two so-and-so's..."

and he uses a word stronger than "so-and-so's,"

"...are seen on the field of play,

my team is not gonna play."

Cap Anson, at the time, is really popular,

and the idea that Cap Anson could potentially represent

the beliefs and ideals of White people

throughout baseball, throughout America in general,

is something that these executives

really pay attention to.

So when he says that he's not willing

to take the field with Black players,

they're like, "Okay."

The International League directors

held a secret meeting at the Genesee House yesterday,

and the question of Colored players

was freely discussed.

Many of the best players in the League are anxious

to leave on account of the Colored element,

and the board finally directed Secretary White to approve

of no more contracts with Colored men.

African American ballplayers were very good

at this game, and they were so good

at the game that the fear was that,

you know, they would consume the positions

that White players were vying for.

In 1896, we have

the Plessy versus Ferguson decision

that determines that separate is equal.

Now, it's not, and we know that.

And so, it sets up, essentially,

what we have going well into the 20th century,

which is this legal doctrine that says,

"It is okay to keep everyone separate."

What was happening there is that a hand goes up

with a stop sign on it, and it's saying to Blacks

outside of baseball, but also inside of baseball,

"You can't do this. You can't do that.

You can't go here. You can't be this."

Well, what do you do when that comes at you?

You turn back into yourself.

You find resources that are your own resources,

and you establish things for yourself

that the larger world is saying you can't do,

et cetera, et cetera.

Really all over the country

Black people were coming together

and forming these self-sustaining communities.

It's okay if they never fully bring us into society.

We can do it ourselves.

We enjoyed ourselves because we were by ourselves.

And nobody trying to tell us what to do.

So we learn how to do with what we had.

See, what do old ladies say? "Got to use what you got"?

So we had to use what we had.

So Black businesses come into being

in that period of time,

founded for themselves out of their own resources,

Black schools and baseball too.

After the Plessy versus Ferguson decision,

great Black professional baseball teams come into being,

and the players and the games were ballyhooed by newspapers

that were their own newspapers.

And those newspapers knew

the audience that they had to play to.

Everybody read the Chicago Defender

and thePittsburgh Courier...

...the two leading Black newspapers in the country.

My grandmother, in our little town,

wouldn't take the weekly newspaper.

She said it was written

for Whites, by Whites, and about Whites.

I mean, there were several major Black newspapers,

and Chicago Defender

was probably the major Black newspaper.

And lots of people read it.

Lots of Black people read it in the South.

And the Chicago Defender was a big promoter

of Black people moving to the North.

It was a push-pull thing.

You're being attracted by the possibility

that life could be better for you moving,

and you want to get away from a situation that's bad.

So something's pushing you out,

as well as something is pulling you forward.

Bob M: For Blacks in the Jim Crow South,

life was a struggle.

Where I grew up in Alabama,

fear and violence were commonplace.

The Ku Klux Klan always did its dirty work at night

and would often drive right past us on the way

to a lynching or cross-burning ceremony.

Bob M: Mama would shout,

"Y'all kids, hurry up, and turn off the lights,

and lay down on the floor."

With the house pitch black, I could hear my heart pounding

with terror as I lay there.

If rifles were shooting in the air...

...then we knew

some poor Black soul

had been lynched just over the hill.

My brother had written me several times,

encouraging me to join him in the North.

I longed to go.

So on a chilly October day, I hopped aboard a freight train.

As the train chugged forward,

I could feel the weight of Southern oppression

lifted off my shoulders,

on our way to a promised land of jobs,

independence...

...and a better life for a Colored man in America.

We had a dream.

People felt that

this is a land of opportunity. Okay, so I will move North,

I will move West, et cetera.

All of these areas where we hope to find the real America.

America that allows us to be all we can be,

all we can become.

And it's a flood tide, that immigration.

Over a million Blacks come up

out of the South to settle in urban centers in the North.

So it's no surprise that Black baseball

would develop as Black people moved out of the South

and into cities where the segregation

was a little less rigid and they had transportation

to get people to go to a ballgame.

These kinds of things made a huge difference

in making it possible for Black people

to have an array of teams in cities.

So now, you see

a few entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it in baseball.

And people like Rube Foster, in Chicago, is able to see

that a Black club can be

a successful business enterprise.

Bob K: Andrew Rube Foster owned the Chicago American Giants,

and he managed the Chicago American Giants.

And Rube Foster, in my own estimation,

is the greatest baseball mind this sport has ever seen.

Rube Foster was light-years ahead of his time.

He was better known as a pitcher,

he pitched seven no-hitters in his brilliant career.

Quite frankly, by 1905, he might have been

the greatest pitcher in the world.

Bob K: He is credited with having invented

what we now know to be the screwball.

Back then, it was called a "fade away,"

and ol' Rube perfected this pitch.

So much so that the great

Major League manager, John McGraw,

would sneak Rube into his camp so that Rube Foster could teach

Christy Mathewson how to throw the screwball.

Christy Mathewson threw the pitch all the way

into the National Baseball Hall of Fame,

that he learned from Rube Foster.

Rube's greatest asset was his genius as a manager

and as an executive.

He's the founder of the Chicago American Giants,

1910 or thereabouts and through the next decade,

Rube Foster makes that team into the greatest Black team

up to that point in time that there was.

Mr. Foster was a pretty smart dude, now.

You would thought he went to school somewhere,

but he didn't.

He would go down South to the Negro colleges in Texas,

and he would get a lot of the ballplayers

out of the schools.

If he was a fast man, a good runner, he'd say,

"Would you put on some football pads?

I want you to learn

how to steal bases."

And Mr. Foster taught them all the tricks.

He exploited the rules to his maximum benefit.

We're looking at a bunt-and-run...

...drag bunting...

double steals...

a suicide squeeze play at home plate.

He made the game more up tempo.

You see, he was adamant about the style of play

that would become signature Negro Leagues Baseball.

Fast, aggressive, daring.

They bunt their way up.

They steal second, they steal third.

And, man, if you weren't too smart,

they were stealing home.

During World War I,

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a very famous editorial

in the crisis called "Close Ranks."

He told Black people, "We need to set aside

our grievances and go join with the country to go fight

to save democracy."

News reporter: Fighting with the eighth Illinois

on the Swanson Front...

...372nd on the plains of Mons-En-Chaussée.

But he thought that doing this,

Black people would show their loyalty,

and Black people would show they were American citizens,

and Black people would show that they were putting

being American

above being Black, and that this would get them

some degree of acceptance. This would get them some degree

of White people listening to their grievances

and responding to their grievances.

He turned out to be totally wrong.

What happens is that they come back

into a racial world that is terribly negative.

In a couple of instances, the Chicago Defender prints

a Black soldier in his uniform being hanged, being lynched.

The Red Summer of 1919 was one of the worst summers

of White terroristic violence in history of this country.

From the late winter up until the following fall,

there was violence all over, and it was, almost all of it

was White violence against Blacks.

The most noted was Chicago.

There was also terrible blow up in Washington, DC,

Wilmington, Delaware, Elaine, Arkansas.

It happened all over.

And part of it was White people wanting to tell Black people

the war doesn't change anything, and we're still in charge.

But it convinced a lot of Black people,

all the more, that we need to close ranks

in another kind of way to build our own institutions.

You had the rise

of someone like Marcus Garvey.

You had people who were telling Black people,

in essence, that they had a destiny.

Soon after, we got Alain Locke writing

his great book called, The New Negro.

The New Negro had a new voice.

The New Negro was not going

to sit back and accept these segregated sanctions anymore.

And so we got a new mindset.

This is the perfect time in America to start

an organized league in 1920.

Rube Foster certainly has to be aware

of all these people trying to figure out

how to move Black people forward

in a society that has constantly ostracized them,

that has kept them on the margins

and doesn't appear to be changing.

So Rube Foster wrote a series of op-eds called,

"The Pitfalls of Baseball" for the Chicago Defender,

and he talked about the importance

of organizing Black baseball.

How it would benefit,

not just the players, but the owners of each team,

for them to form this connected league

and to have scheduled games and play against each other

and build a fan base.

"I have fought against delivering Colored baseball

into the control of Whites,

thinking that with a show of patronage from the fans

we would get together."

So he gets paperwork done in the state of Illinois

to incorporate this non-existent league

that no one has even agreed to do yet.

And he gets these other team owners to agree,

and they meet in Kansas City at the Y.

Bob K: You know, I wish I could have been

a fly on the wall in that room because Rube Foster had to be

a master salesman.

He had to be because he had pulled

these independent Black baseball team owners.

So they were already making money.

And now he had to convince them that they could be

even more successful if we organize

and we now share a piece of the pie

by creating our own league.

And so, you know Rube was a great salesman

because he was able to do that.

And on February 13th, 1920, they walked out having signed

the documents to start the Negro National League.

His motto for the League

he stole from abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

"We are the ship..."

- "...and all else..." - "...the sea."

Bob K: Yeah, he was serving notice

to Major League Baseball

that a new player had arrived on the scene

to be reckoned with.

Bob M: When it came to promoting a game,

no one did it better than the Negro Leagues.

Window placards, newspaper advertisements,

and word-of-mouth were in the works,

well in advance for most games.

Sometimes I spent the ten cents to buy a ticket.

Other times, I'd peer through the knotholes

in the wooden fence outside the stadium.

Pitchers zipped balls with such speed across the plate

that it was hard to follow the pitch.

Batters stretched singles

into doubles, and doubles into triples,

with lightning speed.

It was obvious the fans didn't want the celebration

to end, and neither did I.

Negro Leagues baseball was so popular

that Black churches would move their service time up an hour

so fans could go to the game.

If you know anything about the Black church,

you don't mess with service time.

But when the great Kansas City Monarchs are playing,

any of those great Black teams,

service time would move up to ten o'clock,

and everybody filed out going to that

Sunday doubleheader looking good.

When they went to baseball games,

men would dress very sharply.

Ladies wore dresses and big hats, beautiful hats,

with flowers and whatnot on them.

You would buy the fanciest clothing in the world.

The age of the 20th century,

the Harlem Renaissance, New Negro Renaissance,

was the age of the rise of the Black professional.

You know, you got a new kind of presentation

of the Black professional musician.

You got a new kind of presentation

of the Black professional athlete

with Negro League Baseball.

These were professional men, sometimes women,

who were doing something at a very, very high level

and had a tremendous virtuosity.

Any time you saw Black people doing something

that was virtuosic, you always... You felt like,

"Okay, I can go on

and deal with the rest of my week...

...'cause I saw some Black people doing

something that's really excellent."

That's a home run in the right field

into the stands! First home run of the series!

Meanwhile,

White baseball will soon become a station-to-station game.

You don't run. You don't steal. You don't bunt. No hit and run.

You try to hit it out of the park.

And I think that's a reflection of Babe Ruth's influence.

But it's, in many ways, the antithesis

of the Black game.

Bob K: If a guy went into the hole,

flipped it behind his back, start the double play...

well, we see that now every night of the week

as a top-ten highlight on some network.

Back then, the Major Leaguers would say

that they were "showboating."

But what the Major Leaguers were trying to say then

that the Negro Leagues didn't play the game

the right way.

But really that was a code word to say they didn't play the game

the White way.

But still, it was a fabulous time

for Black men in baseball

because coming out of World War I,

there were lots of people who were looking

for that equality, but now they have

their own league. How about that?

So once Rube Foster organizes the Negro National League,

other people start to see that, "Hey, there's a possibility."

1923 rolls around.

There's a guy in Philadelphia by the name of Ed Bolden,

and he'd worked for the post office for years.

He was the owner of the Hilldale team.

He sees the writing on the wall,

that Rube Foster's influence is headed towards the East.

So Ed Bolden gets

all of the Eastern teams together,

and they have a big meeting, and they form

the Eastern Colored League in 1923.

With the creation of the Eastern Colored League

on the East Coast, the Negro National League,

that was primarily based in the Midwest,

has a competitive league

that now they can stage a World Series against.

So in 1924, the Kansas City Monarchs

of the Negro National League played the Hilldale Daisies

of the Eastern Colored League

in the very first Colored World Series.

The World Series in 1924 was the best of nine,

not seven like it is today.

It turned out to be a great series.

Series is tied up four games each.

We're in Chicago now,

the weather is in the mid-fifties.

José Méndez has a cold, and Rube Foster says,

"You have to pitch this game."

Hilldale comes out with Script Lee.

Script Lee is a submarine pitcher.

The Hilldale pitcher had everything

a pitcher could ask for in the first seven innings.

During that time, only one man reached first.

Then came the eighth.

But he runs out of gas and he starts to pitch overhand.

The bases were full.

Allen looked over the ball, then singled to right scoring.

Duncan slid into home plate...

...half a second ahead of Riggs' throw to Santop.

Monarchs score five runs

and José Méndez, on three hits, shuts out the Hilldale Club,

and the Monarchs take the most dramatic World Series

ever played.

It really kind of established Black baseball.

It was saying to White baseball, "Look, we're the same.

We have the same end of the year championship series,

the same way you do.

We've got our two separate leagues,

like the National and American League,

the same way you do." And that was important.

As much as Rube Foster and other executives wanted to,

you know, get into baseball, and have successful teams,

so they could make their own money

and so that they could do this incredible thing for

and within the Black community.

There was also this constant effort

to show White baseball that Black baseball

was good enough, with the hopes that, ultimately,

Black baseball could become one with White baseball,

that they could join forces.

Bob K: And Rube's initial vision

was that he would create a league that was so dynamic,

that he would force Major League Baseball's hand to expand.

So if we were looking at it in a more modern-day context,

think football with the NFL and the AFL merger,

or for those who are basketball fans,

the merger of the NBA and the ABA.

Now, this was Rube Foster in the 1920s.

That's how forward-thinking and how much a visionary

this man was.

Well, Rube Foster was in Indianapolis for a game

in May of 1925,

and unfortunately, he was subjected

to carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky gas heater.

Oh, he was rescued by his teammates

who came to his room to deliver a telegram.

Some newspaper accounts said he was in serious condition.

He was rushed to the hospital.

I don't think he ever fully recovered.

By September of the following year, in 1926,

he was admitted to a sanitarium.

Rube Foster died on December the 9th, 1930.

Bob K: And Rube Foster, when he dies,

the fans of Chicago lined the streets for three days

to pay their respect to their beloved Rube Foster.

Thousands of people came from afar

to celebrate this great legend.

Rube Foster's death was a great loss

to baseball and Black America.

And the Negro National League

began to struggle.

And then, of course, not only do they lose Foster,

the Great Depression hits.

And so the combination, I think, of the two of those things

really brings about the demise

of that first Negro National League.

As bad as the Great Depression was

for most White Americans, it was a heck of a lot worse

for Black Americans.

When it comes to Blacks, it's the old phrase,

"Last hired, first fired."

That's what faced Blacks.

So the Black community, which had enjoyed

a certain measure of economic success in the '20s,

is once again facing hard times.

And that was a bad time for this country for,

not only the Blacks,

but for the majority of poor people. It was bad.

I know. They could come to a baseball game,

forget about all their woes.

And I was just as proud of making them happy.

And when I'd come in,

you'd think I had a million dollars.

That's how much baseball meant to them.

Bob M: All I wanted to do was talk baseball.

Bob M: The older folks who hung out at the barbershops

were more than happy to share their wisdom with me.

Stories of seeing greats like Oscar Charleston,

"Cool Papa" Bell, and Josh Gibson.

And legendary teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords

and Homestead Grays rolled out of the mouths of old men

as if they knew each player personally.

Back in the '30s, Pittsburgh becomes

the crossroads of Black baseball in America.

It wasn't the largest Black community by far,

but it was situated geographically

on the East-West rail lines,

which meant that any Black intellectual,

politician, figure of note, or ballclub that's traveling

from New York to Chicago, or anywhere else,

is going to stop and play in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh becomes the home to, along with the Chicago Defender,

the most influential Black newspaper in the country,

the Pittsburgh Courier.

Some of the greatest jazz musicians of the era

made their fortunes in Pittsburgh.

And in the world of sports,

you have clearly the two greatest

Negro League dynasties of the 1930s...

the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords.

And those teams had two owners,

who were both intensely competitive,

Gus Greenlee and Cumberland Posey Jr.

They were men of different temperaments.

They had different styles.

I think they knew that their rivalry was something

that was good for both of them

and good for Black baseball as a whole.

Cum Posey, who lived a block and a half from me,

was a great basketball player at Penn State.

His father was a fairly well-to-do man,

and so he had the time.

Most Black kids in those days had worked after school

and on Saturdays and Sundays...

to supplement your family's income.

But Cum had the time to deal with a hobby.

And he took some of these Black baseball players

and made up a team.

It was just a great experience

to have been in Homestead

at that time and tied in with that great ballclub

called the Homestead Grays.

Bob K: In 1931, Cumberland Posey introduces the world

to a young phenom

by the name of Joshua Gibson.

♪ Before ol' Henry Aaron Before ol' Willie Mays ♪

♪ A brown-skin man Hit homers ♪

♪ Over every wall They raised... ♪

He was one of the few people...

that was as good

the first year as he was the last year he played.

He was actually a natural.

♪ Ooh, Josh Gibson... ♪

Joshua Gibson came North in the Great Migration

after World War I.

His father, Mark, left sharecropping

to become a steelworker in Pittsburgh.

Josh left school after the ninth grade

and then was discovered

on the sandlots when Gibson was about 16 years old.

I saw a young man playing, very muscular,

very young.

Near the end of the game, he hit a home run

and he hit the ball out of existence,

it looked like. They didn't even go after it.

It went up over a mountain.

And from that day on, they just loved Josh, all of 'em.

Josh was not pretentious. He was amiable,

and he treated everybody the same, and he could play.

And you knew if you had Josh in the lineup,

you were going to be a winning club.

Perhaps a championship club.

♪ Ooh, Josh Gibson ♪

Josh Gibson made a name for himself

with the Homestead Grays.

When we look at his numbers, his home run at-bat ratio

is between Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds.

We're looking at a Gibson home run

every 14 times at bat.

He always led

every league that he ever played in,

in batting average.

He might go, you know, get eight for ten,

you know, a 13 for 15. You know, like that.

Yeah. He was tough to get out.

Griffith Stadium,

there was 405 feet down the left of the line

and behind that, there was a scoreboard

that had a big hotdog on it with mustard on it.

And Josh hit the ball over the 400 feet,

up over the back above the stands,

and hit that advertisement board

and peeled the paper right off it.

So we used to tease and say that he knocked

the mustard off the hotdog.

I remember one time

I was walking up the ramp with Josh,

and one little kid ran up, said, "Mr. Gibson, Mr. Gibson,

will you give me one of your broken bats?"

Josh says,

"Son, I don't break bats. I wear them out."

Now, that Josh Gibson, he was the type of person

that just liked everybody.

And always with a smile, like a big overgrown kid.

If I step on the bus, he'd say, "Why, oh, my, Ms. Posey."

And he'd run and he'd almost pick me up

and put me in the bus and everything

he'd see that I had there and say.

And the first thing he'd say to the boys is...

And that was it.

Bob K: Cumberland Posey,

of course, had built the great Homestead Grays,

and Cumberland Posey had financial wherewithal.

And so he was able to pluck

star players away from other Black baseball teams.

And he would do that with regularity.

And then here comes Gus Greenlee.

Gus Greenlee would build the great Pittsburgh Crawfords,

as now a rival to Cumberland Posey's Homestead Grays.

He was in a lot of businesses.

He ran a very popular restaurant called Crawford Grill,

and he was the leading entrepreneur

in the Black numbers gambling business.

Well, the numbers, essentially,

were what we now know as the lottery.

They would base the winning number

usually on a number in the stock tables that day,

and every day, everybody played the numbers.

My grandmother...

...who, you know, and my grandparents

who ran a funeral home, played the numbers every day.

Gus Greenlee was as fine a man as you would want to know.

And I found that Gus would do anything for anybody

who was a friend of his.

If he didn't even know them, and they got in trouble,

if there was anything he could do to help them

out of trouble, he would do it.

Gus Greenlee was approached

by a couple members

of the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team,

and at the time they were like a semi-pro sandlot team

and, you know, said that they needed money,

they needed an investor. And Gus jumped in headfirst.

When he took the ball team,

he let us know that when he took it that he was going to the top

and he's gonna do and get the best he could.

I think his top motivation was he looked across town

and he saw Cum Posey, the son of the biggest

and wealthiest Black family in town, and said,

"If I can build the Crawfords into a team

that can beat the Grays,

I'll be the top man in Pittsburgh."

Bob K: He did to Cumberland Posey,

what Posey had done to other teams.

He outbidded Cumberland Posey for his star players.

He convinces Oscar Charleston

to cross town and join the Crawfords.

Then he sets his sight on Josh Gibson.

So now, Josh Gibson is playing for the Crawfords.

And so he steals every good player

that Cumberland Posey ever developed.

But then the Crawfords are able to pick up Satchel Paige.

I just could pitch and then the master just give me

a home. And you just... It was hard to beat me.

You couldn't ought to beat me.

I did some things in baseball I've never seen anyone else do,

and I didn't know what I was doing

one half of the time. But still, I did it.

Satchel Paige is born in Mobile, Alabama.

He's dirt poor.

He has to go out and hunt game with rocks,

and he gets his name, Satchel

because later on, after he's nine or older,

he's able to work at the railroad depot

carrying bags, luggage, satchels.

He learned how to pitch

at the Mount Meigs Reform school.

And so, after that, he comes out of there

and begins his climb to baseball fame.

A fellow by the name of Bill Gatewood,

I just love the way he went, the way he pitched.

He said, "You know the thing is, if you listen to me,

I'll make you one of the greatest pitchers

in the world."

He said, "Because you love to play,

you love the game,

and you try to do what I tell you."

He says, "You see all the fellas out there?"

He says, "I have the devil with them

trying to make them practice."

He said, "You practice without me asking you."

So he was gonna help me.

But now, as far as me saying,

"I am the greatest pitcher in the world."

I didn't say that. It's other people saying it.

Bob M: Once I became an umpire in the leagues,

I finally got my shot to go behind the plate

and call balls and strikes for the legend.

I had never seen a ball move the way it did.

I was stunned, and so was the batter.

Satchel throw balls that looked small,

throw the small ball, which is true.

It'd be turning so fast,

it looks smaller than the regular ball.

"Prince" Joe: I weakly grounded a ball back to him

and I felt like I'd hit a home run.

Just to know that I had made contact with the ball.

Satchel Paige is, without a doubt,

the greatest pitcher in Black baseball history.

We can now show Satchel Paige's strikeout rate per inning

is very similar to Nolan Ryan's.

Bob F: He would be one of the top five

or ten pitchers in baseball history

if he'd been in the big leagues throughout his career.

But I saw him pitch and he threw

with very little effort whatsoever. And the hitters say,

"Well, you can't throw the next one by me."

Boom. There it goes.

And, well, you're not going to get that one by me.

Oop, oop! There it goes.

He went out on that mound and he looked up at the crowd.

He said, "Duty, the sun is shining,

but I'm gonna make them think it's nighttime."

He struck out 21 of the 28 men he faced.

We knew when we saw Satchel Paige pitch,

when I saw Satchel Paige and Satch could call in

the whole team and strike everybody out.

You know, I saw that. He'd call them all in.

Here he is, seven of us, kneeling around the mound.

He threw nine pitches, and the side was out.

When he was in the backyard, he just did amazing things.

Like he'd say, "Look at that.

Look at that berry hanging over there on the bush.

I bet I can hit it." And I'd say, "No you can't."

And he would pick up something and...

...hit it and I would say,

"Oh, wow!" You know, that's what little children do.

They don't think, well, it was 55 feet away

and it was the size of a quarter.

You would have to be a heck of a shot to make it.

Before Gus Greenlee hired Satchel,

the initial Negro League,

which was formed by Rube Foster,

had essentially fallen apart.

So in 1933, Greenlee and some others found

the second Negro National League.

So they became the Negro National League.

But now it's all Eastern teams. And in 1937, the Western teams

organized the Negro American League.

And so, Gus Greenlee

starts to bankroll a bunch of new... ideas.

And one of those people

talk about is the East-West game.

And it was going to be the premier event.

Gentleman Dave: They picked the best of the teams,

players from the East

and the best of the players from the West,

and they rented Comiskey Park.

We started playing in 1933. It was only 22,000 that year.

From that day on, the crowd kept going and going,

until the one time we had 70,000.

People came from all over the country.

You had all the entertainers come in, you got Count Basie,

Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Lena Horne was there.

Anybody who was anybody was there at that game.

♪ Keep on swingin' Trying to get to second base ♪

Bob K: This was the crème de la crème

of baseball.

There's Satchel Paige. There's Hilton Smith,

there's Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard, Mule Suttles.

All these great stars. They're all there.

Oh, man, you're talking about a gala affair. A weekend.

They start coming in by Thursday.

Didn't leave until Monday morning.

The real impact of the East-West Classic

was that White sportswriters started to cover it,

and once they did, some of them, for the very first time,

saw a kind of baseball they had never seen before,

where games were won...

...not just with hitting, but with base stealing,

with these incredibly acrobatic catches

in the outfield, with just a level of speed

that they had never seen in baseball.

And they started to write about that,

and the appeal that could have for White fans, as well.

So the East-West classic is having a big impact

on the vision of the future for baseball.

♪ Well you may run on For a long time ♪

♪ Run on for a long time ♪

♪ Run on for a long time Let me tell you ♪

♪ God Almighty Is gonna cut you down ♪

♪ Go tell That long-tongued liar ♪

♪ Go tell That midnight rider... ♪

Bob M: Before, during and after the season,

teams would travel throughout the country

and play in exhibition games to enhance their income.

I was given the chance to go on the road

with many different teams.

We'd travel right after a game,

sometimes driving all night long to get to our next destination.

♪ I thought I heard The shuffle of angels' feet... ♪

It's 11 or 12 o'clock at night,

and you're just leaving a ballgame,

and you're on a hike for 400 miles

or more to the next stop.

And you find ways, you know, to amuse yourself.

And as you well know,

singers have been a part of our culture.

And they have their quartets, and you would hear one

going down the road in the middle of the night

and hear them singing.

♪ Run on for a long time Let me tell you ♪

♪ God Almighty Is gonna cut you down... ♪

Barnstorming was a schedule that the teams

would have playing different teams.

They may play a league team one day,

and then they'd play

the local shoe factory the next day.

And just playing, in most cases,

as many games as they could play.

I mean, it wasn't uncommon

for a team to play three games in one day.

When I was playing

baseball with the Philadelphia Stars

on 4th of July, we played four games.

Play the game at ten o'clock in the morning,

doubleheader in the afternoon, and then we'd get in the bus

and ride over New York State and play that night.

We played so many doubleheaders

that when we had played one game,

we'd call that an off day.

They had to find a way to get money

turning over all the time.

Their system was to have a game every day.

As long as they could play somewhere every day

in order to keep those payrolls going to keep it afloat.

♪ That's all, brother You'll knock no more ♪

♪ Well, run on For a long time ♪

We would get tired when riding.

We would fuss like a bunch of chickens.

But when you put the suit on, well, it was different.

You just, you knew that was your job,

and you just go to it.

♪ Tell the gambler Rambler, backbiter ♪

♪ Tell 'em God Almighty Is gonna cut 'em down ♪

Bob M: Players kept their minds off their struggles

playing cards and sharing stories.

Of course, we'd always run into a few ignorant kooks

who would call us names.

In those moments, responding to racism,

we weren't players, and umpires, and managers.

We were brothers.

They thought that the Homestead Grays...

was a White team.

So they had us booked into a very nice hotel.

See, Posey was the traveling secretary,

and he was very fair skinned.

So he went in, and he got the rooms

and everything.

So they started to unload the bus...

...and when the players got off,

they said, "Oh, no, no, you can't stay here.

This is a White hotel."

Black hotels in the South,

even in major cities like Birmingham, Memphis,

New Orleans, and whatnot, they were very rare.

And usually the ballplayers would find a rooming house,

a Black rooming house in the town,

and that was where they had to stay.

I can remember a town

where we put up in a rooming house in Arkansas.

When you turn on the lights,

you see the bedbugs start to go for cover.

You have to sleep with the lights on

because if you don't,

those little gremlins would come out

and you wouldn't get any sleep anyhow.

Satchel Paige makes

the point one of his first games.

They arrived at the park

and he said, "Oh, I'm really tired.

I want to hurry up and get to bed and get some rest."

And the manager said, "What bed? What do you mean,

get to rest?

We're staying here in the ballpark."

I mean, you... you had to sleep on your suitcase

in the ballpark.

We didn't stop much because they wouldn't feed us

in the restaurants.

So we had to eat out of paper sacks

and go in a grocery store.

We got one dollar a day meal money,

and we would buy one loaf of bread

and we would buy a jar, a big jar of peanut butter.

That's what we lived off of for three or four days.

Peanut butter and bread.

Sometimes I'd wonder, I'd talk. I'd say,

"Well, how in the world do they expect you to play ball

and you can't even eat?"

You haven't had a bed to sleep in.

You slept in a bus.

It wasn't healthy. It wasn't comfortable at all.

How they could play two and three games in two days

is really a mystery.

Bob M: On long bus rides, I had overheard

Negro League players talk

about their incredible experiences

playing winter ball in the Caribbean.

The players said that a Black man

could just be a man and not have to worry

about paying the social consequences for it.

Bob M: It sounded about perfect to me.

First, I played in Puerto Rico,

then I played in Cuba, and then Mexico.

It was a wonderful place to play.

They give you a chance to go down there,

and the salaries were a little better.

The crowds were better.

The teams in those towns were the kings of the towns,

it was like high school.

You can say that

when the game was played on weekends

and the whole town was at the game.

Fans were more like football fans, you know,

"rah rah" cheering and hit a home run

you'd take your cap around and they'd put money in the cap.

And they had a company called Don Q Rum.

Every home run you hit, you'd get a case of Don Q Rum,

you know? So it was fun.

There little kids run behind you

and after the ball game, they want your autograph

and it makes you feel a part of something,

instead of being something separate unto itself.

But when you are out of your own country,

and you find everything so much better...

you know, it's a revelation in a way,

if you never experienced it.

But it's like heaven, you know?

I want to go back, you know, I got to go back there.

I got to go back there.

There was very little discrimination.

So you felt, you know, free.

The fact that, you know,

you were accepted for your ability,

not from the color of your skin,

and that really made you feel great.

I think from the very beginning,

there was a sense of a kind of a solidarity or connection

between Black players here and Latin players,

dark Latin players.

So in some ways,

baseball generated a kind of diaspora,

'cause these Black Latin players

could not play Major League Baseball either.

They had to play in the Negro Leagues

that they were playing in the United States.

And so Martín Dihigo and José Méndez,

Cristóbal Torriente,

the game was just full of Latino ballplayers.

Negro Leagues was a rainbow coalition

of players of color,

everything from chalk to charcoal.

That was the pigmentation

that played in the Negro Leagues.

News reporter: Millions enjoy a great year in American sports.

But Dizzy and Daffy Dean,

the Cardinal Ace's new national heroes.

Dizzy Dean pretty much saved baseball

during the Depression.

Babe Ruth was kind of fading out for the Depression 1934,

and him and his brother come in with the Cardinals.

They win the pennant,

and then they go to the World Series.

So they're like on top of the world.

And they could have gone home, but they were gonna barnstorm.

And so they played in that particular year, 1934.

They play six games against Kansas City Monarchs,

two against the Philadelphia Stars,

three against the Pittsburgh Crawfords,

and two against the New York Black Yankees.

And they tour all the way across the country.

But people didn't, hadn't seen Blacks

and Major League All-Star teams mix too much in those days.

So we always had large crowds. I think we played ten games.

We played against

Dizzy Dean and his brother in Cleveland,

and they had a sellout crowd. And...

Satchel beat Dizzy two-one in 12 innings.

Bob K: The record books bear out that the Black teams

won the majority of those head-to-head matchups.

What that tells me, number one, is there was no doubt

in the minds of those Major League athletes

that these guys could play.

Now,

we knew that we could play baseball with anybody.

If you've got Satchel on your team,

you can play our teams that got nine devils on it.

Somebody asked Dizzy Dean, they said,

"Who's the greatest pitcher you ever saw?"

And Dizzy Dean was known to be a little conceited,

and they figured he's gonna start talking about himself.

He said, and he told them

that the greatest pitcher he ever saw was a Colored boy

named Satchel Paige.

He said, "If you can get him and me on the same team,

we could win the pennant by the 4th of July

and go fishing until the World Series started."

I remember we were playing in California

in the winter league,

and I was with Satchel Paige's All-Stars.

And we were playing the Major Leagues All-Stars.

And we played three Sundays.

And then Judge Landis, who was the commissioner

at that time,

sent a telegram out and told the Major Leaguers

not to play us any more

because they had everything to lose and nothing to gain.

We had everything to gain and nothing to lose.

I can only be for the best team in each league to win a pennant.

But to you fans, no heartaches and not even a grouch.

May you all win.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis

is brought in as the first commissioner of baseball

after the Black Sox scandal of 1919,

which was the throwing of the World Series.

So the owners give Kenesaw Mountain Landis

essentially almost dictatorial powers,

because they needed to clean up the image of baseball

after the Black Sox scandal.

Whatever views Landis had, we know that by his actions,

he maintained segregation in Major League Baseball

far longer than it needed to be maintained.

Landis will soon prevent teams of Major Leaguers

from barnstorming against teams of Negro Leaguers

because he doesn't want

intact Major League teams being defeated.

Whatever he says about, "Oh, there's no law.

There's no rule against integration."

The reality is, at every step, he did nothing but block it.

News reporter: Today, Destination Freedom

will play that chapter entitled "The Ballad of Satchel Paige."

♪ Nobody knows when he first Played on a baseball field ♪

♪ Some say he put out Caesar ♪

♪ When old Julius Tried to steal... ♪

As his name recognition grows as a tremendous winner,

other teams want him to come in, pitch two or three innings,

and that's when the relationship between him and Gus Greenlee

becomes...

strained.

By 1937, he had put in two, like, really great seasons

for Gus Greenlee.

He was back with the Crawfords, and all of a sudden,

these guys start hanging around the stadium,

and it turns out that they were emissaries

from the strong man in the Dominican Republic,

Trujillo.

So he sent his emissary with 30,000 dollars

to offer Satchel Paige

to play for him, and then also carte blanche

to then bring as many players as he could bring with him.

Paige then was able to reach out

to other star Negro League players,

particularly those on the Crawfords.

"And yeah, I'll go with you. Sure. For what? How much money?

Pay me a couple thousand. Oh, yeah, right. I'm coming."

Paige brought in a total of nine Pittsburgh Crawfords

from a roster of 16.

But it destroyed the Pittsburgh Crawfords

because they lost their best players.

By 1938, they were history.

It was too bad because Greenlee did a great deal

for Black baseball.

So at that point,

Cum Posey takes advantage, pounces.

And he lured Josh Gibson back,

started stealing some of the players back.

And then you had the makings of,

really, the last great Negro League dynasty,

which was the Homestead Grays.

And they made it to five of the last

Negro League World Series

in the last decade of the Negro Leagues.

News reporter: The stakes this time

are the greatest men have ever fought for.

And what are the stakes? The American state.

The liberty of the whole earth

depends on the outcome of this contest.

Bob M: Following the US entry into World War II,

African Americans once again embraced the opportunity

to fight for their country.

Close to 120 Negro League ballplayers

joined in the war effort.

In the spring of 1943, I enlisted as a member

of the United States Marine Corps.

I was one of the first Black Marines

in the history of this country.

Black soldiers were always put on the front lines,

used as pawns to pave the way for the White soldiers.

On the battlefields of Okinawa, Saipan, and Guam,

I would endure many harrowing experiences.

More than half of my company was killed.

There were so many dead bodies lying around,

they could have covered the playing field

of any Major League ballpark with the corpses.

I had given America two and a half years of service,

and the country still had not granted

full rights to me or my Black brothers.

It was a huge contradiction

that Americans were fighting this war effort

on behalf of civil rights and liberties for people abroad.

And Black people understood

that they were still second class citizens at home.

And I think Black people took that as an opportunity

to start pushing for more.

The Double V campaign

was started by the Pittsburgh Courier.

The Courier rallied Black opinion

around the country,

around the idea of "We will support this war.

We will enlist to fight.

We will buy war bonds and support the war.

We will be patriotic, but we want it understood,

that when the war is over, we are going to get our rights."

And this is what they call the Double Victory campaign.

The idea of having to fight two wars, one overseas,

and more importantly, one here at home against segregation.

And in that discussion comes one of, I think,

one of the most powerful images and stories that comes out

is the idea they can fight,

and go, and fight, and die at Guadalcanal,

but they can't play on a diamond together?

At the time,

baseball was America's most important sport,

and so integrating that

they felt symbolically would be such a major step

to see Black people and White people

working together on the same team

to achieve a common goal of winning a game.

I was involved

in an organization of young people

interested in breaking

the Jim Crow ban in the big leagues.

We used to go collect signatures

from the fans coming into Forbes Field

that we want to have Negroes get into the big leagues,

and there were lots of petitions

like we were making in Pittsburgh, in New York.

Many, many petitions

were gathered at the Yankee Stadium.

The owners knew that this has got to change.

Bob K: Now, the Black press

was pushing this agenda all along. Sam Lacy, Faye Young.

There were other great Black writers

who were all trying to alter the course of baseball

and move Black folks into Major League Baseball.

But Wendell Smith,

one of the great Black writers of that era,

was really its primary front man.

Wendell Smith started writing

this whole series of stories about the issue.

And so, when teams came to play in Pittsburgh at Forbes Field,

he would park himself at the Schenley Hotel

across the street from the ballpark

and buttonhole the top managers and coaches and players and say,

"Are you in favor of integrating the Major Leagues?"

And he got all of these top,

well-known people on the record saying "Yes."

And then he and other sportswriters used

some of that data to start pressuring

the Commissioner Landis

to consider the integration of Major League Baseball.

And he had been dodging the whole issue

for a couple of decades.

In December 1943, leaders of the Black newspapers

met with the commissioner of baseball

and the owners of baseball

about getting Blacks into the big leagues.

And they selected Paul Robeson to be the spokesman

of the delegation here in New York.

Paul Jr: Dad was then a great theatrical star, film star,

the leading concert artist in the country and in the world.

So my father's attitude was, especially,

because I've reached this pinnacle,

because I'm who I am...

I have to do whatever I can do

to advance the interests of African Americans as a whole.

And in this case,

what better way than to throw my weight behind the campaign

to break the segregation

in organized baseball in particular.

So Paul explained

to the commissioner and to the others,

"We have a million Blacks in the armed forces,

and now, right during this war,

they... You still have this ban against them in what sport?

The national sport.

How does that fit in with what we're fighting for?"

Voice as Paul Sr: We live in times

when the world is changing very fast,

when you may be able to make a great contribution

to not only the advance of our own country

but of the whole world.

Because a thing like this...

...Negro ballplayers becoming

a part of the great national pastime of America...

can make a great difference

in what peoples all over the world

feel towards us as a country

in a time when we need their help.

Paul Jr: He made about a ten, 12-minute presentation,

which was quite impassioned. It was off-the-cuff

and really had an enormous effect

on the owners, apparently because unusual,

they applauded at the end and all that.

And then of course, everybody withdrew,

and they went back into private session.

Branch Rickey,

who's president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, says,

"Are we going to discuss and make a decision

on the proposal to integrate Major League Baseball?"

And Landis said,

"We have considered it. No action has been taken."

He said, "It is a matter for each club to determine

whether or not to sign a Black player."

But as long as he is the commissioner,

there will not be any player who can't cross the color line.

But in 1944, Commissioner Landis dies.

It really changes everything.

♪ Goin' to Kansas City Kansas City, here I come... ♪

Bob M: Sailing home was a bittersweet journey.

We had defeated a dangerous enemy,

all the while earning respect as soldiers.

Bob M: We hoped life would be better back home.

♪ They got some Crazy little women there... ♪

Bob M: After the war,

my brother begged me to give him a lift to Kansas City, Missouri.

Kansas City had jobs, nightlife, a thriving Black community,

and a professional Black baseball team,

the world famous Kansas City Monarchs.

♪ Standin' on the corner... ♪

Bob M: When I arrived in Kansas City,

the Monarchs were stocked full

of some of the League's best known talent.

♪ With my Kansas City baby... ♪

Bob M: Clifford Connie Johnson, Buck O'Neil, Ted Strong,

Willard Brown, and Satchel Paige.

♪ I might take a plane... ♪

The Monarchs were big shots,

as far as I was concerned.

We thought that they were the greatest things

that Kansas City had, you know.

We'd sit over there

and talk about who had pretty legs

or who was built and looked real fine.

You know, they looked good.

♪ Ah, but you know Yeah, must die... ♪

This was a good time for baseball,

a good time for musicians.

They would come to the ballgame, see us play.

And at night we go on and see them,

dance and everything.

By the time we get to the '40s, really,

this is the heyday of Black baseball.

Because of World War II,

there's money pouring into the Black community, right?

Like defense hiring,

these manufacturers can no longer say,

"Well, we're not gonna hire you 'cause you're Black."

It's all hands on deck, right?

So now, Black people in the general community

have more money to go to baseball games

and to support these institutions.

So by the late '30s and early '40s

Black baseball was considered to be the third largest

economic institution in the Black community.

'Cause you have vendors,

and you have advertising, and you have ticket sales,

and you have all of these other aspects to the game

that weren't considered, you know.

People were making money from it.

Bob K: The impact that it had on urban communities

was something that we've not seen to that magnitude

since the Negro Leagues.

So when we think about Black baseball

and its impact on cities like Chicago,

Kansas City, New York.

Wherever you had successful Black baseball,

you typically had thriving Black economies.

♪ They got some Crazy little women there... ♪

Bob M: My arrival in Kansas City in 1946

came at an exciting time for Black baseball in the town.

Bob M: When the Monarchs advanced

to the Negro League World Series that year

against the hot contender from the East,

the Newark Eagles.

They were run by powerhouse owners,

Abe and Effa Manley.

The ballplayers, they have a word they used.

I realized it was the most important word

in their vocabulary, and the word is "satisfied."

"I am satisfied." If they're not satisfied,

all you've got is a guy in a uniform.

And then on the case

of our old time Negro ballplayers,

they were happy doing what they did.

Effa Manley was a woman

who said the things that needed to be said,

even if nobody wanted to hear 'em,

and did the things that needed to be done,

even if nobody else wanted to do them.

She is called

"The First Lady of Black baseball"

because there really,

at that time and pretty much after that,

weren't any other women

closely involved in successful Black baseball teams.

And there weren't very many other women closely involved

with successful White baseball teams, either.

But she was also an enigma.

There's questions of like, "Was Effa Black? Was Effa White?

Was she passing,

or was she just living her truth?

Was she just living her life?"

Before she gets into baseball,

she comes of age in Harlem in the 1920s and early '30s,

and she is absorbing all of it.

I immediately became very much involved

in civic affairs.

I was attending a dinner one night,

and we got into this conversation

about how hard it was for Negroes to find employment.

The department stores and other big stores

on 125th Street in Harlem,

which was the main business street there, had no,

other than elevator operators,

you couldn't see a Black employee in the store.

So she decides to launch a boycott

against a department store in Harlem,

because even though 70, 75 percent of their sales

were coming from the Black community,

they would not hire Black women as salesclerks.

It worked. And if you were gonna see

how Effa Manley was gonna run her team

in the Negro National League,

you need only look at those few months

in Harlem in 1934.

Abe Manley was involved in numbers operations,

and Abe had always been a really big fan

of Black baseball.

Once he marries Effa and sees what Effa is capable of

during this Blumstein's boycott. He can trust her.

He knows that she will do the work,

that she is smart, that she is savvy.

He's like, "Yeah, let me give this Black baseball thing a go."

Little by little,

I found myself doing more and more.

I drew up the schedules, bought the equipment,

went to all of the meetings, of course.

I found myself completely involved,

and I enjoyed it.

Bob K: She was a shrewd negotiator.

She knew the business of baseball as well as any man,

and Monte Irvin was fond of saying,

"She never missed a payday."

You had a lot of respect for her,

and she tried to keep you on, you know, tried to,

particularly young fellas.

She'd try to advise them what to do,

how to do it and that kind of a thing.

But I think it was her ability

and her characteristics and what she was like

and what she wanted the League to look like

that made her a presence

in the Negro League situation, you know? Very important. Yeah.

For many years in the '40s, the Homestead Grays

were constantly winning the pennant,

and the Eagles were right behind them.

And in 1946, they finally caught up.

It was special for Effa.

She'd been in baseball at this point, her and Abe,

for over a decade.

And this was the moment that she had been working to.

She had Larry Doby,

who became the first player in the American League,

when he signed

with the baseball team out of Cleveland.

Monte Irvin was on that team, Leon Day was on that team.

Bob K: Leon Day throws

an opening day no-hitter...

...in 1946.

Opening day, that was tremendous.

It was... I mean, it was...

That's why that reaction, it was shock.

The Black people threw the little blue cushions

they used to give you to sit on,

they just covered the stadium with pillows.

And pillows were sailing out from all over the place.

I was a little boy looking at that,

I thought... I was like, "Wow, look at this."

Bob K: And the Newark Eagles rode that wave

all the way to the World Series

against the Kansas City Monarchs.

The Monarchs were ahead, three games to two,

and were on the verge of winning.

The Eagles won a slugfest in the sixth game to tie it up.

So they're back at Rupert Stadium

for the seventh game.

And he gets to the ninth inning.

The Eagles are ahead, three to two.

Monarchs last chance. First guy makes an out,

the second guy singles,

but he's thrown out at second,

trying to stretch it into a double.

So now there are two outs,

and Effa Manley is just as nervous as a cat

because the next guy gets a hit.

She's something like in her memoirs,

"How can a human heart take all this tension?"

She says, "I can't look,

I hear the crack of the bat and I can't look.

I finally opened my eyes,

and the ball is coming right down

in first baseman Lennie Pearson's mitt."

He grabs it. The Eagles win.

Boy, did we have a ballclub in 1946.[chuckling]

I don't believe

any ballclub in the country could have beaten us.

I'm in the Navy.

I'm a boatswain, stevedore platoon.

It's an all Black battalion.

It's 10:30 at night.

Everybody's in bed, and the officer said,

the officer of the day,

"Boatswain O'Neil, come to my office at once."

I say, "Oh, hell, what did I do now?"

He said, "You know what?" I say, "No, sir."

"Branch Rickey just signed Jackie

to an organized baseball contract."

I say, "Whoop, give me that horn."

I got on it.

I say, "Hear this, hear this, hear this."

Woke up the entire camp.

And I said, "Branch Rickey just signed Jackie Robinson

to an organized baseball contract."

They whoop, they holler, they shot their guns.

We didn't sleep much that night. Oh, man. That was it.

I came out of the service,

I joined a baseball team. In a year or so,

I was with the organized baseball,

and in a very short time,

I was up there in the Major Leagues.

Boy, I was a pretty lucky fellow because we do pretty well

in the Major League in baseball.

♪ I got a good thing A good thing going on ♪

♪ I got a good thing A good thing going on ♪

♪ Woke up this mornin' It's a brand-new day ♪

♪ And I know everything's Gonna come my way ♪

♪ 'Cause I got a good thing A good thing going on ♪

Jackie Robinson had been this incredible athlete at UCLA,

and he was known across the country

as this football star,

but there was no avenue for him to play football.

And so, baseball really became the best outlet for him

to be a professional athlete to make money.

And that door opened for him through the Negro Leagues,

through the Kansas City Monarchs.

At the time,

Wendell Smith decided that Jackie Robinson

was the player that had the best odds

of breaking through into the Major Leagues

because he had the right temperament,

and he had the right look

that would be accepted by White fans.

So it was actually Wendell Smith

who put Jackie Robinson on Branch Rickey's radar screen.

Organized baseball

hasn't had a Negro player since 1884,

when Moses Walker was with Toledo.

But 63 years later, in 1947,

Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers

and blasted his way to stardom.

Bob M: We never thought we'd lived to see the day

when a Black man would be admitted into the Major Leagues.

Equality was within our reach.

If a Black man could integrate the great American pastime,

anything seemed possible.

Every Sunday in my hometown Fairfield,

I would read about three guys,

Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial.

Those are the guys

that were on the sport page every Sunday.

So when Jackie came in in '47, he gave me hope.

Well, man, one of these days

I might be on the front page like that.

Brooklyn became Harlem.

Or that is to say, it was a place most loved.

And whether you would ever go there or not, you knew Brooklyn

because Jackie Robinson was there.

One of the very first times

that I went to see the game at Ebbets Field...

First of all, going on the subway,

you'd have thought all of Harlem was heading there.

Everybody I see, they're bringing along baskets.

They've got chicken. It's like a big picnic.

All of Harlem now is going to Ebbets Field and so,

you know where they're going, and you know why they're going.

Jackie. Everybody's talking about Jackie.

Jackie changed people.

The whole dynamics of America changed.

You know, when the Dodgers began playing on the road...

you saw tumultuous scenes, you know, and...

this was... There was a first in everything.

There was an exhibition game in Georgia.

This tremendous crowd of Black people,

and the Dodgers emerged from their dugout.

A big roar of greeting from the Black crowd.

The second thing is booing from the White stands.

Okay. Then the third thing happens.

What's the third thing? White people begin standing up

and clapping to differentiate themselves.

How many? Hundreds.

So, who are these people, you know?

They're not all hidden closet progressives, you know.

So that's a great dynamic at work there.

Black and White took the field together.

How do you estimate the meaning of that, you know?

Jackie Robinson not only opened the doors for baseball,

but he opened the doors for a lot of other opportunities

because he brought to mind

to a lot of predominantly White businessmen,

why shouldn't we have a Black telephone operator?

Why shouldn't we have a clerk in our store?

They didn't understand that,

until they got to see Jackie Robinson

producing like a professional baseball player

and then projected that into other areas of life.

I think Jack was one of the catalysts

for the civil rights movement,

that somehow he alerted White people

to the fact of discrimination

and what the losses were for the society,

that you couldn't include this talent.

And I think he made Black people,

who had been made to feel inferior,

feel prouder of themselves.

Signing him was remarkable

because Jackie was not a great player when he started,

but every year he improved and became very exciting,

and a great second baseman, and a team leader.

He just... He did a great job of pioneering.

But the hostility to Jackie was very, very strong.

And now, the Cardinals were probably the most hostile.

And I saw Enos Slaughter run down

and just deliberately reach out with his left foot

and spike Jackie Robinson's ankle.

The things that happened on the ball field

hurt more than anything else, simply because of the fact

that I had been in athletics for many, many years,

and I had never really experienced some of the things

that were happening to me at this particular time.

So Mr. Rickey felt that for the first few years

that we couldn't oppose actually some of the things

that were said and done to us.

We had to sort of turn the other cheek.

I found that very difficult. Matter of fact,

my doctor told me to get away from baseball

for fear I was gonna have a nervous breakdown.

I knew what he was going through,

and I could hear it in certain cities,

like Philadelphia and Baltimore,

some of the places where there would be

racial epithets coming out of the stands

and that kind of thing.

And I would... It would make me angry.

But I was just as committed to the course

that Jack had chosen, as he was,

and he would fight back with his bat.

I mean, he would do well,

and that would silence those detractors.

In that pressure cooker of that first year,

he still was Rookie of the Year, and they won the pennant,

which has to be the most incredible,

courageous feat in the history of American sports.

Just look at this, and think about Jackie Robinson.

Dark-skinned Black man puts on a white uniform,

picks up a bat made of white ash,

stands in a white batter's box

to hit a white baseball from a White pitcher...

...thrown over a white home plate,

hits the ball between two white foul lines.

He's called "out" or "safe" by a White umpire,

as White fans boo or cheer.

He was an ink spot

on the white canvas of injustice.

And so, no matter how you feel...

...he was under a tremendous pressure...

to try to blend in.

All those that I talked to or was around were very excited

about the Negroes breaking into the Majors,

you know, which I myself was, in a way,

except that it did wreck our business.

And I do feel it was an unfair approach.

I feel that it should have been handled much differently.

Black executives of Negro Leagues teams

were on board with integration in the sense that they believed

that integration in baseball

would mean integration in all of society,

that Black people would ultimately become "equals,"

if you will.

I'm not even gonna say that they were opposed

to integration in baseball

in terms of its effect potentially on their teams.

You know, whether they might lose some of their best teams.

You know, once Jackie was signed away from the Monarchs,

you know, they understood

that their players could be next.

In fact, their players were next.

I don't even think

they were really opposed to that.

The conflict came in

because they wanted to be treated fairly

as businessmen and women.

Even Cum Posey was an advocate,

before he died,

of integration.

He would give speeches and he would say,

I hope to, you know,

eventually see Black players playing in the Major Leagues.

But it was always with the expectation that the...

that the Negro League teams would be compensated,

that if they jumped

from the Negro Leagues to a pro-team,

that the pro-team would essentially

do what they would do, you know...

...amongst themselves,

which are, they would buy out the contract.

Branch Rickey opposed that from the very beginning.

In fact, he mocked the idea

that Jackie Robinson had any contractual obligation

to the Kansas City Monarchs,

or that the Negro Leagues were even a real league.

He said they're not even a real league.

Branch Rickey didn't even ask... He accused Dad of being...

And the Negro Leagues were ran by a bunch of gamblers.

I don't know where he got...

Well, there was one guy in the East Coast,

was in the number business, but that's the only guy

I ever heard of being into gambl...

But he used that mainly as an excuse,

so they wouldn't have to pay him.

But Branch Rickey never paid anything,

really, to anybody.

He was a very close-operating, cheap person.

He knew how the baseball business worked.

Here are these players that you have invested in

that you have trained, that you have developed.

Now, I want them to play on my Major League roster.

Here is what it should cost me.

But Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers,

and Branch Rickey did not pay the Monarchs for his contract.

And later, Branch Rickey signed Roy Campanella

and did not pay Tom Wilson

of the Baltimore Elite Giants for his contract.

And he signed Don Newcombe,

and he didn't pay Effa and Abe for his contract.

So there was this understanding

that, not only was integration happening,

but it was going to kill their businesses.

I never felt he was right to take those valuable players

and not give us a nickel for them.

I felt that was very wrong,

and we should have had some little compensation.

But we were in no position to protest, and he knew it.

So he just completely outmaneuvered us,

outsmarted us, or just plain raped us.

I don't know what you'd say or how you'd describe it.

Bob K: To say that Effa Manley couldn't stand Branch Rickey

might be an understatement.

She didn't care for Branch Rickey

because she saw what Branch was going to do,

and she was able to kind of fight him off.

But she knew she wasn't gonna be able to continue to hold

those other owners off once this thing did break loose.

As we say, there was blood in the water,

and the sharks were coming out.

At this point,

Jackie's establishing himself with the Dodgers

in the National League.

Bill Veeck, from Cleveland, had called and told Effa

that he wanted to sign Larry Doby,

and immediately,

I think Effa's probably just happy she got a call

because she didn't get a call

from Branch Rickey for Don Newcombe.

So already she understands,

okay, he is at least trying to do business with me.

And he makes it clear that he wants to sign Larry Doby.

And she says, "Okay, well, how much will you give me?"

So Bill Veeck,

the owner of the Cleveland Indians,

offered 10,000 dollars for Larry Doby's contract.

It wasn't a lot of money,

but it was a whole lot more than anybody else was paying.

And Effa said, "You know, Mr. Veeck,

if he were White and a free agent,

you could get 100,000 dollars for him."

And Veeck says, "Well, yeah, you're right.

I'll tell you what.

If he sticks with the team for a month,

I'll pay you another five."

I think that made her tremendously important.

A woman in a man's space, speaking up and running a team,

but also a woman in a man's space saying,

"Run me my money."

So Bill Veeck brings in Larry Doby.

He also will bring in Satchel Paige.

Paige is pretty old by that time,

but he comes in,

he sets attendance records in his first three games,

and he can still pitch.

Announcer 1: Lou Boudreau goes to the mound,

that's all for Christopher and it's gonna be Satchel Paige.

And here's the announcement

about the appearance of Satchel Paige. Listen.

Announcer 2: Satchel Paige!

And he will pitch in relief,

he will pitch in the World Series,

and the Indians will win.

That was the death knell of Negro League Baseball.

When they signed the Black players,

the people that had been coming

to Griffith Stadium in Washington to see us play,

and in Yankee Stadium to see us play,

now, they want to see Jackie play.

The interest in the Negro League

really fell off.

So they found out that they couldn't continue

to pay the salaries.

And, you know, all those favorite fans

now were going to see players that had just been called up.

Integration took place,

and I begged Abe to quit the next year

because we dropped another 20,000 dollars.

I mean, the fans deserted us

to go see the boys on the White team.

Deserted us like they say rats desert a ship.[chuckling]

Bob M: With the onset of integration

in the great American pastime,

the once-prosperous Negro National League

in the East folded in 1948.

Only the Negro American League in the Midwest was left

to hold down the fort of Black baseball.

So on the East Coast primarily

is where you saw that really quick downfall.

Effa called it "Jackie Robinson Country"

because where she was playing in Newark, like, you know,

her fans could just catch a train and go see Jackie.

When people have one option, or you know,

they don't have money to go to multiple games,

they're choosing to go see Jackie.

Why am I going to go see the segregated ballclub

that was born of Jim Crow

and represent segregation and all of these things,

when I can go see Jackie? He's the hope. He's the future.

One of the questions I get asked all the time

about integration is, "Layton, wasn't it wonderful

that when Jackie Robinson got called up,

that it opened up baseball for all the Black ballplayers?"

And I said, "If you talk to the ballplayers themselves,

the answer is no."

Is... If you were an impact ballplayer

like Larry Doby, or Roy Campanella,

or Don Newcombe, or a Jackie Robinson,

there was gonna be a chance

that you could play in organized baseball.

But for the average Negro League ballplayer, no.

I knew that everybody couldn't be the same

and be that at the same time.

It's a lack of opportunities, that's all.

But we had ballplayers

that could have played in the Major Leagues

when they first started playing.

But they didn't get the chance.

Willie Wells,

there ain't no baseball player in Major League Baseball,

no better ballplayer shortstop than Willie Wells.

Raymond Dandridge... ...Josh Gibson.

Josh Gibson was always in the conversation

about this vision some day

of Black players playing in the Major Leagues

because, by the mid-1930s,

he was considered the greatest hitter

in Black baseball,

and people who had seen him play would say, like,

"He's greater than Babe Ruth."

But in fact, Wendell Smith himself,

and some of the other top Black sportswriters,

had actually stopped advocating for Josh Gibson by the 1940s

because they thought he had too many demons.

According to the family,

Josh was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

And it took a toll on him, physically and mentally.

He lost his sense of who he was and control

and was found wandering around the streets of San Juan.

And he passed not long after that.

And it was a very, very sad ending for someone who,

anybody who saw him play,

said this was one of the greatest players

who ever played the game.

There were still attempts to keep going,

to keep playing. And even into the '50s,

there were some players that were being recruited.

Henry Aaron was playing on a Black team

when he was recruited,

and we saw all kinds of efforts to bring in more ticket sales,

like the signing of women to play games.

There's good baseball being played by Negro Leaguers,

and the league itself persists down to 1960.

But it's not anywhere near the quality of baseball played

when the Negro Leagues were at their height.

I don't know if it was apparent at first,

but I think over time the loss of the Negro Leagues

began to be more felt,

and that people began to understand

that the loss of the Negro Leagues

was something significant.

It was felt in many ways that were tangible.

You know, when we start talking about all of the people

that it takes to make a team run,

whether we're talking about bus drivers, or, you know,

people working concessions or taking tickets,

all of those people typically came

from within that Black community.

But then, there's also the intangible,

of in the midst of all of the stuff

that we have to deal with as Black people in this society,

this place where we can go,

where we can get dressed to the nines,

where we can hang out,

where we can root for our favorite players

and are free to just be us without the White gaze.

They lost that too.

What happened was starting in the '50s,

a lot of the Black folks,

who had the opportunity to leave those communities

to go to college, to rise within White professions,

did so, and they left

folks who were stuck in those communities

to be on their own

at a time when they were more vulnerable than ever,

as a result of the declining industries,

as a result of the devastating impact of urban renewal.

These housing projects and highway projects.

So the demise of the Negro Leagues

foreshadows a larger crisis

for Black America in those communities.

You look at just the Crawford Grill

and across the street is a Black barbershop.

And it's fascinating

after the integration of Major Leagues,

you see the deterioration.

It's just devastating to the Black community.

Bob K: When we talk about integration,

it was good morally, it was good socially,

and it moved us in ways

in which we probably never, ever dreamed possible.

But that progress came at a cost.

The enduring importance of the Negro Leagues is the fact

that we can do this thing on our own.

I'm not saying we should.

I'm not saying that we should go off in a corner

and, you know, build our own teams and leagues

and recreate Negro Leagues baseball.

But we can.

We know, and White baseball should know as well,

that we're capable 'cause we already did the thing.

Boom. Out toward straight center.

Willie Mays catches it, 450 feet.

Say, hey, Willie, was that a catch!

Would baseball be baseball today

without Willie Mays from the Birmingham Black Barons

or Ernie Banks from the Kansas City Monarchs?

The Negro Leagues brought a new dynamic to the game.

It made the game a better version of itself.

By the '60s and '70s,

guys who had not played in the Negro Leagues

come on the scene in what really was the heyday of Black baseball

in the Majors.

Hank Robinson jockeys the count

to three and two, before he gets his pitch

Players like Frank Robinson

excelled at every level of the game.

Like Rube Foster, he was a star player,

a manager, and a baseball executive.

Bob Gibson was the greatest Black pitcher

since Satchel Paige.

And Reggie Jackson, like Josh Gibson,

who is one of the most feared sluggers in baseball history.

Black and Latin players made it a very different game,

and with their success on the field,

there was no turning back.

Upton steals home!

Bob M: On April 8th, 1974,

Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record,

one of the most sacred in baseball,

hitting his 715th home run in the Major Leagues.

Swinging and there's a drive into left-center field,

that ball is out of here!

It's 715,

there is a new home run champion of all time,

and it's Henry Aaron!

Hank Aaron once said,

"My abilities are only limited by the lack of opportunity."

And once he got that opportunity,

he made an assault on Ruth's record.

Henry Aaron, the home run king of all time...

So let's keep in mind

that Babe Ruth never hit a home run off a Black pitcher.

His record was set in apartheid baseball,

which makes Hank Aaron's record more valuable.

His record was set

against the best pitchers on the planet.

Bob M: Following years of pressure from the public,

Satchel Paige became the first player

to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame

based on his record in the Negro Leagues.

I am the proudest man on Earth right today,

and I know my wife is.

Bob M: The following year,

he was joined by Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson,

and then "Cool Papa" Bell.

Many more would follow, including Rube Foster,

Effa Manley, and Cumberland Posey.

It's hard to do too much for pioneers.

I think, you know, we stand on their shoulders,

and we know it. They paved the way for us,

and we should have a lasting gratitude toward them.

Bob K: The Negro League players themselves,

they had no idea they were making history.

Man, they didn't care about making no history.

They just wanted to play ball. But the pride, the passion,

the courage that they demonstrated

in the face of adversity.

To overcome the adversity transcends race, transcends age,

transcends gender. And that's the real story.

It was in my blood.

It'’s still in my blood to be an umpire.

You call a player safe, it just get all over ya.

You call a player out, it just get all over ya.

It's just like a... in heaven.