Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience
 Baseball is one of America’s central institutions, and it has long reflected the complicated and painful history of race in the United States. "Pride and Passion" tells the story of black baseball players in the U.S. over the past century and a half. Although many blacks played baseball with whites in the nineteenth century as amateurs and also played on minor league teams through the 1880s, black players were not allowed to compete with whites when major league baseball was created in the mid 1890s. To counter this discrimination, they organized teams made up entirely of black players and formed leagues that were known collectively as the Negro Leagues. The Negro Leagues had their highest level of success in the 1940s, and they continued into the 1960s, with the last team disbanding in 1961. When Jackie Robinson was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, though, integration in baseball began a slow and uneven path to the integrated status of modern day teams, and all-black teams began to disappear.
The story of African Americans in baseball is a remarkable and fascinating slice of American history. It parallels the failures of the greater American society in solving the racial problems resulting from slavery, the Civil War and the confusion of Reconstruction. Baseball was played on Southern plantations as far back as the 1850s, and a quote from the New York Clipper newspaper in 1869 tells of a game between the leading black and white baseball teams in Philadelphia. Although early baseball was segregated for the most part, there are many examples of blacks and whites playing the game together. However, racial prejudice escalated in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and baseball reflected this development in the larger society. The captain of the leading black team in Philadelphia was murdered in riots that occurred on the first day black men were legally allowed to vote in October, 1871. Black players on the rare integrated teams, such as the Toledo Blue Stockings, were sometimes threatened by people in the stands and by players on opposing teams. When the National League was founded in 1883, blacks were shut out, and the black players on the Toledo team in the mid 1880s were the last to play on an integrated team until Jackie Robinson in 1947. This early baseball history will be both a revelation and a surprise to most viewers of the traveling exhibit, and it adds a fascinating dimension to late 19th century U.S. history.
"Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience" has been designated as part of the NEH’s "We the People" initiative, exploring significant events and themes in our nation’s history and culture and advancing knowledge of the principles that define America. It is a collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Library Association, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The exhibition is based upon a permanent exhibition of the same name on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.
The traveling exhibition and tour are funded by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to the American Library Association Public Programs Office.
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