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Negro league baseball : the rise and ruin of a Black institution
Lanctot, Neil
Adult Nonfiction GV875.N35 L36 2004
From Library Journal:
The author painstakingly examines the difficult path trodden by black baseball during the period of the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War era. Lanctot (history, Univ. of Delaware) focuses on the Negro National League, which diligently strove to make black baseball commercially viable, wrestled with calls for the integration of organized ball, and suffered through the eventual batting down of Jim Crow barriers. Those barriers had endured, even during the war years when the major leagues experienced a marked manpower shortage, and as sportswriter/black league executive Rollo Wilson exclaimed in 1945, "a one-armed man, a one-legged man, Cubans, Chinese, Mexicans-anyone except a known colored man" was welcomed into the big leagues. Key personalities are briefly discussed, but this volume retains a larger emphasis on broad social, cultural, and economic currents. Lanctot clearly explores how a destitute industry acquired seemingly firm economic footing during the war years, only to plummet precipitously once the minor and major leagues became integrated. By the 1950s, even once-thriving franchises like the Homestead Grays and the Kansas City Monarchs went under. Still, black baseball had created an enormously rich talent pool-Robinson, Campanella, Mays, Aaron, and Banks, among others-that transformed the major leagues. For general libraries.-R.C. Cottrell, California State Univ., Chico (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Lanctot, Neil
Adult Nonfiction GV875.N35 L36 2004
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From Library Journal:
The author painstakingly examines the difficult path trodden by black baseball during the period of the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War era. Lanctot (history, Univ. of Delaware) focuses on the Negro National League, which diligently strove to make black baseball commercially viable, wrestled with calls for the integration of organized ball, and suffered through the eventual batting down of Jim Crow barriers. Those barriers had endured, even during the war years when the major leagues experienced a marked manpower shortage, and as sportswriter/black league executive Rollo Wilson exclaimed in 1945, "a one-armed man, a one-legged man, Cubans, Chinese, Mexicans-anyone except a known colored man" was welcomed into the big leagues. Key personalities are briefly discussed, but this volume retains a larger emphasis on broad social, cultural, and economic currents. Lanctot clearly explores how a destitute industry acquired seemingly firm economic footing during the war years, only to plummet precipitously once the minor and major leagues became integrated. By the 1950s, even once-thriving franchises like the Homestead Grays and the Kansas City Monarchs went under. Still, black baseball had created an enormously rich talent pool-Robinson, Campanella, Mays, Aaron, and Banks, among others-that transformed the major leagues. For general libraries.-R.C. Cottrell, California State Univ., Chico (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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