America and baseball are rediscovering the game played by African
Americans before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947.
We now know a great deal about the Negro Leagues of 1920 on, and
their great stars--Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and their
contemporaries.
But what of the pre-1920 black game? From the onset in the 1880s
of the "gentleman's agreement" that barred blacks from playing in
white leagues, that game is nearly invisible. Financially shaky,
with sporadic media coverage even in black newspapers and
completely overlooked by the mainstream, Negro teams of this era
played on for love of the game and in hopes that their skills would
receive their due.
In 1907, Sol White, a remarkable African-American ballplayer,
successful manager, and baseball loyalist, wrote a small volume on
the history of the black game. Part fund-raising effort,
advertising brochure, team hype, celebration of black baseball, and
throughout an implicit and explicit challenge to racism, "Sol
White's History of Colored Base Ball" is the source of much of what
we know of the events in the organized black game of that time.
The original was poorly printed, and copies are exceedingly rare
(known and rumored copies number only four). This edition
republishes the full 1907 edition (with the even rarer supplement),
completely reset for legibility, and reproduces all the original's
illustrations, including the advertisements that speak volumes on
the social world of the day. Fifteen additional documents from 1886
to 1936 augment the picture of the black game and our record of Sol
White himself.
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