Bearing Witness to Blackball: Buck O’Neil, the Negro Leagues, and the Politics of the Past

Abstract

In 1970, Robert W. Peterson, the author of Only the Ball Was White, one of the first and most influential books on the Negro leagues, wrote: ‘‘Negro baseball was at once heroic and tawdry, a gladsome thing and a blot on America’s conscience.’’ When this appraisal was first made, every team in the Major Leagues had been ‘‘integrated’’ for at least ten years, and, as Peterson notes, ‘‘Negro baseball had virtually been forgotten.’’ This was perhaps willful on the part of many white people. At the time, Leroy ‘‘Satchel’’ Paige (1906–82) and Josh Gibson (1911–47) had neither been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame nor had they been transformed into national icons, and there was a general ignorance, even among most sports fans and scholars, about the Negro leagues.