Documents the life of the Negro League star and Hall of Famer, tracing Bell's sharecropping heritage, his extraordinary switch-hitting talents, and how Major League Baseball's racial barriers impacted his career.

"1930s, New York City: An ambitious Harlem woman's husband upends her social climbing when he buys a Negro Leagues baseball team and appoints her as the team's business manager. Overnight, Effa Manley goes from 125th Street's civil rights champion to an interloper in the boys' club that is professional baseball. Navigating her way through gentlemen's agreement contracts, the very public flirtatious antics of superstar Satchel Paige, and a sports world...

"Harper Fleming is done with being passed over. As a journalist for a Chicago newspaper, she's been refused a shot at the sportswriter position she longs for. And her on again/off again relationship is going nowhere. Leaving both behind, she heads to Nashville, Tennessee, where she plans to interview her widowed grandfather, Bernard Fleming, for a book about his father Kelton Fleming's time in the Negro Baseball Leagues. When Bernard reveals health...

""The best all-around catcher in black baseball history"--Cumberland Posey, Owner of the Homestead Grays National Baseball Hall of Fame catcher James Raleigh "Biz" Mackey's professional career spanned nearly three decades in the Negro Leagues and elsewhere. He distinguished himself as a defensive catcher who also had an impressive batting average and later worked as a manager of the Newark Eagles and the Baltimore Elite Giants. Using archival materials...

Negro league baseball players didn't always get the respect that major leaguers received. And yet many, including Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Roy Campanella, quickly became standouts in the major leagues after 1947. Others didn't get to prove their mettle in the majors at all, or not until long past their prime. Leroy “Satchel” Paige mixed his blazing fastball with 29 other devastating pitches to win 42 games and...

A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884 to 1955 relates how black fans came to cherish their own heroes, why a trip to see a Negro league game was in itself a statement of racial pride, and why much of black culture was centered on the game of "blackball." For over fifty years - or up until that bright April day in 1947 when Jackie Robinson smashed the major leagues' color barrier - the only ball fields where an African-American could play organized...

Introduces the Negro Leagues of baseball, highlighting the players, coaches, owners, and teams that dominated the leagues during the 1930s and 1940s.

The story of Negro League baseball is the story of gifted athletes and determined owners; of racial discrimination and international sportsmanship; of fortunes won and lost; of triumphs and defeats on and off the field. It is a perfect mirror for the social and political history of black America in the first half of the twentieth century. But most of all, the story of the Negro Leagues is about hundreds of unsung heroes who overcame segregation, hatred,...

The story of the Negro Leagues and of the talented players who were not allowed to compete with the white baseball players. After Branch Rickey desegregated the Brooklyn Dodgers by hiring Jackie Robinson in 1947, and National League President Ford Frick offered to suspend any player who went on strike to oppose Robinson, the Negro Leagues lost their best players and the fans followed them. The Negro National League shut down at the end of the 1948...

The Negro baseball leagues were among the most important Black institutions in segregated America, and the players were known and revered throughout Black America, both north and south. At a time when baseball was America's favorite sport, the Negro League players crossed the color barrier to play memorable games with their white Major League counterparts and paved the way for Latin American ballplayers to become part of baseball's history. The Negro...