The story of the Negro baseball leagues has the hallmarks of a feel-good story: determination, inventiveness, and relentless optimism in the face of unyielding hatred. But while Sam Pollard’s mostly straightforward and celebratory documentary The League doesn’t skimp on those elements, he also introduces knottier emotions that allow the film, which is executive produced by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, to escape two-dimensionality.
Unlike many other manifestations of American racial prejudice, baseball in its early years was at least somewhat integrated. The historians here describe how late-19th-century baseball featured largely white teams with occasional Black players. In the film’s telling, this relative openness started coming to an end after an 1883 game where star white player and manager Adrian Constantine Anson, nicknamed “Pop” and “Cap,” refused to play an integrated team. When the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling provided legal justification for segregation, the practice became standardized across many American institutions, including baseball.
Pollard identifies the start of Negro league baseball as one of many Black entrepreneurial endeavors that sprouted up in the early 20th century. Some of the documentary’s most engrossing segments vibrantly sketch out the historical roots of the leagues. Following World War I, the Great Migration and a new sense of proud idealism created a network of northern urban Black communities in which people were energized to “close ranks,” in the words of historian Gerald Early, against white racism and create their own institutions.
The film breaks the history of the Negro leagues into three segments. The first starts in 1920, when Rube Foster gathered owners of several Black teams in a YMCA in Kansas City to create the Negro National League (NNL). Through the ’20s, the Midwest-based NNL and the East Coast-centered Eastern Colored League were a popular business and beloved pillar of many Black communities. Many interviewees in this anecdote-rich film, from researchers to players and spectators, lovingly describe the centrality of Negro league baseball to Black society at the time, identifying it a crucial node in social networks that included jazz clubs, newspapers, and churches (the latter of which would shift service times to let people get to a game on time).
While the second segment, detailing the second iteration of Black baseball leagues from the Depression into World War II, is solid historical storytelling, it fails at times to capture the drama and tragedy inherent in such an apartheid system. Though the interviewees briefly discuss how the Black players’ base stealing and aerobatic fielding differed from the home run-focused white teams’ style of play, Pollard misses a chance at this point to delve more deeply into those differences. And aside from a very brief mention during a section on how Black players enjoyed “winter ball” games in the less prejudiced Caribbean, the film doesn’t talk much about the Latino players in the Negro leagues who were also locked out of white teams.
The League’s last segment is both its most uplifting and most uncertain. There’s an element of triumph in the film’s telling of how World War II-era agitating for equal treatment helped push the white leagues to grudgingly accept Black players, starting famously with Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. But the triumph proved bittersweet, once Black fans started going to major league games. As Effa Manley, co-owner of the Black Newark Eagles team, says in one archival clip, integration was wonderful but it “did break our business.”
That tone of wistful regret complicates the conclusion, in which an against-the-odds triumph like the Negro leagues, spoken of with such warm and deeply felt pride throughout the documentary, was wrecked by racial equality. It’s clear that many of the people Pollard interviews aren’t quite certain how to feel about the demise of the Negro leagues.
Redolent of PBS’s “American Experience” documentary house style, The League doesn’t have the kind of visual or structural treatment that might have given its story the pizzazz it deserves. The moments where it tries to add visual panache, such as the scratchy filter that’s used to make some of the interviewees seem as if they’re from another time, are distracting more than anything. If Pollard had treated this story with the same excitement of his more thrillingly crafted MLK/FBI, then the contention made by an interviewee that the Negro leagues were a crucial precursor to the civil rights struggle might have landed with more impact.
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