Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1902-1931

Book excerpt: As the companion volume to Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860–1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary, Lomax’s new book continues to chronicle the history of black baseball in the United States. The first volume traced the development of baseball from an exercise in community building among African Americans in the pre–Civil War era to a commercialized amusement and a rare and lucrative opportunity for entrepreneurship within the black community. In this book, Lomax takes a closer look at the marketing and promotion of the Negro Leagues by black baseball magnates. He explores how race influenced black baseball’s institutional development and shaped the business relationship with white clubs and managers. Lomax analyzes the decisions that black baseball magnates made to insulate themselves from outside influences. He explains how this insulation may have distorted their perceptions and ultimately led to the Negro Leagues’ demise. The collapse of the Negro Leagues by 1931 was, Lomax argues, “a dream deferred in the overall African American pursuit for freedom and self-determination.”