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- Title
"It Couldn't Be Any Other Way.".
- Authors
Carroll, Brian
- Abstract
To integrate professional baseball, America's black communities of the North and Midwest had to sacrifice the Negro Leagues, which were heavily concentrated in those regions. Complicit in this devil's bargain was the black press. Having struggled for decades to achieve the larger societal goals of integration and equal opportunity, the press eventually settled for piecemeal integration of the major leagues--and at the cost of the vitality and even relevance of black baseball. This article analyzes that deliberate but wrenching sacrifice, one that dramatized W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of double-consciousness, or the notion that blacks must reconcile a desire for assimilation with an equal desire to preserve their distinctive heritage and culture. In particular, this article examines and places into historical context the outlandish plans black press writers and editors hatched, motivated perhaps in part by guilt, to save black baseball for at least one more summer in the sun.
- Subjects
NEGRO leagues; BLACK baseball players; SPORTS journalism; RACE discrimination in sports; SPLITTING (Psychology); ASSIMILATION (Sociology); AFRICAN American journalists; BASEBALL writers; AFRICAN American newspapers; HISTORY
- Publication
Black Ball: A Journal of the Negro Leagues, 2012, Vol 5, Issue 1, p5
- ISSN
1939-8484
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3172/BLB.4.2.5