Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

African Americans were never banned from playing in Major League Baseball, but it was the owners’ decision to sign the players to the team. Since Major League Baseball was not integrated until 1947, African American baseball players were forced to play in various negro baseball leagues. Previous work done by Brian Carroll and Chris Lamb show the impact that the black newspapers’ coverage of baseball led to the integration of Major League Baseball. No work has looked specifically at “white newspapers” and their coverage of African American baseball. This case study uses the structure of the research above, such as the black newspapers fight for integration, to look at how the Chicago Tribune covered the Negro Leagues throughout the 20th century. The focus on the Tribune is due to the headquarters for all three of the Negro Leagues being in Chicago with the annual All-Star Game for the Negro Leagues being held in Chicago from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. The first part of the paper will evaluate the Tribune’s coverage of the Negro Leagues from 1900-1940. Then, the paper will look at the massive changes in the paper’s reporting of the Negro Leagues in the 1940’s and 1950’s. The concluding section will deal with how the Chicago Tribune remembered the Negro Leagues and chose to remember its own memory of their coverage of the leagues. This work focuses on a broader perspective of African American baseball to show that there were more influences to the integration of baseball other than the black newspapers and community.