For more than a century and a half, warm weather has meant the return of baseball as the great American pastime, with fans filling ballparks from coast to coast to cheer on their heroes.

Until well into the 20th Century, however, professional baseball had a great divide with African-American players forbidden from competing in the Major Leagues.

As a result, a separate venture known as Negro League baseball grew up to provide opportunities to athletes of color.

The enterprise has been the focus of ongoing research for University of Delaware alumnus and Department of History supplemental faculty member Neil Lanctot, who has given thorough and thoughtful consideration to the business of Negro League baseball through the middle years of the 20th Century.

Lanctot, AS ’02/PhD, grew up in Woonsocket, R.I., as a devoted fan of the Boston Red Sox and for him baseball has been a lifelong passion. “I’ve always been a baseball fan,” he says.

He developed an interest in Negro League baseball following his undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania when he assisted Washington, D.C., area author John Holway with research on a project involving league statistics. The project involved poring over African-American newspapers, where he came across stories about the game and its star players, such as catcher Josh Gibson and pitcher Satchel Paige.

“I found there was this whole other world I wasn’t aware of,” Lanctot says. “And, as I read more and more, I decided the story of the Negro Leagues had not been told that well.”

His interest continued while working on a master’s degree at Temple University, where his adviser, Allen F. Davis, steered him to write about the Hilldale baseball club, an African-American team that was formed in Philadelphia. The thesis turned into a book, Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910-32.

The book spurred Lanctot to consider expanding on his work “to deal with black baseball as a whole.” Furthermore, he decided that if he had enough material to write another book, he should also prepare a dissertation and seek his doctorate, and so enrolled at UD with Raymond Wolters, Thomas Muncy Keith Professor of History, as his adviser.

His most recent book, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution, debuted last summer to enthusiastic reviews the same Sunday in both The Washington Post and The New York Times, which noted that it was “prodigiously researched” and “enormously important” in providing historical context. A New York Daily News reviewer hailed the book as a “landmark work” that “became essential as soon as it was released.”

For Lanctot, who developed his dissertation based on research in preparing the book, the reception was astounding. “I’m in shock,” he says, noting that the book, which is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, was in its second printing almost before the first printing had hit the bookstores.

“The book deals with the story of the Negro Leagues from 1933 until their extinction in the 1960s,” Lanctot says. “I approached the topic from the standpoint of how the leagues were run as businesses. A great deal has been written about individual players, and about Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in major league baseball, but there has been much less focus on the leagues as business enterprises and as important institutions in the black community. I tried to go beyond that, to look at how the leagues operated in relation to white society and the white major leagues.”

In addition to newspaper accounts, Lanctot was able to sift through some of the personal correspondence of Negro League owners. “It enabled me to see how they ran the teams and the struggles they faced on a day-to-day basis,” he says.

What he found was that Negro League baseball was an important community institution for African Americans, providing entertainment and a source of pride in cities that saw populations of blacks boom during the great migrations from the farms of the South to the industrial centers of the North. Through the 1940s, with incomes improved through an increase in manufacturing jobs because of World War II, the Negro Leagues were among the upper echelon of successful black businesses in the United States.

Lanctot picks up the story of the Negro Leagues­—the institution evolved into two leagues, the Negro National League that operated in the major cities of the East and the Negro American League that operated in the Midwest and South—in the trying times of the 1930s, when the Great Depression and a subsequent recession had taken a steep financial toll. Among African Americans, unemployment rates were astronomical.

The enterprise, which was made necessary in the first place because of segregationist practices in major league baseball, struggled mightily but was kept afloat by one of the two owners Lanctot most admires, William Augustus “Gus” Greenlee.

Greenlee, the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, provided an important influx of cash, gained largely through an illegal numbers lottery, just when the leagues needed it most. Sadly, Greenlee later lost a great deal of money and was forced out of the game by fellow owners, who then refused to grant him readmission when the leagues rebounded in the 1940s. 

Lanctot also admires Effa Manley, wife of the owner of the Newark Eagles, who was “very, very aggressive, to the point of being kind of a pain in the neck” to other owners. “The leagues needed someone to kick other owners in the pants once in a while, and she did it,” he says, adding that she was progressive in her dealings with players, even providing her team one of the circuit’s first air-conditioned buses.

Throughout the book, Lanctot sheds light on the exceedingly complex issue of race that culminated in a triumph of integration but the eventual death
of the Negro Leagues when Jackie Robinson broke the color line to join the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Reviewer T.J. Quinn wrote in
The New York Daily News that “Lanctot succeeds because he doesn’t fall into the two categories that have governed previous descriptions of Negro Leaguers: the long-suffering and colorful nobles, and the individual stories of how players would have fared in the white major leagues. This isn’t a book about how many games Satchel Paige would have won in
the majors, or whether Josh Gibson would have hit more home runs than Babe Ruth. Lanctot shows us how Negro League baseball was crucial in the development of a disenfranchised community, representing the best aspects of American ingenuity and the worst reflections of a racist legacy.”

In his book, Lanctot concludes that black professional baseball “contributed profoundly to black life.”

“Despite numerous obstacles and flaws,” he writes, “the institution provided entertainment and
fostered a sense of racial pride…. Ultimately, the remarkable survival of professional black baseball provided an institutional basis for fostering the skills of black athletes and to a lesser extent, black entrepreneurs. Because of this institution-building in the black community, a pool of talented African-American athletes developed who were able to take full advantage of the great opportunities that became available with desegregation.”

In addition to guidance from Wolters, Lanctot says he received helpful support from Anne M. Boylan, UD professor of history, who was able to steer his book to an acquaintance at the University of Pennsylvania Press.