Black Baseball Black Business

AN EXTRAORDINARY HISTORY OF THE NEGRO LEAGUES AND THE ECONOMIC DISRUPTIONSOF DESEGREGATING A SPORTRoberta J. Newman and Joel Nathan Rosen have written anauthoritative social history of the Negro Leagues. This bookexamines how the relationship between black baseball andblack businesses functioned particularly in urban areas withsignificant African American populations-Chicago DetroitIndianapolis Kansas City Newark New York Philadelphiaand more. Inextricably bound together by circumstance thesesports and business alliances faced destruction and upheaval.Once Jackie Robinson and a select handful of black baseball's elite gained acceptance inMajor League Baseball and financial stability in the mainstream economy shock waves traveledthroughout the black business world. Though the economic impact on Negro Leaguebaseball is perhaps obvious due to its demise the impact on other black-owned businessesand on segregated neighborhoods is often undervalued if not outright ignored in currentaccounts. There have been many books written on great individual players who played inthe Negro Leagues and/or integrated the Major Leagues. But Newman and Rosen movebeyond hagiography to analyze what happens when a community has its economic footingundermined while simultaneously being called upon to celebrate a larger social progress.In this regard Black Baseball Black Business moves beyond the diamond to explore baseball'sdesegregation narrative in a critical and wide-ranging fashion.ROBERTA J. NEWMAN Brooklyn New York is master professor in the Department ofLiberal Studies at New York University. Her work has appeared in the journals CooperstownSymposium: 2009-2010 and NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. JOEL NATHANROSEN Allentown Pennsylvania is associate professor of sociology at Moravian Collegein Bethlehem. He is coeditor of A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity Sexuality and FemaleAthletes; Fame to Infamy: Race Sport and the Fall from Grace; and Reconstructing Fame: SportRace and Evolving Reputations all published by University Press of Mississippi.