On this week’s podcast, history professor Matthew Andrews discusses the professional baseball leagues and the role they played in American history.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues — professional baseball leagues comprised mostly of African American players. The leagues were created in 1920 as a response to highly talented non-white players being kept out of the major leagues.
“As long as there has been baseball, there have been African Americans playing baseball,” said Matthew Andrews, a teaching associate professor in the College of Arts & Sciences’ history department. “But as baseball got organized, African Americans found themselves excluded from organized baseball.”
Andrews and other historians study the Negro Leagues using primary sources like newspapers, but a large portion of the leagues’ history is actually unknown.
On this week’s episode, Andrews shares the history of the Negro Leagues, tells some of the leagues’ stories that have survived the test of time and examines the leagues’ place in American history.
This episode of Well Said can be heard on SoundCloud, Spotify or wherever podcasts are played.
Read a transcript of this episode
By University Communications