Sam Pollard: Documenting Black Baseball

A glorious look at the men and women who created baseball’s Negro League before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers

Academy Award-nominated and three-time Emmy Award-winning documentarian Sam Pollard is among the big and little screen’s foremost filmmakers chronicling the Black American experience. Ever since directing episodes of the epic Civil Rights series Eyes on the Prize in 1990, Pollard’s productions have often expressed an embattled cinematic sensibility, filled with righteous rage.

1997’s Oscar-nominated 4 Little Girls, which Pollard co-produced with director Spike Lee, is an elegiac account of the innocent children killed by the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. The 2020 compilation film MLK/FBI, composed of archival footage and recordings, angrily reveals J. Edgar Hoover’s relentless COINTELPRO surveillance of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the Bureau’s campaign to discredit the Civil Rights leader and its attempts to push him to commit suicide. 2022’s Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, co-directed with Geeta Gandbhir, vividly recounts the rise of militancy in Alabama during the 1960s, as Stokely Carmichael vied with King for hegemony over the civil rights movement.

But in terms of outlook, Pollard’s latest nonfiction film, The League, is in, well, a league of its own. As is usual for Pollard, he shows us another side of America’s hidden history, exposing the fact that Black professional baseball began long before April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson donned a Dodgers uniform to compete at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. Pollard’s 103-minute documentary has a decidedly upbeat tone and, at times, is positively gleeful and even giddy. This is because of the subject matter: Baseball’s Negro leagues.

From the post-Civil War era until the 1940s, Major League Baseball (MLB) was generally segregated (there were a handful of exceptions in the nineteenth century until 1884, according to the film), due to America’s apartheid system. But this didn’t mean Black Americans didn’t play ball; Black Americans would regularly “batter-up” throughout the Jim Crow era. However, they did so by creating their own teams—such as the Kansas City Monarchs, the Homestead Greys, and the Pittsburgh Crawfords—with Black (and some Latinx) players and owners. Despite segregation, the pastime proved so popular for nonwhite fans that on Sundays, churches had to change their hours of worship so parishioners could head out to the ballpark.

Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, The League is a joy to watch, largely because of the enticing characters. First and foremost are the outstanding athletes who thrilled spectators. The mythic pitcher Satchel Paige (voiced by actor Lovell Gates) is arguably first and foremost among them. During the 1930s, Paige’s all-star team beat “Dizzy” Dean’s major league team in exhibition games;  the white pitcher for the Cardinals and Cubs told the media Paige was baseball’s best pitcher. Paige was also famous for hurling a fastball named “Long Tom,” reputedly at 105 miles per hour, and for saying: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Another legendary player recounted onscreen is catcher and power-hitter Josh Gibson, who was nicknamed the “Black Babe Ruth” and in 1972, posthumously became the second Negro League athlete inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Other notables covered in The League who got their starts on all-Black teams included sluggers Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, and most famously, Jackie Robinson.

But players are not the only captivating, quirky figures that Pollard covers. Some of the ballclub owners, too, were fascinating personalities in their own right. They include the son of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest Black man, Cumberland Posey, who, during the Roaring Twenties, established the Homestead Grays. Gus Greenlee was a numbers runner, entrepreneur, and banker who co-created Black baseball’s all-star game called the East-West Classic, which attracted 50,000 fans to Chicago’s Comiskey Park and was an annual highlight for Black Americans in the 1930s and 1940s.

According to the film and press notes, Andrew Rube Foster was “a talented pitcher, manager and ball-club owner . . . . In 1920, inspired by the Black nationalist fervor of the Harlem Renaissance, Foster persuaded his fellow team owners to join together in the first Negro National League. He sought to build a self-sustaining league, created by and for African Americans. Borrowing from abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Foster adopted the motto: ‘We are the Ship, All Else The Sea.’ By 1924, Negro National League teams faced off against teams from the rival Eastern Colored League in a thrilling and glamourous event called the Colored World Series.”

But perhaps the Negro League’s most exceptional owner was the Newark Eagles’ Effa Manley, whom the film calls “the First Lady of Black Baseball” and in 2006 became the first woman ever admitted to the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York.

Being the politically aware filmmaker that he is, Pollard includes a vignette about the personal role Paul Robeson played in helping to desegregate professional baseball. During World War II, activists invited the renowned athlete, singer, actor, and organizer to meet with white club owners to persuade them to integrate the national pastime.

The League’s interview subjects include the famed playwright and poet Amiri Baraka, who provides lighthearted memories of the Negro League. The commentary provided in interviews by female and male observers, such as essayist and academic Gerald Early, is quite sharp, incisive and insightful, helping to verbally illuminate the saga Pollard unfolds visually. One of the film’s executive producers is Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of Jimmy Fallon’s back-up band the Roots on NBC’s Tonight Show and a Best Documentary Oscar-winner for the 2021 film Summer of Soul.

I’d be remiss if I gave the impression that everything depicted in The League is rosy. It also exposes how once Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s race barrier in 1947, he was subjected to racist abuse. The film also depicts how integration adversely impacted the Negro League in other ways. Effa Manley contended that the Dodgers’ Branch Rickey and other MLB teams poached athletes such as Robinson and should pay compensation. As MLB became integrated, Black-owned businesses suffered—not only the owners, but others who depended on the Negro League for their livelihoods, from hotdog hawkers to ticket sellers to other venders.

Pollard has pondered integration’s effects on Black-owned businesses and the African American community’s cohesiveness before; Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power ends with an eyebrow-raising quote from the reverend King, as stated by Alabama-born SNCC field secretary Ruby Sales: “I have come upon something that disturbs me deeply. I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house. I’m afraid America may be losing what moral vision she had.” Last December I asked Pollard about this and he replied:

“African Americans grew up in this country in the fifties and sixties figuring that if we become integrated into America, we could accept that life will be good, everything will be fine. All that we’ve gone through before the Mayflower, with slavery, what happened after Reconstruction, the rise and fall of Jim Crow, that life would be better if we were finally integrated into the system. The thing we need to remember, which Ruby Sales to me is really saying, is that: ‘America is really a place that’s full of poison.’ ”

All in all, The League is a very uplifting, ebullient film. Considering the athletic excellence exhibited by Black Americans in baseball and the other sports they had been shut out of by Jim Crow, Pollard’s film also shows how racism and segregation hurt not only Black Americans, but everyone. Even if audiences laugh more than they express outrage at injustices, Sam Pollard has done it again with a good, fun documentary, lovingly shot, about the talent and unbeatable spirit of these Black athletes.

The League opens in theaters and on VOD July 14.