New Sam Pollard-Directed Documentary Details Rich History Of Negro Leagues

On the eve of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City hosting a screening of “The League” — the terrific new Sam Pollard-directed documentary that traces the history of the Negro Leagues — the museum’s president, Bob Kendrick, said the film is another important time capsule to educate young and old generations about that chapter in baseball history.

“It’s all kind of dovetailing into one another,” said Kendrick. “That is a great thing for the museum and the Negro Leagues history, in general.”

Kendrick is one of numerous people interviewed in the film, which also features commentary from historian James Brunson III, former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker, and author Andrea Williams, among others. There are also archival interviews with Hall of Famers and former Negro Leagues players Satchel Paige, Buck O’Neil, Hank Aaron, and Monte Irvin and everyone from the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maya Angelou to Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel.

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The musician Questlove is one of the film’s executive producers, and Byron Motley, the son of the late Negro Leagues umpire, Bob Motley, is a producer.

Pollard also devotes a significant amount of the film tracing the ugly underbelly of the segregated baseball era, before Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. There is commentary on Hall of Fame inductees Cap Anson (player) and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner, both of whom perpetuated segregation in the sport; the landmark 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, that established “separate but equal” doctrine; and the rise of the Negro Leagues in the early 20th century.

“Jackie Robinson is recognized as the first professional African-American ballplayer to play in the major leagues. But we know that in 1884, Moses Fleetwood Walker played for a professional team, the Toledo Blue Stockings,” says Brunson in the film. “So there were African-American professional ballplayers in the 19th century.”

Kendrick discusses in the film how Rube Foster, the Hall of Fame pitcher/executive/manager, was the genius behind Cooperstown pitching great Christy Mathewson’s famous screwball.

“Back then it was called a ‘fadeaway.’ And Old Rube perfected this pitch, so much so that the great major league manager (New York Giants) John McGraw would sneak Rube into his camp, so that Rube Foster could teach Christy Mathewson how to throw the screwball,” Kendrick says in the film. “To go to a Negro Leagues game, you could feel the immense pride that Black folks had about this product… to a large degree because they understood that it was something that was inherently ours. Now, it was shared with the rest of the world, but it was still ours.”

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Robinson’s Dodgers career was 10 seasons, including the club’s 1955 World Series title year. After his playing days, Robinson was a key civil rights advocate and pioneer.

“I think Jack was one of the catalysts for the civil rights movement. That somehow he alerted white people to the fact of discrimination, and what the losses were for the society that you couldn’t include this talent,” says Rachel Robinson in the film. “I think he made Black people who had been made to feel inferior, feel prouder of themselves.”

Kendrick said in an interview that on the heels of the success of “MLB The Show 23,” a video game that features Negro Leagues stars; with MLB recognizing the Negro League stats in 2020 and elevating them to major league status; and with the release of “The League,” that era of baseball history continues to have “a mainstream voice.”

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“We’re here to preserve and celebrate this wonderful chapter of baseball,” said Kendrick. “But as we look at ways to grow interest in this subject matter, a project like this documentary goes a long way in helping to continue to increase interest around the history of the Negro Leagues. That can only be good for the museum in long term.

“I consider ourselves to be an institution of higher learning. And we’re still educating people. These are all unique ways to introduce the Negro Leagues to young people. This type of (film) is also moving this history in front of an audience that may not have paid attention to it otherwise,” added Kendrick.