Negro league baseball

The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be used narrowly for the seven relatively successful leagues beginning in 1920 that are sometimes termed "Negro Major Leagues".

In the late 19th century, the baseball color line developed in professional baseball, excluding African Americans from league play.^[1] The first league, the National Colored Base Ball League, was organized strictly as a minor league^[2] but failed in 1887 after only two weeks owing to low attendance. After several decades of mostly independent play by a variety of teams, in 1920 the first Negro National League was formed and ultimately seven major leagues existed at various times over the next thirty years.^[3] After integration, the quality of the Negro leagues slowly deteriorated and the Negro American League of 1951 is generally considered the last major league season. The last professional club, the Indianapolis Clowns, operated as a humorous sideshow rather than competitively from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced that based on recent decades of historical research, it was added to the six historical "major league" designations it made in 1969. It classified the seven "major Negro leagues" as additional major leagues, thus recognizing statistics and approximately 3,400 players who played from 1920 to 1948.^[4]