"Bearing Witness to Blackball: Buck O’Neil, the Negro Leagues, and the Politics of the Past" by Daniel A. Nathan in Journal of American Studies (Vol. 35, No. 3), Cambridge Univ. Press, Edinburgh Bldg., Shaftesbury Rd., Cambridge, England CB2 2RU.

Thanks to documentaries such as Ken Burns’s 1994 Baseball, and nostalgic tributes to legends such as Josh Gibson and James "Cool Papa" Bell, the Negro Leagues may be more celebrated now than at any time since they disappeared in the late 1950s. Nathan, a professor of American studies and history at Finland’s University of Tampera, senses something fishy. He thinks the current nostalgic interest in the Negro Leagues is an attempt to rewrite history.

Some of the first professional baseball teams after the Civil War were integrated, and even the all-black teams of the time routinely played against all-white teams. But segregation started early. The National Association of Base Ball Players voted in 1867 to bar "any club which may be composed of one or more colored persons," and the National League, organized in 1876, "tacitly agreed to the same prohibition." All was not lost, but "by the beginning of the 20th century there were no African Americans in the Major Leagues."

In 1920, Andrew "Rube" Foster formed the first successful all-black league, the Negro National League, but it was done in by the depression. A new Negro National League sprang up in 1933, followed four years later by the Negro American League. The Negro League all-star game often surpassed its Major League counterpart in attendance and profits, Nathan reports.

Until Jackie Robinson was signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers by Branch Rickey in 1947, breaking baseball’s color barrier, Negro League players were excluded from the Major Leagues, and many great black players missed their chance for the kind of immortality achieved by the likes of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Some who made it to the majors, such as Satchel Paige, arrived only in the autumn of their careers.

 Nathan credits much of the current interest in the Negro Leagues to the tireless efforts of Buck O’Neil, a "smoothfielding first baseman" for the champion Kansas City Monarchs who won the Negro American League batting title in 1946 with a .350 batting average, and whom some may recognize as the folksy interlocutor in Burns’s Baseball. Many observers are amazed at O’Neil’s lack of anger over the injustices he and others suffered. Nathan believes that there is more to the story than that. Making a hero of O’Neil, deserved though that status may be, is a way of recasting history as a story of individual struggle and minimizing "a national disgrace." There’s a bit of an edge even to O’Neil’s niceness. At Satchel Paige’s funeral, in 1982, O’Neil remarked that "everyone was saying, ‘isn’t it a shame Satchel didn’t play with all the great athletes of the major leagues?’ But who’s to say he wasn’t, playing with us?"