How Does Baseball Affect African American Community

The way that baseball was integrated impacted the African American community by severely limiting the power and influence that their community would have in the sport. Branch Rickey’s primary reason for integrating baseball was not to help aid black athletes; he primarily did it for the benefit of his team’s success and to make sure that white society had full control of the integration of their favorite sport. While Integration was successful both in bringing black athletes back into baseball and providing near-equal opportunities for those black players, the consequences of destroying any chance the black community had at achieving power outweighs the success of integrating baseball. Rube Foster's attempts to aid the black community and create …show more content…
He realized that there was a large amount of talent that was being unutilized due to the fact that major league baseball teams didn’t want to hire black athletes. Rube Foster turned to all the negro league franchise owners around him and informed them of what he was trying to do and how it could help themselves economically and how it could boost their communities’ pride. The negro league franchise owners agreed and the first national negro league was born. This league was extremely successful in all the ways that Rube Foster hoped: it was economically stable, produced black pride, and more importantly distributed wealth back to the black community. Unlike the major leagues, the revenue garnered from negro league games went to the black community because the games are housed, primarily attended, played, and owned by the black community. Similar to the way Malcolm X wanted to create a self thriving society run by black people, Rube Foster had created a self thriving league run and owned by black people. Foster’s dream however, built upon Malcolm’s idea in that he didn’t want to be removed from white society; he wanted his negro league teams to compete against the major league teams in a league comprised of both white and black teams. Branch Rickey had a different method in mind for integrating major league baseball: a method that wouldn’t be nearly as beneficial to …show more content…
Ricky turned to what he called, the most unutilized pool of talent: the negro leagues. Rickey figured that he could bring these negro league players into the major league making his team successful and also helping the negro league players by providing them with the ability to achieve fame and recognition for their talents. Rickey acknowledged that negro league players had a unique style of playing that would reinvigorate societies passion for major league baseball. Branch Rickey’s method was to integrate baseball at a pace slow enough to allow white society the chance to get used to the the change. He wanted the change to be non-reactant and non-violent. Rickey felt that this would cause white society to empathise with the black athlete due to the fact that the athlete would be constantly bombarded with threats while being defenseless. Branch Rickey’s method would take time, but it would be successful in its goal of re-integrating baseball. But Branch Rickey’s method wouldn’t come anywhere close to the amount of good that Rube Foster’s method would do for the black community. The only good that Branch Rickey’s method of integration did for the black community was primarily aimed at black athletes; allowing these athletes to gather fame and recognition at heights they could never achieve