I must admit I’m no baseball aficionado; I understand the basics — home runs, foul balls, three strikes and you’re out at the old ball game. There’s a reason I’m writing a books column, and not the sports column. Yet, when I heard about Reginald R. Howard’s Baseball’s Silent Genocide: How They Cut Black Youth Out of Baseball, I knew it was a story I wanted to know more about. Yes, it’s a story about baseball, specifically Negro League Baseball, but it’s a story that examines an unheard perspective. “People sing the praises of Major League Baseball players but Negro League players aren’t even mentioned in that song,” Howard writes. “My primary reason for writing this book is to express my heartfelt beliefs about why and how black youth in this country have been kept from playing the ‘Great American Game’ called baseball.”
Within his book, Howard, who played for the Indianapolis Clowns in the ’50s and ’60s, weaves the history of baseball and his own experiences in the league into his thesis. Growing up in South Bend, Indiana, Howard says his family was addicted to Black baseball, with his uncle even playing for the Memphis Red Sox. Yet, he says, “All the black students who played baseball were being steered toward track and field. The coaches didn’t want us to play baseball. In fact, I kept hearing stuff like, ‘You guys don’t like baseball.’ Well, they were saying that to the wrong person when they said it to me.”
To Howard, as he reflects back on his early days, it was like “the [white] majority said, ‘We’re going to preserve baseball for our kids. We do not want minority kids to dominate all sports.’” It began with defunding baseball in the inner city and creating more expenses to play, and segregation only helped keep Black players out of the sport.
When Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color line in 1947, Howard was still a child, but “when I became an adult it didn’t look that good to me,” he says. Indeed, at the time, the Negro League was a successful business, “second only to the black insurance industry.” But as Major League Baseball gleaned players here and there from Negro League rosters, the team owners were not compensated, and eventually, the Negro League deteriorated into oblivion.
As of 2021, 8 percent of MLB players are Black, compared with 78 percent in the NBA and 67 percent in the NFL. “Those numbers don’t become that lopsided without somebody doing something to cause that,” Howard writes.
Today, Howard laments baseball’s fall in popularity. Eighty or so years ago, baseball was America’s most popular sport, followed by football and basketball. Now, baseball places third. “When I go to speak to black kids today and ask, ‘Who doesn’t like baseball?’ hands shoot up all around the place,” Howard writes. “‘Why don’t you like baseball?’ ‘Oh, it’s too slow.’ ‘It don’t move fast enough.’ ‘Basketball is faster.’ ‘It’s dull!’ I’ll counter with something like, ‘Hey, something is happening on every pitch. There’s always something happening in baseball.’”
Howard goes on to say, “I’m not saying for one second, or the militancy of black baseball is not saying for one second, that black kids playing baseball would be a panacea for race relations and black incarceration in America, but it would have helped a lot.”
In its entirety, Howard’s book is only 135 pages long, but it is filled with insights that the baseball enthusiast and non-enthusiast can appreciate. “I’m in my 80s now,” he writes, “and I want to make these statements. I don’t want to die with this stuff in my head. It would be a serious dereliction on my part if I did.”
Within the pages are photographs, charming excerpts from Howard’s own life, passages about forgotten players and their contributions to the sport, and a chapter about Tennessee’s and Memphis’ significance in the Negro League — all of it written as if you were sitting beside the writer listening to him speak in a conversation that draws your full attention.
Purchase Baseball’s Silent Genocide at tinyurl.com/t7t7kcu4.
