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 Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience
November 2 - December 14, 2009
Hughes Main Library
Join us for a six-week presentation of Pride and Passion: The African-American
Baseball Experience! This national exhibition, along with discussions, lectures
and film, will explore the history of black baseball players in America over
the past 150 years.
The story of African-Americans in baseball is a remarkable and fascinating
slice of American history. Baseball is one of America’s central institutions,
and it has long reflected the complicated and painful history of race in the
United States. Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience tells
the story of black baseball players in the U.S. over the past century and a
half. Although many blacks played baseball with whites in the nineteenth century
as amateurs and also played on minor league teams through the 1880s, black
players were not allowed to compete with whites when major league baseball
was created in the mid 1890s. To counter this discrimination, they organized
teams made up entirely of black players and formed leagues that were known
collectively as the Negro Leagues. When Jackie Robinson was signed by the Brooklyn
Dodgers in 1945, though, integration in baseball began a slow and uneven path
to the integrated status of modern day teams.
Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience,
a traveling exhibition for libraries, was organized by the National Baseball
Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York, and the American Library
Association Public Programs Office, Chicago. The traveling exhibition
has been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities: great ideas brought to life.
The traveling exhibition is based on an exhibition of the same
name on permanent display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
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