Negro League Baseball Discussion Forum: Negro League Teams – Information Exchange: Number of teams in the negro league
By Lboard (Lboard) on Sunday, June 10, 2001 – 08:01 pm:
How many teams were in the negro league and what was there time spand. What was there logos.
By Admin (Admin) on Sunday, June 10, 2001 – 08:50 pm:
A sensible answer to your question depends first upon a definition for the term "Negro League." The term generally refers to considerably more than a single league, and the term is used differently by various historians and students of baseball history.
Although African Americans were playing baseball professionally during the late 1870s and early 1880s, they were playing on integrated teams along with white players. By the early 1890s the color ban was firmly in place, and black ballplayers began forming their own teams to compete against other black professional teams. There were several hundreds of these teams formed on all levels from fully professional to semi-professional. No credible organized league appeared, though, until Rube Foster organized the Negro National League in 1920.
After 1920 several leagues were formed, some of them featuring "major" league quality play, and others featuring a somewhat lesser quality brand of baseball. While all historians agree that the Negro National League (both the original and the reformed NNL organized by Gus Greenlee in the early 1930s) and Negro American League were of major league quality, others would also include the Eastern Colored League and Negro Southern League in that group. Other well organized leagues like the Texas Negro League, West Coast Colored League, American Negro League and Texas-Oklahoma-Louisianna League appeared during the 1920 to 1950 period, as did dozens of lesser circuits like the North Georgia Negro League, etc.
In addition to all of the above, throughout the first half of the 20th century there were always numerous independent barnstorming teams that played active schedules throughout the country. Among these were such top quality clubs as the Indianapolis Clowns (who played variously within a league structure and as an independent club) and many clubs of somewhat lesser quality such as the Texas Black Spiders, Sudan Black Cats, Louisville Hard Hitters, etc.
In modern use, the term "Negro League" or "Negro Leagues" is generally used to refer to all of the above mentioned professional (and even semi-professional) clubs who played during the era of segregation in professional baseball. So, as you can see, the number of teams in the "Negro League" would count in the hundreds.
After the integration of professional baseball began in the late 1940s black professional teams quickly lost most of their stars and top young prospects to the integrating major and minor leagues. Nonetheless, even after the collapse of the Negro National League after the 1948 season, a reformed Negro American League continued to play throughout the 1950s, as did many less prominent leagues and independent clubs. Some choose to include these teams within the term "Negro League", while others choose to limit the term to encompass only those teams which played as all-black professional teams prior to the integration of baseball.
As for team logos, the simple fact of the matter is that most professional teams, white and black, during the first half of the century did not have logos as we think of them today. While a few teams did have distinctive emblems or insignia, most teams simply chose one of the standard types of athletic lettering available at sporting goods stores for their uniforms and cap insignia. Most commonly the team name or base city was simply spelled out on the front of the uniform in collegiate block characters or one of the other standardly available typestyles. Cap emblems were usually of the same type. Many black teams took their names from local white teams and simply added the work "black" (such as the New York Black Yankees, Birmingham Black Barons), and many also adopted insignia from white clubs when such existed, sometimes making minor style changes, sometimes not.
So…what we are left with is a somewhat confusing, yet accurate, answer to your question.