The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams predominantly made up of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latin Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be used narrowly for the seven relatively successful leagues beginning in 1920 that are sometimes termed Negro Major Leagues.

The league was racially segregated due to racism in the United States, and as part of an effort to give poor white boys an opportunity to achieve economic success,[1] with non whites prevented from playing in the major and minor baseball leagues. In 1885 the Cuban Giants formed the first black professional baseball team.[2] The first league, the National Colored Base Ball League, was organized strictly as a minor league[3] but failed in 1887 after only two weeks owing to low attendance. The Negro American League of 1951 is considered the last major league season and the last professional club, the Indianapolis Clowns, operated as a humorous sideshow rather than competitively from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

Because blacks were not being accepted into the major and minor baseball leagues due to racism in the United States, they formed their own teams and had made professional teams by the 1880s.[4] The first known baseball game between two black teams was held on November 15, 1859, in New York City. The Henson Base Ball Club of Jamaica, Queens, defeated the Unknowns of Weeksville, Brooklyn, 54 to 43.[5]

Immediately after the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and during the Reconstruction period that followed, a black baseball scene formed in the East and Mid-Atlantic states. Comprising mainly ex-soldiers and promoted by some well-known black officers, teams such as the Jamaica Monitor Club, Albany Bachelors, Philadelphia Excelsiors and Chicago Uniques started playing each other and any other team that would play against them.

By the end of the 1860s, the black baseball mecca was Philadelphia, which had an African-American

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