Negro Leagues Baseball Collection: Business Behind the Leagues

Behind the uniforms and the roar of the crowd was a world of paper, letters, contracts, telegrams, and game schedules, each holding together a league built from the ground up by businessmen, coaches, and community leaders.

Men like T. H. Hayes Jr., who ran one of the oldest Black-owned funeral homes in Memphis and simultaneously operated the Birmingham Black Barons, were at the center of it all. Hayes wasn’t just managing a team, he was negotiating games, wiring payments, booking fields, and fielding telegrams from agents and promoters. His correspondence reveals the daily labor of running a franchise: coordinating travel, fielding player requests, writing to newspapers, and securing sponsors. So too with Abe Saperstein, founder of the Harlem Globetrotters and one of the most ambitious sports promoters of the 20th century. His letters read like a master class in logistics, discussing tour stops, responding to inquiries from Southern teams, even reflecting on injuries and attendance reports.

The collection contains schedules for barnstorming tours, telegrams arranging last-minute exhibition games, handwritten notes on player performance, travel reimbursements, and gate percentages. These aren’t just scraps of business; they’re proof that the Negro Leagues were deeply organized, purposeful, and always negotiating for space within a segregated system. Behind every inning was an unseen network of labor: owners, secretaries, press agents, drivers, and schedulers, working with limited resources and maximum resolve. They did the math. They sent the wires. They made sure the games went on. The players gave the league its shine. But this was the structure that held it all together.