The Blackball Journal
The Game They Built for Themselves
Before Jackie Robinson crossed the color line, Black America had already built its own. The Negro Leagues were not a consolation prize — they were proof: proof that Black excellence, organized and sustained, could thrive against the full weight of American exclusion. This journal exists to tell that story.
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Featured Articles
Come and Build Your Own: How Black America Turned Baseball, Community and Consumer Power Into Capital
How the 1906–1910 Leland Giants turned a $2,500 baseball acquisition into a $100,000 community equity offering — and launched a Black economic tradition that never stopped building.
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Come and Build Your Own: How Black America Turned Baseball, Community and Consumer Power Into Capital
How the 1906–1910 Leland Giants turned a $2,500 baseball acquisition into a $100,000 community equity offering — and launched a Black economic tradition that never stopped building.
Born Into Black Baseball: Rube Foster, Reconstruction, and the Pursuit of Self-Determination
On the 147th anniversary of Rube Foster's birth, a reconstruction of the Black baseball world he entered — and the case that the player belongs in the highest conversation, not just the organizer.
The Power of a Vision
Karl Pendleton II traces the birth of Black baseball in the South, the destruction of Black institutional independence through integration, and asks the question that changes everything: what happened to what was being built?
The South Still Has Something to Say
Karl Pendleton II issues a reckoning: forty years of organized Black baseball erased by narrative compression, and a documented record that is about to change everything.
Before the Negro Leagues: The Birth of a Black-Owned Professional Baseball Industry
Karl Pendleton II traces the full, unbroken lineage of Black professional baseball from the Pythian Club of 1865 through Bud Fowler, Sol White, and the organized leagues of 1886–1906 — dismantling the myth that 1920 was the origin.
The Game Before the Game: How Rube Foster Built Black Baseball
On February 13, 1920, Andrew "Rube" Foster gathered team owners at a Kansas City YMCA and built something that had never existed — a self-sustaining professional baseball league owned and operated by Black Americans.
Black in Caracas: Jim Pendleton and the Winter Leagues
When the American baseball season ended, Jim Pendleton didn't go home — he went south. In Venezuela and Puerto Rico, he became something he could not yet be in the United States: simply a ballplayer, judged on merit alone.
The Long Way to the Show: Jim Pendleton's Blackball Years
Before Milwaukee, before the Major Leagues, before any of it — Jim Pendleton learned the game in the Negro Leagues with the Asheville Blues and the Chicago American Giants. This is that chapter.
8 articles · Click any card or to read full screen
A History Written in Full
The Negro Leagues and the World Jim Pendleton Came From
From the Field to the Archive
The Full Arc of Black Baseball History
We are the ship, all else the sea. — Rube Foster, Father of Black Baseball