The League a documentary directed by Sam Pollard and produced by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson to chronicle the history of baseball’s Negro League will premier exclusively in AMC theaters the week of July 7. Rolling out spoke to the award winning director of the film Sam Pollard about the importance of telling this story and what it says about Black America.
What resonated most when working on this project?
First of all, the fact that there was a man named Rube Foster, who had been a pitcher, a manager, and then became an owner of a team, and decided in 1920 he wanted to create his own league and he put together the Negro National League. That’s an extraordinary undertaking that he accomplished. We didn’t feel that he had been given his proper due. This is an opportunity to give audience a sense of who he was and how important he was to the creation of the Negro National League.
The second thing that I came away with feeling very strongly about was the role of a manager named Effa Manley, who was co-owner of the Newark Eagles and her ability to challenge someone like Branch Rickey, who’s been painted as such a heroic figure for being the man who signed Jackie Robinson.
The part of the story that none of us knew about was that Branch Rickey didn’t wanna compensate the owners of these Negro League teams for people he signed, like Don Newcombe, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. Effa Manley made a stink about it and she did stories in newspapers to say, this isn’t fair, this isn’t right.
What does the Negro League experience say about the Black experience in America?
It says that we as Black people during the horrific times of segregation were able to survive and to prosper within our own segregated communities. You saw these communities prosper like Tulsa places like Harlem, Bronzeville in Chicago. To be able to go see your favorite team on a Sunday after church was a pleasure. It was an opportunity to provide cultural sustenance and economic sustenance to the communities.
What would you like people to leave with after watching this film?
We live in a time when people are saying “You can’t tell this story about America. This is not the right story.” The Negro Leagues is an American story. It’s not just a story that needs to be engaged by us, our people but engaged by everybody.
I grew up having to learn about Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. It’s about time other Americans got to learn about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell. This is another part of the American story. That’s a role I took on many years ago as a filmmaker to tell our stories and to make people understand that our stories are part of the American fabric. To deny it is a slap in our face.
