Updated at 8:49 a.m. ET on July 12, 2023

In July 1918, shortly after American troops won their first major battle of World War I, in northern France, W. E. B. Du Bois published a contentious editorial in The Crisis, the NAACP-affiliated magazine he founded as a “record of the darker races.” Du Bois, who hoped that African Americans’ support for militarism abroad might lead to more democratic treatment at home, urged readers to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.” But rather than ushering in the era of racial harmony that Du Bois imagined, the end of World War I saw a vicious backlash to wartime integration efforts: The next year, Black servicemen and civilians alike faced extraordinary racist violence across the United States. As Gerald Early, a professor of English and African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, explains in the new documentary The League, “It convinced a lot of Black people all the more that we need to close ranks in another kind of way—to build our own institutions.”

The League grounds the formation of Negro-league baseball in this fragile historical moment. The film, directed by Sam Pollard and executive-produced by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, charts the rise of several baseball leagues in the early 20th century, when Black players were barred from participating in Major League Baseball. Those regional athletic clubs fostered phenomenal talents and revitalized the communities from which they came, but they began to dwindle in the late 1940s after Jackie Robinson’s signing to the Brooklyn Dodgers kicked off the integration of MLB. Pollard’s film doesn’t treat the color line that Robinson so famously crossed as a tragic inevitability of American racism, instead illustrating how the barrier was actively constructed—and illuminating what was created in its shadow. With rigor and finesse, The League, which was released in theaters on Friday and begins streaming on demand this week, examines the afterlife of Black baseball’s golden eras. The documentary highlights Black players’ indelible influence on the modern sport, making a powerful case for how important the Negro leagues were—and still are.

In addition to competing in all-Black clubs, Black Americans had played on major-league teams as far back as 1884, when the catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker joined the majority-white Toledo Blue Stockings. But by World War I, a gentlemen’s agreement among white team owners had entirely ousted Black players from Major League Baseball. As the major leagues doubled down on segregation, Black players formed their own professional teams. In 1919, Andrew “Rube” Foster, the owner-manager of the Chicago American Giants, published “Pitfalls of Baseball,” a series of op-eds addressing other Black team owners. Writing in The Chicago Defender, Foster cautioned against “delivering Colored baseball into the control of whites” and advocated for the formation of a unified league. In February 1920, he gathered a group of fellow executives at the YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, where they signed documents to incorporate the National Negro League. For its official motto, they borrowed from Frederick Douglass: “We are the ship, all else the sea.”

These owners were not interested in playing against white teams who, off the field, challenged their right to exist. And by resisting the impulse to present integration as a panacea, in baseball or otherwise, The League offers a far more nuanced examination of the sport’s history than most common retellings. The film draws much of its narrative power from the recollections of Bob Motley, who died in 2017 as the last surviving umpire from the Black leagues. (Byron Motley, his son and a co-author of the book on which The League is based, is one of the film’s producers.) In The League, Motley’s observations are largely relayed via voice-over by Pollard. “We didn’t realize it at the time, but the great ballplayers of the leagues would transform the game,” he recounts. Those players also powered an economic engine in their communities, establishing a fan culture so potent that churches would move their service times up an hour so that congregants could make it to the games. As Early puts it, “Any time you saw Black people doing something that was virtuosic, you always—you felt like, Okay, I can go on and deal with the rest of my week.”

The League revels in its subjects’ athleticism and the dynamic style the players pioneered, which now defines contemporary baseball. That emphasis on their talent makes the film a delight to watch while also contextualizing their skill among their contemporaries (and, by extension, within the larger baseball canon). Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, notes that Foster is credited with having invented the deceptive pitch we now know as a screwball; he goes on to relay the lore that the famed New York Giants manager John McGraw sneaked Foster into his team’s camp to teach the screwball to the legendary Christy Mathewson, who “threw the pitch all the way into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.” The League also reconsiders the home-run record once held by Babe Ruth, who never faced off against a Black pitcher in MLB. “His record was set in apartheid baseball,” says Larry Lester, an NLBM co-founder, “which makes Hank Aaron’s record more valuable.”

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In MLK/FBI, Pollard’s 2020 film about the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., he documented the agency’s efforts to stifle the civil-rights movement by maligning “the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation.” Just as MLK/FBI rejected the simplistic view of MLK as a docile idealist, The League dispenses with some of the more clichéd conventions of the sports-movie genre—the weepy narrative about a scrappy team’s unlikely triumph, the euphemistic hagiography of a tortured talent. The League doesn’t shy away from portraying the racist behavior of baseball juggernauts such as Cap Anson, who set off a years-long campaign to whiten the field, or the MLB commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who upheld segregation in the league until his death, in 1944. The League features a broad cross section of players, as well as the umpires, owners, assistants, writers, and family members who witnessed—and made—the sport’s history.

Pollard is also adept at contextualizing rare footage with shrewd but accessible analysis. In telling the story of the Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige, he compiles a deft montage of newspaper clippings, scholarly insight (the historian Donald Spivey shares the origin story for Paige’s nickname: The athlete worked at a railroad depot, where he carried bags), first-hand recollections of Paige’s play from Motley’s book, and statistical analysis of his dominance. But the most affecting summation of Paige’s talent comes from an archival video of Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, who played for more than a dozen Negro-league teams. Radcliffe recalls a day when Paige struck out 21 of the 28 players he pitched to: “He went up on that mound, and he looked up at that crowd. He said, ‘Duty, the sun is shining, but I’m gon’ make ’em think it’s nighttime.’”

This type of testimony gives the documentary its power, painting a vivid portrait of Black players’ talent, camaraderie, and importance within their communities. The grown children speak of former players with awe about their fathers’ larger-than-life presences; scholars and political figures outline how their games created a site of refuge, uplift, and joy for Black people, and introduce key figures whose work off the field kept stadiums buzzing. The film also expands its view outside the United States to demonstrate how the Negro leagues created opportunity for Latino players and forged solidarity with Caribbean nations. By the time The League substantively delves into Jackie Robinson’s catalytic journey to the MLB in its third act, it’s hard not to feel conflicted about that much-celebrated milestone. The documentary explores Robinson’s own internal conflicts, recounting some of the violence he suffered. “I found it very difficult,” Robinson says of his manager’s directive that he ignore the racist treatment he received from fans and players. “Matter of fact, my doctor told me to get away from baseball for fear I was gonna have a nervous breakdown.”

Robinson, of course, persisted. “He would do well, and that would silence those detractors,” Rachel Robinson, his widow, says in the film. In persevering to excel on the field, all the way from the Kansas City Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson shifted not only the landscape of the MLB but also the future of the country. The League underscores how much that broken barrier also crushed him, a sobering meditation on the perils of Black exceptionalism. The precedent also had devastating consequences for the leagues he left behind. In an archival clip, the former Newark Eagles pitcher Max Manning calls it “the death knell of Negro league baseball—when you signed the Black players, the people that had been coming to … see us play, now they went to see Jackie play.”

With World War II–era social change pointing the way toward a future without Jim Crow, Black executives had rallied behind coordinated movements for integration in baseball because it represented a push toward equality in society at large. But as the journalist Andrea Williams explains in the film, they understood that many of their other players would be next. White MLB owners didn’t just sign Black talent away from the Negro leagues. Many, including the Dodgers’ Branch Rickey, also did not compensate the Black team owners whose stars they poached, and crushed the Negro leagues’ economic prospects in the process. Within a few years of the MLB integrating in 1947, the Negro National League, on the East Coast, folded, and the Negro American League, in the Midwest, limped along until it formally closed in the early 1960s. The League offers an elegy for the sport’s Black heyday, taking great pains to show what was lost with its demise. As with the initial segregation of the MLB, this decimation of the Negro leagues was not unavoidable. Black players made baseball a better version of itself, and Pollard’s film subtly asks what the sport still owes them in return.

A previous version of this article misstated that the actor Berry Williams Jr. had voiced Bob Motley’s recollections; it was actually the film’s director, Sam Pollard.