1. Introduction
[1.1] Although the history of Black Americans playing and watching baseball is nearly as long as that of white Americans, currently Black people make up a disproportionately small percentage of players on Major League Baseball (MLB) teams and fans at MLB games. In the decades after Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut as the first Black player in the modern MLB, the percentage of Black American players increased, reaching a peak of 18.7 percent in 1981. However, in the era since then, that number has fallen into the single digits (Armour and Levitt 2017). Immediately after Robinson debuted, it was not unusual for crowds to be one-third Black (Tannenbaum 2021). Reports on the number of Black American fans at MLB games are often estimates, but since the 1970s they have consistently fallen far below the Black population of cities MLB teams call home, ranging from 2 percent to 7.3 percent (Albrecht 1992; Hampel 1998; Flanagan 1999; Staples 1987). One analysis found Black fans pictured in just 5 percent of televised crowd shots at MLB games (Ogden 2004).
[1.2] There are many explanations of the decline in Black American players and fans in MLB. Those include the cost of playing high-level youth baseball (Solomon 2021), the lack of playing fields in urban areas (Jones 2003), the impact of the end of the Negro Leagues on the game's infrastructure (Ruck 2011), that Major League Baseball's draft structure makes signing players from the Caribbean and Latin America cheaper than signing American-born players (Smith and Kiss 2021), baseball's lack of popularity amongst younger Americans (Norman 2018), the lack of excitement in the game (Hampel 1998), and baseball's lack of appeal to African American culture (Brown and Bennett 2015). Few of those explanations, however, examine the impact of the historical fan experience at MLB games. Those that point to the fan experience tend to do so vaguely or in passing. One study argued that Black fans did not come to the park because other fans were a "bunch of drunk white people" (Hampel 1998). Another suggested that Black people avoided baseball games because of how MLB and fans treated Black players (Wiley 1993). Scholar Gerald Early recognized that "despite efforts to increase black attendance, it is surely not the desire of any major-league baseball owner to have blacks make up the kind of attendance percentage they did when Robinson debuted in 1947. It would, indeed, be a cause of unease, if not downright unrest" (2000).
[1.3] The lack of extended examination of Black fans and their historical experiences at MLB games mirrors sport studies' typical focus on athletes rather than fans. This is perhaps especially evident in my own subdiscipline, sport history. Broad-reaching volumes like Murray G. Phillips et al.'s Routledge Handbook of Sport History (2022) and Steven A. Riess's A Companion to American Sport History (2014), which combine to include more than a thousand pages of text across seventy-six chapters, do not dedicate even a single chapter to fandom.
[1.4] This article examines the historical experiences of Black fans getting to and being at MLB games and reveals that they were persistently physically, geographically, and socially marginalized at the ballpark. The methods by which MLB marginalized Black fans varied by location in accordance with prevailing regional norms around race and segregation and became more covert and purportedly "color-blind" in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, I argue that reflecting on the historical experiences of Black fans is essential to understanding their small numbers at MLB games today.
[1.5] The evidence in this historical study comes from a variety of sources related to the fan experience at MLB games. While I read widely in secondary sources, the bulk of the material in this article comes from primary sources. Chief among them are African American newspapers, many of which are part of full-text searchable databases, but some are only available on microfilm. Memories of fans, activists, and team employees are key sources, too, and the majority are published, but I also interviewed several people I located through the Society of American Baseball Research. I reviewed digitized mainstream, white newspapers and magazines as well as the limited collections of MLB team and MLB team owners' papers that are publicly accessible in archives or online. Throughout, I remained focused on sources that spoke to the experience of being in or getting to the ballpark rather than on broader forms of fandom such as following on the radio, television, or through journalistic accounts and always thought critically about issues of power and access.
2. Black fans in the age of overt racism and segregation: 1900–1947
[2.1] The marginalization of Black fans at MLB games traces back at least as far as 1900 and, in accord with common racist patterns of the first half of the twentieth century, Black fans were cast as inferior in overt, blatantly racist manners, which often included racial slurs. In a January 1910 Baseball Magazine article, J. Raymond Price wrote about the range of fans at the ballpark "from the millionaire to the street Arab." After discussing a variety of white fans and quoting them in a grammatically correct manner, Price turned his attention to Black ones. He wrote that "many negroes are becoming dyed-in-the-wool fans, and they afford a lot of amusement for rooters and players with their original style of 'fanning.'" Price marked Black fans as inferior and described "the way the negro fan puts it" by quoting one saying, "Yah, dere boy, I jes' gess dat you'se ain't done never seen sich ball playing as dat you'se jes seen." He provided an example of the "quick wit of the colored rooter" when a player named Bob Ganley, who had been immersed in a deep slump, finally hit a single and looked like he was trying to steal second base. Price wrote that a Black fan cautioned, "Look out dar, Mistah Bob, don't get fresh around dat base. You'se ain't none too familiar with it."
[2.2] Despite the ways the baseball establishment cast Black people as inferior, some teams aimed to attract them to their parks. One was the New York Yankees, situated in the Bronx, not far from overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods like Harlem. In part, they were interested in drawing Black fans because, compared with other parks of the era, the team's home starting in 1923, multitiered Yankee Stadium, had more options for richer fans—who were more likely to be white—to physically distance themselves from poorer fans—a group more likely to include Black people. That distance meant marginalization of Black fans and privileging white ones remained a fundamental part of the experience there. Moreover, aspects of the experience not directly under team control also marginalized Black fans. For example, Art Rust Jr. recalled that, when he was a twelve-year-old attending a game at Yankee Stadium in the 1930s, "while leaning over the bleacher wall in right field with other youngsters seeking autographs, Washington Senators outfielder Taft Wright called me a 'black son of a bitch'" (1992).
[2.3] Verbal abuse by Yankees players, however, more directly challenged the team's ability to attract Black fans. In a live radio interview in 1938, outfielder Jake Powell said that he stayed in shape in the offseason because he was "a policeman and I beat n——s over the head with my blackjack" (Levitt 2008) (note 1). His comments provoked outrage: Black fans boycotted team owner Jacob Ruppert's brewery and threated to do the same to the team's games; baseball's commissioner suspended Powell for ten days, the first time an MLB player had been suspended for making racist remarks; and African Americans in New York City demanded that Powell apologize and the Yankees release him (Daniel 1940; "To Mr. Ruppert" 1938; "Jake Powell Case" 1938; Lamb 2012). The New York Amsterdam News, the city's largest Black newspaper, argued that if the team kept him, it meant "they agreed with his sentiments" (Bourne 1938b).
[2.4] Yankees general manager Ed Barrow apologized to the New York Amsterdam News on behalf of the entire organization (Bourne 1938a). To assuage Black fans, Powell went on an apology tour of Harlem's bars and newspaper offices. However, several newspapers questioned his sincerity (Clark 1938; "Jake Powell's Apology" 1938). Demonstrating how the Yankees marginalized Black fans' concerns, Powell remained on the active roster despite injuries and poor play. His presence on the team was met with picket lines during the 1938 World Series (G. Miller 1939). The Yankees also chose to resign Powell for the 1939 season (Levitt 2008). The New York Amsterdam News argued that by renewing Powell's contract, "Barrow shows his disregard for colored people" (Danyell 1939).
[2.5] African American fans' justified anger in the wake of Powell's comments led Barrow to attempt to defend the club's treatment of Black people. The Yankees, like all Major League teams at the time, employed no Black players, so Barrow turned his attention elsewhere. He claimed that the club allowed hundreds of Black children into the park for free as part of a broader program for impoverished youth and noted that the Yankees hired Black plainclothes security guards ("Yankee Manager" 1938; "'Jake' Powell's Insult" 1938). This inclusive hiring policy did not extend to the concessions vendors, though. Harry M. Stevens, Inc. (HMS), who the Yankees contracted to sell concessions, did not hire Black people. Because HMS did its own hiring, Barrow claimed the club was not responsible for the policy ("Yankee Manager" 1938). If Barrow and the Yankees had been serious about inclusive hiring, Barrow, relying on his nearly half-century-long close relationship with HMS, could have pushed HMS to hire Black workers (Barrow 1951).
[2.6] Following Ruppert's death in 1939, Barrow established the Jacob Ruppert Memorial Cup for Negro League teams that played at Yankee Stadium. New York Amsterdam News columnist Dan Burley argued that trophy ended the backlash over Powell's words because "the race was lulled to sleep by the creation of a cup for colored baseball" (1939). Similarly, one fan at a Ruppert Cup game noted "there still ain't no colored players in the major leagues and Jake Powell is still on the New York Yankee's [sic] roster. So they buy us off with a gold-plated cup" (B. Miller 1939). In explaining why he established the trophy, Barrow said, "the colored stars will undoubtedly attract thousands of fans and supporters who will help them in their fight to reach the pinnacle of organized baseball" ("Ed Barrow's Views" 1939), yet their very separate nature continued to marginalize Black people.
[2.7] Similar actions privileged white people at the Polo Grounds, the home of the National League's (NL) New York Giants. The Polo Grounds was also often the site of segregated Negro League games. Additionally, the Giants seemed to think about Black people in much the same way that the Yankees did.
[2.8] In 1939, Giants manager Bill Terry hired a young Black boy, Cecil Haley, who had been opening and closing cab doors outside the home clubhouse for tips, to be the team's mascot. Haley's role was to sit on the team's bench and "as the batsman passed young Cecil on the way for their turn at the plate, they would rub their hands over the boy's head and pray." The New York Amsterdam News did not initially "find anything especially offensive about the players rubbing the youth's head for good luck," but they wrote the team should hire Black players if they wanted to improve on the field ("Look, Mr. Terry" 1939). In the eyes of the franchise, Black people were only able to serve as good luck charms. Even that did not last long, because, as the New York Amsterdam News reported, "somewhere, somehow, the thought occurred to someone that 'it didn't look good' to have a Negro sitting on the Giants' bench" (Daniel 1940).
[2.9] Moreover, at the Polo Grounds in the late 1930s Rust wrote that he was "called a 'black bastard' by St. Louis Cardinal left-hander Clyde Shoun when I was trying to get his autograph. My head was rubbed for good luck by St. Louis Cardinal right-hander Fiddler Bill McGee as he walked out of the clubhouse past the bleachers." During another autograph-hunting session, Rust recalled "'Pepper' Martin of the St. Louis Cardinals pushing my scorecard aside and saying, 'Get out of my way, you little black bastard. Why don't you go and see the niggers play baseball'" (1992).
[2.10] Also in 1939, Giants player Burgess Whitehead visited a "cabaret in [sic] 133rd street and [...] allegedly called Obadiah Green, one of the waiters, a '—r.'" Following the incident, Whitehead did not miss a game and the New York Amsterdam News reported that "Negroes were in the stands at the Polo Grounds the next day the Giants played here and were vociferous in their howls for Whitehead" ("Ball Star Held" 1939; Daniel 1940). Moreover, that November, Whitehead "brutally smack[ed] down a colored woman" named Hazel Grimes Alston in North Carolina. Alston had walked on the sidewalk past Whitehead's parked car and in response, Whitehead followed her into a store, knocked her down, and punched her twice. Whitehead, however, was slated to be in the team's Opening Day lineup in 1940 and the New York Amsterdam News reported "there are hundreds of Negroes in Harlem who [will] be in the line for tickets for grandstands, boxes and bleachers as though a Negro was in the lineup [...] and not a fellow like Whitehead who expressed the utter contempt and hate a southerner can have for a Negro" (Daniel 1940). Even if Black fans sat in the same section as white ones at the Polo Grounds, the team's refusal to respond to its players' overt racism marginalized them.
[2.11] Other teams, however, barred Black fans from sitting in certain parts of their ballparks. This was especially common in Southern minor leagues ballparks but also occurred in at least one MLB facility. As early as 1920, if not earlier, Black fans could only sit in the outfield seats—the bleachers and the pavilion—at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, home to the NL's Cardinals and the American League's Browns. White fans could sit in those sections—and some did—but they could also pay more for grandstand seats so they would not have to interact with Black fans (Tannenbaum 2021).
[2.12] Broadly speaking, Black fans' reactions to this policy fell into two camps. One demanded equal treatment based on socioeconomic standing—the right to sit in the middle-class grandstands if they could afford it rather than be forced to sit in the working-class bleachers and pavilion. For example, Willis Lewis did not call for an end to segregation but rather that the team set aside a thousand grandstand seats for "respectable colored men [who] would like to take their wives out to the game" where they would not be subjected to the rowdy behavior common in the outfield seats (1926).
[2.13] The second viewpoint, urging fans to patronize nonsegregated Black-owned businesses, was summarized by Chas Coleman, who responded to Lewis by writing, "I made one trip to Sportsman's Park and have too much sense to go back. [...] I never try to spend my money where it is not wanted." He suggested that Lewis boycott Sportsman's Park and buy tickets for games at the Black-owned home of the St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League instead (1926). While the segregation policy was in place, most of the commentary in the weekly Black-owned St. Louis Argus aligned with Coleman's view. In 1926 the editors wrote "we do not know who or what class of colored people among us, would be so unthoughtful as to lend their aid in the segregation program of this ball club by putting down their hard earned dollars in admission fees." They asked, "why should we go there [...] when we can go to Stars Park and see just as good a game and have first choice at a box seat?" ("Paying to Be Segregated" 1926). A complicating factor with this viewpoint was that it asked working-class Black fans to boycott Sportsman's Park because middle-class Black fans faced discrimination there. Perhaps this explains why Black fans were a not-uncommon sight at Sportsman's Park while the grandstands remained all white.
[2.14] Following decades of advocacy by St. Louis' Black community, the segregation policy finally ended in 1944, thanks in part to a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign by an interracial commission of mayoral appointees created in an attempt to prevent racial unrest (Tannenbaum 2021). After the policy ended, however, large numbers of Black fans did not start going to Sportsman's Park. Nate Crump, a Black St. Louisan, explained that after 1944 he sometimes sat in the grandstands, but due to how the team had treated Black fans previously, he did not attend often (Tannenbaum 2021). In 1945, former Cardinals executive Branch Rickey noted that "there is a vast Negro population [in St. Louis] and it has not yet got into the habit of supporting major league baseball" (Spink 1945). There were good reasons for that population's behavior: The Browns and Cardinals remained all white and for decades had pushed Black fans to the outer edges of their park. Simply ending the discriminatory policy did not entice Black fans to regularly attend Cardinals' games. What did have an impact was the integration of the game on the field. When Jackie Robinson debuted in the Gateway City, the Cardinals drew record crowds (Tannenbaum 2021).
[2.15] The prospect of more Black fans at MLB games, however, scared many MLB owners. In August of 1946, while Robinson was playing in the previously all-white minor leagues, a group of MLB team executives authored a report on the financial state of the game. One of the topics they covered was the "race question." Although they acknowledged that "baseball will jeopardize its leadership in professional sport if it fails to give full appreciation to the fact that the Negro fan and the Negro player are part and parcel of the game," they included no specifics of what that appreciation might look like (Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power 1951). More to the point, the report was fearful of the influx of Black fans who came to see Robinson. It noted that when Robinson's team played on the road "the percentage of Negro attendance at some games at Newark and Baltimore [minor league cities with large Black populations] was in excess of 50 percent. The situation might be presented, if Negroes participate in major-league games, in which the preponderance of Negro attendance in parks such as the Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Comiskey Park could conceivably threaten the value of the major league franchises owned by these clubs" (Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power 1951). In a new era marked by desegregation, MLB's previous pattern of marginalization through overt racist and segregation—the norm for the first half of the twentieth century—would have to change. However, MLB owners clearly thought they had to repel Black fans to keep white ones, so they needed to shift their methods of marginalization.
3. "Color-blind" discrimination and geographical separation following integration: 1947–present
[3.1] When Robinson and other Black players proved dominant on the field and as the Civil Rights Movement accelerated, MLB executives had to find different ways to marginalize Black fans. Like much of the rest of society, they settled on supposedly "color-blind" ways to achieve their ends, taking advantage of structural discrimination in employment and housing to continue to make it difficult for Black fans to get to the ballpark and partake of the same experience as white fans. One way owners made it more difficult for Black fans to attend games was by building stadiums farther away from them. After ruling out ballpark age, fan income, and team winning percentage, scholars Alan Sager and Arthur Culbert determined that the demographics of the neighborhood around a team's ballpark were the deciding factors for whether or not a team moved during the 1950s and 1960s. Teams that moved left neighborhoods that were on average 44.1 percent Black (note 2). By contrast, teams that did not move were in neighborhoods that were 17.6 percent Black. For teams that moved into less white areas, Sager and Culbert speculated that new highways and parking lots served to wall stadiums off from the surrounding neighborhood, thereby limiting Black fans' ability to attend games (1993). Although Sager and Culbert's analysis is limited, it meshes with some owners' public statements. Calvin Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, who moved his team to Minnesota and renamed them the Twins in 1961, told a Waseca, Minnesota, Lions Club that he moved from Washington, D.C., "when I found out that [Minnesota] had only 15,000 blacks" (Staples 1987).
[3.2] The 1960s also saw the creation of new MLB teams, one of which was based in Houston—deeper in the South than any other MLB team had been before. With municipal funding, the team built the world's first domed stadium on undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city, far from Houston's Black and Latinx neighborhoods. The dome's roof, air conditioning, and massive parking lots made it perfect for what the team was trying to accomplish—drawing middle- and upper-class white Houstonians. Although its formal name was the Harris County Domed Stadium, when it opened in 1965 everyone called it the Astrodome after its primary tenant, the Houston Astros. The team's owner, former Houston mayor Roy Hofheinz, claimed that all fans were treated equally there, but that was not the case. Fans had different experiences at the Astrodome based on their class, race, and gender (Tannenbaum 2020).
[3.3] While funding for the dome was secured in large part due to Hofheinz's guarantee of racial equality (Mease 2001), the Astrodome's extreme separation between fans based on the price they could pay for tickets functioned similarly to racial segregation, allowing many white fans to buy their way out of having to sit near fans of color. Moreover, the park was difficult to access for many fans of color, who had lower car-ownership rates than white fans (Shelton 2017). For example, nearly all of the 47,000 fans who came to the dome's first exhibition game arrived by car and parked in its 30,000 parking spots (Gast 2014). The few municipal busses that served the area stopped at the parking lot's gates, so fans had a long walk after a ride that in some cases took two hours in an unair-conditioned bus traversing poorly paved roads (Sam Quintero conversation with author July 13, 2020) (note 3).
[3.4] Additionally, Hofheinz and the team did not focus on the experiences of Black and Latinx fans. Inside the Astrodome, the team's 250-page souvenir book, overflowed with images of fans, team officials, and players, but the only Black face not on an athlete belonged to Joe Louis Holiday, who worked in "mail and delivery" (Houston Sports Association 1965). Hofheinz told a reporter, "We did a lot of research before choosing the colors [of the luxury suites]. We made sure the color complemented the complexion and clothing of women. It took us two weeks to get the right color of blue. Many blues would give ladies a pasty-looking complexion" ("Designers Keep the Gals in Mind" 1965). His concern about women's "pasty-looking complexion" reveals that he did not expect Black or Latinx women to sit in the most exclusive part of the dome. Moreover, Astrodome employees recalled that most fans of color sat in the least expensive seats (Quintero 2020).
[3.5] Beyond luxury suites, the Astrodome featured several exclusive clubs. Team publications presented images of well-dressed white fans in those spaces (Houston Sports Association 1965). In 1967 The Economist declared that "the clubs at the Dome have only one colour line; if your dollar bills are green, you get in [...] If you are a Negro, that makes no difference" ("Bigger and Better in Texas" 1967). The magazine did not analyze how many Black Houstonians could afford the tickets needed to access the clubs, baking the marginalization of Black fans into its coverage of the facility. While it does seem, as The Economist noted, that "there [was] a conscious effort to ensure that a high percentage of the employees [were] Negro and that the Negroes employed [would] share all levels of jobs" ("Bigger and Better in Texas" 1967; Quintero 2020), there was no analysis of the differences between working in an exclusive part of the dome and being able to sit there.
[3.6] The team's lack of focus on fans of color meant that few attended their games. A 1973 study noted that the Astros, like many other teams, should "consider ways of encouraging Black fans' and other Ethnic fans' attendance at the ball park [by building ...] up the sense of community identification with these Ethnic groups in their neighborhoods." Furthermore, it suggested that the Astros could draw more fans of color by developing "transportation programs to make it easier for Ethnic fans to get out to the ball park" and having television cameras focus on fans of color in the dome (Lieberman Research 1973). Such suggestions were only necessary because the franchise had marginalized some Houstonians from the start (note 4).
[3.7] While the Astrodome's suburban, car-focused design dominated stadium construction in the 1960s and 1970s, by the late 1980s that model left many baseball fans unsatisfied. As the Astrodome's Modernism grew outdated, Postmodernism took hold in urban planning and—with Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland—ballpark design, too. In the 1970s and 1980s, developers discovered that carefully controlled urban spaces with ties to the past appealed to suburbanites at the same time they realized that downtown buildings were cheaper to renovate than tear down. Festival marketplaces put new stores in these old buildings, prompting consumers to think about an imagined version of the past (Isenberg 2004) and Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles, was designed to function similarly.
[3.8] The Orioles, who moved to Baltimore in 1954, played in Baltimore Memorial Stadium until Camden Yards opened in 1992. When the team first arrived, Memorial Stadium was surrounded by a middle-class white neighborhood. By the 1980s, though, the area around the stadium had changed. In a pattern common to many American cities, middle-class white residents moved to the suburbs and the neighborhood ended up poorer and Blacker (Levine 1987). In those decades, the team was led by Black superstars like Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray, but the Orioles did not put much effort into drawing Black fans (J. Miller 1990).
[3.9] Memorial Stadium's surroundings, age, and lack of amenities meant that in the 1980s, it was few people's ideal facility. White fan and ballpark reviewer Bob Wood gave it low marks for how hard it was to drive to and park at. He feared Black neighborhoods around many of the ballparks he visited and called those parks "seedy," "dirty," and "filthy," and claimed they were located next to "ghettos" (Wood 1988). White fans like Wood, it seemed, wanted to be farther from the Black people who made up the majority of many American cities. Fearful of the Orioles leaving the city, local politicians were determined to fund a new ballpark that would make fans like Wood comfortable.
[3.10] In the late 1980s, those politicians decided to create a series of sports-themed lottery games to fund construction of a new baseball stadium. While using taxes would have drawn more money from wealthy, and mostly white, Marylanders, poor Black people disproportionately played the kinds of lottery games politicians instituted. One member of the state's Black Legislative Caucus, Senator Decatur Trotter, said that people who play the lottery "are the same people who are least likely to use the new facility because of the high price of tickets" (Hamlett 1987). Before construction had even begun, the new park was structured to marginalize Black fans, a marginalization that was replicated in several of the park's features.
[3.11] Like festival marketplaces, Camden Yards was manufactured nostalgia with modern amenities designed to bring white suburbanites back to the city. Harborplace, one of the earliest and most successful festival marketplaces, influenced the team executives closely involved with the park's design and the elected officials who supported it. Moreover, the team and the city closely controlled and carefully regulated Camden Yards' surroundings to limit unexpected events that might send customers back to the suburbs for good. To geographer Darrel Crilley, places like Camden Yards were "programmed to filter the social heterogeneity of the urban crowd, substituting in its place a flawless fabric of white middle class work, play and consumption" (1993). In that way, Camden Yards highlights how MLB adapted its marginalization of Black fans in a "color-blind" manner to maintain its popularity with white ones.
[3.12] Before Camden Yards' inaugural season, Black elected officials criticized the Orioles' poor outreach to the city's African American population. The park was adjacent to a much whiter neighborhood than Memorial Stadium had been and, according to state representative Howard P. Rawlings, the team had "neglected the city's black majority" in its opening festivities. He continued, "it's a reflection of [the Orioles'] lack of awareness that [...] Baltimore [...] is more than 60 percent African-American" (Banisky and Hyman 1992). By the end of June, it was evident that Camden Yards was not drawing any more Black fans than Memorial Stadium had. Rawlings noted that the Black community's "dollars helped build [the park] and the bottom line is you don't see us there." He categorized the Orioles' marketing efforts towards the Black community as "barely impactive" (Owens 1992).
[3.13] In September, the Baltimore Sun, the city's daily newspaper, put the low numbers of Black fans on its front page. The team estimated that just 5 percent of people at Camden Yards were Black. One Black fan who came to Orioles games from his home two hours away noted that "every time I come out, I always look, but I hardly see any blacks." Many, but not all, Black fans faulted the team. David Kaintuck, who regularly followed games on the radio, once heard a broadcaster say "it's a really nice day, and you can get a really good tan" at the ballpark. Kaintuck said the team and its announcers "just don't realize all the people they're offending. He wasn't inviting us to come out." George Chainey, a local businessman argued that Black turnout was low because the team was "not marketing to get black customers. They're trying to distribute the services to folks in the outlying regions" (Bembry and Hyman 1992).
[3.14] The team did make some superficial efforts to attract Black fans; they honored Black people as the fan of the game and changed the music that played between innings to "include songs by artists who appeal to blacks, such as Boyz II Men and En Vogue." They also offered free tickets to local school children and contributed to Black charities. However, as diversity consultant Clifford Alexander noted, that was far different from "a concentrated marketing effort" and therefore was not likely to have a lasting impact (Bembry and Hyman 1992).
[3.15] Just how much the experiences of Black fans were afterthoughts to the team became clear in the article. The Sun reported that the team's vice president "appeared surprised at the displeasure among local black fans." He promised that the team "certainly will continue to work on" attracting more Black fans. However, as Alexander noted, the Orioles had no incentive to advertise to Black fans because attendance was already extremely high—the team sold out more than two-thirds of their games in 1992 (Bembry and Hyman 1992). Moreover, Camden Yards became the model that teams across MLB copied.
[3.16] The Atlanta Braves were one of the many teams that tried to replicate Camden Yards' success in the years after 1992. MLB first came to Atlanta in 1966, when the Braves arrived as transplants from Milwaukee and moved into Atlanta Stadium. That facility was a lot like the Astrodome but without a roof; it had luxury boxes, massive parking lots, and was easily accessible from highways. Additionally, the highways that made it straightforward for white suburbanites to get to the park made it difficult for nearby residents, the majority of whom were Black, to walk to games (Burns 2013). After the 1996 Summer Olympics, the city and the Braves converted the former Olympic stadium into Turner Field, a facility inspired by Camden Yards that the team called home starting in 1997. Even though the Braves were very successful on the field in the 1990s and 2000s, they were unable to sell all tickets for some of their home playoff games—a rare occurrence in modern baseball. Like other MLB teams, most Braves fans were white, and something was stopping them from coming to games. In 2013 team executives aimed to eliminate the issue by announcing they would move into a new ballpark, Truist Park, in Cobb County, a much whiter suburb of Atlanta, to start the 2017 season.
[3.17] The organization explained the move by claiming that Cobb County was "near the geographic center of our fan base" (Tucker 2013). As geographer Andy Walter (2015) has shown, however, the map the team used to make this argument was deeply flawed. It took class divisions that made it more difficult for the fans who lived closest to Turner Field to afford tickets and racial divisions fostered by redlining and white flight and translated them into statements about fandom. Relying on structural factors, the map further marginalized Black fans.
[3.18] As promotional attractions for a game during the team's last season at Turner Field demonstrated, similar disregard of Black people seemed popular with a majority of the team's fans. In May 2016, the Braves hosted "Law Enforcement Night" and donated a percentage of ticket sales to the Georgia Chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund; fans who bought special tickets got a hat featuring the team logo framed by a police shield ("Law Enforcement Night" 2016). Before the game, the team played videos rife with racially coded language, falsehoods about the state of urban crime, and assertions that the mainstream media denigrated police officers. The crowd did not boo. Instead, when the videos ended, police officers and their families—overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, white—paraded around the park's warning track to a standing ovation. Then the team played another video, this time featuring police officers from Cobb County discussing the devices they used to "ensure citizen safety." Taken together, the pregame festivities were little more than coded language disguising racism and a fear of being near Black people.
[3.19] Moreover, the same combination of redlining and white flight that afflicted the people who lived near Turner Field makes it extremely difficult for Black people to attend games at the Braves' new home. Truist Park is at the intersection of two interstate highways and bound on a third side by the Cobb Parkway, a large, high-speed road. While it is not entirely inaccessible via mass transit, Truist Park is much harder to reach without a car than Turner Field was (T. Brown 2017). This inaccessibility is intentional. In 1971 and 2012, Cobb residents voted not to extend Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) lines to their county because of concerns about crime (deMause 2021; E. Brown 2013). In 2013, the chair of the county's Republican party argued that all transportation funding for the new park should go toward "moving cars in and around Cobb [...] and not moving people into Cobb by rail" (deMause 2021).
[3.20] Braves fans in Cobb were blunt about their views on MARTA and the people who lived near Turner Field. One wrote, "I moved out of Atlanta to escape the bad element there. I also stopped attending Braves games because of the gauntlet of 'street people' begging, harassing, following and name-calling me while getting to and from my car. While I believe rapid transit helps bring growth and expansion, it also brings crime, 'affordable' housing, and marginal businesses" (Hobbs 2019). In conjunction with broader social trends, MLB's decades of "color-blind" methods of marginalizing Black fans had been so effective that without mentioning race, instead relying on language about economics and housing, this fan made it clear he had no interest in attending a game with or even near Black people. The words had changed but the results were the same. MLB was far, far more concerned with attracting white fans than Black ones.
4. Conclusion
[4.1] The marginalization of Black fans at baseball games has a concrete impact not least because MLB has long asserted it represented all of America but never truly has. In the 1990s, the Braves had been popular in the city's Black community, but after attending a game at Truist Park, one Black fan described it as having "a Trump feel" (Blake 2021). Today, the St. Louis Cardinals play in a ballpark designed to replicate the essence of long-segregated Sportsman's Park. When protestors gathered outside of it following Michael Brown's 2014 murder in nearby Ferguson, white fans chanted the name of Brown's killer and yelled "we're the ones who fucking gave all y'all the freedoms that you have" (Ley 2014). One protestor explained that they were outside the ballpark "because this is where white America gathers" (Strauss 2014). Decades of marginalization meant it was not a place where much, if any, of Black America gathered.
[4.2] That said, MLB has made and continues to make efforts to attract Black people to the game. For example, my hometown Philadelphia Phillies, like organizations across MLB, sponsor programs geared at Black youths and have hosted events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, and Juneteenth. The Phillies have also hired Black American former players in a number of off-field positions. In 2024, MLB hosted a game at Rickwood Field, former home of the Birmingham Black Barons, a Negro League team, but that one game pales in comparison to MLB's decades of hosting games abroad. MLB's efforts, contemporary Black fan communities both online and at games, the perspectives of current Black baseball writers such as Shakeia Taylor, and connections between baseball and Black culture found in the new Souls of the Game exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame, MLB's partnership with Hip Hop 50, and the activism of Black players like Mookie Betts are fertile areas for further study, especially in connection with the historical patterns outlined in this article and in contrast to other major American sports. As former all-star Curtis Granderson implied when he would "count the number of African-American fans" in the stands and only find ten or fifteen, there is no one solution to undoing more than a century of marginalization of Black fans at MLB games. Instead it will take multiple initiatives across many years to achieve meaningful change (Livingstone 2011).