ATHENS, Ga. – Michael E. Lomax, an associate professor of physical education and sports studies at the University of Georgia’s College of Education, has received a national award for his book on the earliest development of black baseball.
Lomax received the Robert Peterson Recognition Award from The Negro Leagues Committee for his book Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860-1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary. Lomax’s book continues a relatively new tradition of serious research on the history of black baseball before 1947, which critics say began with Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White (1970).
Before Peterson’s book, historians of the national pastime had largely ignored black baseball, just as organized baseball had kept blacks from playing. Peterson’s book created a new field and ushered black stars belatedly into the history of baseball. Now there are reference works, records have been incorporated into standard baseball encyclopedias, and a special committee has chosen a good number of players from the Negro leagues for the Hall of Fame, many posthumously.
Lomax’s book, published in spring 2003, won high praise in a New York Times review, which called it “as definitive a work as can be written on the subject.”
In his book, Lomax writes a history of the game from the perspective of its development as a business during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, with much minute information on the financial side of early black baseball. He convincingly places the fledgling industry in the context of the emergence of a black middle class after the Civil War and black migration to the North. He shows how, given the relative poverty of blacks in Northern cities, the black game had to appeal at first to white audiences and often be run by white entrepreneurs. A constant theme is how black advancement was achieved through negotiated gains in which not a few concessions had to be made. But the central, most profound story is blacks’ struggle to realize the most American of ideals – freedom and self-determination – in a hostile environment.
Lomax describes how racism eventually led to the exclusion of blacks from organized baseball, how the few who played on white teams were gradually denied access, owing sometimes to the white players’ prejudices, sometimes to those of the leaders and promoters of the game. Some of the key figures in the development of major league baseball, like Albert Spalding and Adrian C. (Cap) Anson, played a significant role in the movement toward apartheid.
Lomax, who joined the UGA faculty in 1996, received his PhD from Ohio State University. His research focuses on the African-American sporting experience and black entrepreneurship in sport. He teaches sport history and sport business practices.
