Introducing: Behind the Barrier: Voices from the Negro Leagues

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Well, I will say that we look at baseball in
American history right as America's national pastime. That tells us
something right there. That means that we attached particular characteristics
to baseball that represented what we thought America was all about. Right.
If you leave out of that discussion the entire experience,

(00:24):
then you're leaving out a huge chunk of American history.
From Legendary Sports Broadcast at Royan Barr and the Sports
Byline Archives comes a series that explores the players and
the culture of Ego League Baseball. Well, if I could
transport myself back to a particular time, I'd love to

(00:44):
go back and be able to just watch the negro Leagus.
They were so special. There were players that played with
great heart, great emotion and love for the game. You
were involved with them. Tell me what was so special
about that? Well, mean, I can only speak because I
was only there two years. They made me say, Hey,
you're gonna go to the Major that that's just what

(01:06):
they say every day, You're gonna go to the Major.
Were not we may not go because when I was fifteen,
those guys were twenty five and they didn't have a
lot of chances to go they was only gonna stay there,
but they said to me when I first got there,
we're gonna make sure you go to the mayor. That
means you're not gonna do anything wrong, You're gonna do
everything right. All you do is go out and play.

(01:30):
The archive of interviews includes Hank Aaron, Willie Means, and
over fifty other Negro League players telling their stories in
their own voices. Baseball. You know everybody who was the
year to play baseball because Gagarogy was the first people
like to play in our day in time and he

(01:52):
uh here years either will be all the players that
were the gay interested in baseball. I always felt like
that will Hope. I always felt like, if you just
keep doing your job, that somewhere you was going to
touch somebody's mind and somebody's soul, and somebody was gonna
be wise enough to realize the only thing that you

(02:15):
wanted to do was to have a chance to play baseball.
It is important that they understand that these leagues were
segregated at one point in time and was by no
necessary desire of those black players that they weren't including
in the major leagues, and so they did indeed create
their league and this league became a great league, and

(02:35):
I don't want that to be lost. The courageous owners
who financed these teams, that the players who played against
the backdrop of American segregation. This is quite significant. Behind
the barrier. Voices from the Negro leagues is available on Apple, Spotify,
iHeart Radio, or wherever you get your podcasts from the

(03:01):
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