Baseball was embraced as  America’s first national “pastime” in sports, but as with other public gatherings, Negroes were excluded from participating in front of white audiences. 
Nonetheless, it created a separate venue which they built their own institutions for leisure time. And it created some of the legendary icons of the game. They played in cornfields and sandlots and built rivalries that soon brought about the  establishment of organized leagues. There were the folks who became owners and architects who  organized teams and built stadiums and traveling teams which have been chronicled in the movies. And when the color barrier became threatened by integration, it opened up a new era for black college players that slowly saw the best the Negro League baseball had to offer and paved the way for others who went on to achieve the highest honors in the sports. The “Other Boys of Summer,” a new documentary by historian and filmmaker Lauren Meyers continues to extol the virtues of a movement that coincided and contributed to the Civil Rights movement in sports.