The Set-Up Men

Race, Culture and Resistance in Black Baseball

This book is an examination of cultural resistance to segregation in the world of black baseball through an analysis of editorial art, folktales, nicknames, “manhood” and the art of clowning. African Americans worked to dismantle Jim Crow through the creation of a cultural counter-narrative that centered on baseball and the Negro Leagues that celebrated black achievement and that highlighted the contradictions and fallacies of white supremacy in the first half of the twentieth century.