Brian Campbell

My dissertation, "Sporting Correspondents: African American Baseball Players in the Americas, 1910-1950," shows how black baseball players and sportswriters served as defacto correspondents for the black press between 1910 and 1950. During this period, hundreds of African American ballplayers traveled abroad to nations like Cuba and Mexico in search of better pay and improved working conditions. Their journeys revealed to African American journalists differences in accommodations, celebrity statuses, along with the presence of interracial baseball abroad. Through columns, op-eds, photographs, and box scores, athletes and sportswriters worked in tandem, transforming the sports pages into a dynamic site of citizenship politics and more importantly, as a crucial forum for discussing race and discrimination in an international context.