The Mission of a Black Baseball Team

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in April, and Bill Evans Field is dotted with players taking batting practice, fielding grounders, shagging flies. The Clark Atlanta Panthers practice on a lot at the corner of Princeton Drive and College Street in College Park, Georgia, behind the library, across from the police station, a twenty-five-minute drive from their campus just west of downtown Atlanta. Clark College, founded in 1869, was the first four-year liberal-arts institution in the country dedicated to serving African-American students; Atlanta University, founded four years earlier, was the oldest predominantly black graduate school. They merged in 1988. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the Panthers are almost exclusively black. But, these days, even among the baseball teams of historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, this makes the Panthers a rather remarkable exception.