Beschreibung:

Real photo postcard featuring an African American baseball team. Ink inscription on recto: "C.A. & N. Univ. team / Langston, Okla." Ten men wear baseball uniforms while three wear suits. Verso bears autograph note to Miss. J. Edna Hunter in Cleveland, Ohio from a student. The Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma was established in 1897, named in honor of civil rights pioneer John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), the first African American member of Congress from Virginia, the founder of Howard University Law School, and the American consul-general to Haiti. The school offered baccalaureate degrees as well as junior college programs; some of the areas of focus were teaching, vocational agriculture, home economics, and trades such as woodworking and shoemaking. Baseball had long been popular in the Black community with the first African American amateur teams established in the 1860s and all-Black professional teams by the 1880s with some professional Negro leagues and many traveling as barnstorming teams. With more historically Black colleges and universities being established, in part due to the Second Morrill Act, collegiate baseball teams proliferated across the country, though due to color lines, it was often in-practice an intramural sport for some isolated colleges. This team likely played against other all-Black teams, collegiate or not. Condition: Very good. Postally used.