The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., has analyzed the film but not determined whether it is the oldest of its kind, said Craig Muder, a spokesman.

“Unfortunately our archivists do not have a point where they can say, ‘This is the first or this is among the first,’ ” Mr. Muder said. But historians there are continuing to analyze the film.

Blacks played baseball as early as the mid-19th century, historians say. They joined college teams with white players by the 1880s in the Midwest.

But no film had been found from before the creation of the Negro Leagues in 1920. The earliest came from a 1921 movie, “As the World Rolls On,” which has footage of an all-black Kansas team in the background.

The Georgia footage was donated to the university last year with 140 other reels by the Pebble Hill Plantation, a 3,000-acre farm in Thomasville. For decades, they sat in boxes in a dusty room of the plantation’s main house.