Pittsburgh and the Negro Leagues

Editor’s Note: A version of this article appeared in Pittsburgh Magazine, February 1993.

 

With Cool Papa Bell flying around the base paths, Josh Gibson drawing accolades as the black Babe Ruth, and Satchel Paige walking the bases loaded, telling his fielders to sit down, and striking out the side, Pittsburgh was once the center of a black baseball world that stretched from Chicago to the Caribbean.

During the 1930s and ’40s, when base ball was still divided by race, the black game was based in Pittsburgh. Headquarters to the Negro National League and home to the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, Pittsburgh fielded an array of stars.

The Grays and the Crawfords dominated black baseball, winning 13 Negro League pennants between them in 16 seasons and sending seven players to the Hall of Fame. Club owners Cumberland Posey Jr. and Gus Greenlee helped build baseball into the third biggest black business in the nation (after the black insurance companies and the numbers game a forerunner of the lottery).

They did so in spite of, and in part because of segregation. And when segregation in baseball ended, so did these autonomous black leagues. Black baseball’s story is more than a tale of athletic grace amid a tortured racial setting. It highlights what black America created on its own during this epoch and how much was lost when integration brought about black baseball’s demise.

Driven out of integrated baseball by rising racial intolerance in the 1890s, African Americans turned inward and created a league of their own that stretched across a swath of northern cities. Because of geography and the nation’s fifth largest black population in 1930, Pittsburgh became the crossroads for black teams. Passing through the city meant playing the Homestead Grays, a club begun in 1900 by black workers in the Monongahela mill town.

By the end of World War I, the Grays had become the best sandlot team in the region. The catalyst to their ascent was Homestead native Cumberland Posey, an exceptional athlete who made the transition from player to promoter. Posey joined the Grays as an outfielder in 1911 and became the club’s manager and owner by the 1920s. To a core of stellar locals, he added some of the best ballplayers in the country, including Oscar Charleston and Smokey Joe Williams.

By 1930, Cumberland Posey had transformed the Grays from a squad of steelworkers into the champions of black baseball. But on the sandlots of the Hill district of Pittsburgh, a challenger emerged the Pittsburgh Crawfords.

Formed in 1925 by a dozen boys who lived on the Hill, the Crawfords took their name from the Crawford Bath House, which sponsored them in a city tournament. By the end of the decade, bolstered by the addition of several players From the Edgar Thomson Steelworks team, the Crawfords were ready to challenge the Grays.

Anchoring the club was catcher Josh Gibson, a strapping youth who had come north from Georgia when his father found work in one of Andrew Carnegie’s mills. Gibson lasted but a few seasons with the Crawfords before Cum Posey offered him a spot in the Grays’ lineup. There, at only 18 years of age, Gibson hit what might have been the first ball to clear the center field wall of Forbes Field.

As the Crawfords prepared to take on the Grays, a new force entered the city’s sport ing life. Numbers baron Gus Greenlee owned the Crawford Grill. He and Woogie Harris, a friend and associate who owned the Crystal Barbershop across the street from the grill, had made the numbers into the biggest business in black Pittsburgh. They gave part of their profits back to the community in the form of subsidies for sport and never-to-be-repaid loans to those in need.

When the Crawfords asked Greenlee to take over the club in 1930, Gus put the players on salary and set out to make them into the best black team ever. Greenlee lured Josh Gibson back from the Grays, and also took first baseman Oscar Charleston and third base man Judy Johnson from Posey’s club. James Cool Papa Bell, a slender young man from Mississippi who was considered by many the fastest baserunner ever, was signed to patrol center field. Greenlee also brought a lanky right-handed pitcher named Leroy Robert Satchel Paige to town. All five players ended up in the Hall of Fame.

Greenlee built the finest black-owned ballpark in the country on Bedford Avenue in the Hill and called it Greenlee Field. He resurrected the Negro National League, which had collapsed in 1931, and put its offices above the Crawford Grill.

Hall of Famer and former Negro Leaguer Monte Irvin calls the Crawfords black baseball’s answer to the 1927 New York Yankees, thought to be the best major league team ever. Champions of the Negro National League in 1933, 1935, and 1936, the Crawfords were on the verge of being a baseball dynasty when the volatile politics of a Caribbean isle intruded.

While the Crawfords were in New Orleans for spring training in 1937, an emissary of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo appeared. He offered Satchel Paige more money than even Greenlee was willing to pay if the pitcher would jump the Crawfords to play for Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican.

Paige took the pesos and boarded Pan American’s biplane to the islands. Gibson, Bell, and a half dozen other Crawfords soon joined him. Ciudad Trujillo vanquished its tropical opponents that summer, but what was left of the Crawfords fell into the second division. Greenlee relinquished the franchise a year later. Greenlee Field was torn down, replaced by the Bedford Dwellings housing project.

Although Paige never played for a Pittsburgh club again, Josh Gibson wound up back on the Grays. There, he teamed with Hall of Fame first baseman Buck Leonard as the Grays won the Negro National League pennant every year from 1937 until 1945.

During the late 1930s and World War II, the Grays played three games a week at Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C., where they often outdrew the white American League team. Black baseball finally achieved financial success, but the good times did not last long.

In the wake of the war, the struggle for integration converged with the major leagues’ search for new fans and talent. In October 1945, Brooklyn Dodger President Branch Rickey signed Negro League shortstop Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Dodgers’ Montreal farm club. After a season in the minors, Robinson entered the majors in April, 1947. The color line was history.

Baseball’s great experiment was a resounding success, both on the field and in its impact elsewhere in society. But there was a price the end of he Negro Leagues.

“After Jackie,” sighs Buck Leonard, “we couldn’t draw flies.” Deserted by their fans and the black press, and losing its best players to the major leagues, usually without compensation, the Negro National League folded in 1948. The Negro American League fell apart a few years later.

Mal Goode, the nation’s first black television correspondent, concedes, “Integration had its disadvantages,” including the end of black ownership. But Jackie Robinson opened doors of opportunity outside baseball. Likening the game’s desegregation to that of schools, Goode concludes that though there were costs to pay, “What we gained was the greater we got our self-respect back and you have to have been black to understand what that meant.”

For award-winning authors John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson, the end of the Negro Leagues was a harbinger of larger, and not always optimum, changes. “What was contained in those institutions,” Wideman says of black baseball and colleges, “was not sim ply a black version of what white people were doing… and rather than having those institutions change the total picture, change what we all do, we lost them… That’s not what integration is supposed to be about.”

In 1948, the Homestead Grays won the last Negro World Series ever played, beating the Birmingham Black Barons. The league collapsed after the season and the Grays and their brethren soon became baseball’s forgot ten men. Black owners, general managers, and managers disappeared from the game. Black players, though, moved to baseball’s center stage in the 1950s and `60s.

It is fitting that the Pittsburgh Pirates became the first major league club to honor the Negro Leagues. On a late summer night in 1988, the banner of the Homestead Grays flew over Three Rivers Stadium as the Pirates celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Grays’ championship in the last Negro League World Series.

A. Bartlett Giamatti spoke to Doron Levin of the New York Times about the event. “We must never lose sight of our history,” the late commissioner said, “insofar as it is ugly, never to repeat it, and insofar as it is glorious, to cherish it.”

Pittsburgh has much to remember, and even more to cherish.