Big Problems and Simple Answers: An Explanation of the Negro Leagues

I think that no players in the majors today could conceive of going through what Negro Leaguers did for a chance at a baseball career. At the same time, however, most of the veterans of baseball’s black leagues will say that, if given the chance, they would do it all over again.

A statement like that says a lot about the players in the Negro Leagues. It certainly carries more weight than it would coming from a former white big leaguer. The differences between the white and black leagues were great, but not in the way that most people think. The most common mistake that people make in their perception of the two leagues is the level of talent in each. Too many people tend to go to the extreme in their view of the Negro Leagues. They either think that the level of play was grossly inferior to the majors, or far superior.

Both of these assumptions are incorrect. Truth be told, the level of talent in both the leagues were comparable. Any established star in the Negro Leagues would have been able to play on any major league team and continue to perform at his usual level. Chances are, the Negro League player, for a time, would do better in the white majors than he did in the Negro Leagues, just as his white counterpart’s performance would most likely fall off for a time in the Negro Leagues. The reason for the changes, however, has nothing to do with talent, but rather that the business of the game differed so greatly in the two leagues.

In the white majors, teams had a safe haven in their home fields. At the beginning of each year they knew that they would be at that stadium for 77 games, and play 11 games in each of seven stadiums during the season. They would, at the very most, play two games in the same day only once every few weeks. White major leaguers traveled in comfort and were secure in the knowledge that once they reached a city, they would play there for two or three days before hitting the road again. The traveling done by major leagues was planned so that it would be easy on the players. And that’s exactly what it was. Some former major league players may deny that and claim that the traveling was tough on them, but in comparison to the schedules of the major Negro League teams, traveling in the white majors was a cakewalk.

There was no preset number of games that a Negro League team would play each year. On the other hand, in major league baseball, the number of games played in an official season was set in stone: 154. In comparison, official league games in the Negro Leagues never totaled more than 99. That was the high-water mark reached by the Detroit Stars of the Negro National League in 1927; several other teams played nearly as many league games during the 1920s seasons.

By the 1930s, however, the number of league games had dropped. In the Negro National League, the Pittsburgh Crawfords of 1935, considered by some to be one of the greatest teams ever, played only 72 games in a split-season schedule. The drop in the number of league games for Negro National League (NNL) teams continued at such a pace that by 1945, the NNL pennant-winning Homestead Grays played just 45 league games, while the pennant-winning Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League played 69 league games.

These numbers refer only to league games, not the total number of games played. It was rare if a major Negro League team played less than two hundred games in a single season. The reason that such a small percentage were leagues games is simple. In order for black baseball to be able to operate at anything close to a break-even level, the teams had to make all of America their home field. At any time during the era of the black baseball leagues, the population of those of African American descent was approximately 9% of the United States. In 1940, to pick a random year, the population of the United States was 131 million people, making the total black population in the area of 12 million people spread across the country. Fans of the Negro Leagues were overwhelmingly black, and black baseball had a much smaller consumer base from which to draw.

In the Northeast, Newark was one of the cities with largest percentages of blacks. In 1940, the overall population was around 430,000 people, with blacks making up nearly 11% of the city. It was the home of the Negro National League Newark Eagles. If the Eagles could pull every black living in Newark to a game, as well as entice 1% of the white population of the city to also attend, it would result in a crowd of less than 50,000 people. Needless to say, no Negro league team was ever able to attract every person of African American descent in their city to a game. On Opening Day in 1942, at Ruppert Stadium in Newark, the Eagles did draw a crowd of around 13,000 fans, or just under 29% of the city’s black population. And that was in the 1940s, the heyday of black baseball.

During the years of World War II, the Negro Leagues rivaled the major leagues as a business. In 1942 and 1943 attendance declined at major league games, while it steadily increased at Negro League contests. The reasons behind this are simple.

The United States’ need for men for the armed forces and to produce war materiel resulted in the country facing a shortage of manpower. In order to fill this gap, the job market was suddenly opened to individuals previously excluded. One of these groups that benefited was African Americans.

As a result, the second great migration of African Americans took place, with hundreds of thousands of blacks leaving the South. Of this number, roughly half of them moved to the Midwest and East Coast, areas which were the traditional homes of the major Negro League franchises.

By 1944, nearly 8% of the jobs in war industries were held by African Americans. These workers’ salaries would rank them among the highest-paid African Americans in the United States, making, on average, the same as a white female worker, another group used to fill wartime industry positions.

Before the war, the average African American worker had an annual income of about $457 a year, while the average white worker made $1,064 per annum. By 1944, the average African American defense worker was making $1,976 annually. Workers in urban areas had more money but faced the same situation that all Americans faced; due to wartime restrictions, there was less on which to spend their money. While African Americans had wages that had quadrupled during the war years, production of consumer goods had dropped drastically.

For example, there were no civilian cars produced, bicycles were rationed, no civilian production of toasters, percolators, or other such household appliances. Rationing of leather resulted in women’s shoes available in six colors only, full skirts and knife pleats were banned, lace was limited, and there was a general shortage of men’s clothes. In addition cigarettes, coffee, tea, butter, eggs, meat, and other foodstuffs, as well as gasoline, was rationed and restrictions were placed on travel by everyone, including major league teams.

More money in the pockets of its fan base was not the only advantage the Negro Leagues had during the war years. While stars like Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, and countless other major league drawing cards were off serving Uncle Sam, the major Negro Leagues stars of the day, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Jud Wilson, and a plethora of others were still to be found plying their trade at the local ball yards.

This was not because African American ballplayers did not help in the war effort. Scores of Negro League players’ careers, including future Hall of Famers Monte Irvin and Leon Day, were interrupted by the war, There were other reasons that the Negro Leagues’ biggest drawing cards were not called up for military service. While still a dazzling pitcher, Paige was too old to serve. Gibson, who was still knocking mammoth home runs, was declared medically unfit for military service due to bad knees. Various other reasons kept other top Negro League players from trading in their baseball flannels for Army khakis.

The old adage that all good things must come to an end proved true in the case of Negro League baseball. With the end of the war, Negro League baseball once again fell on hard times. Not, as some people believe, solely as a result of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ signing of Jackie Robinson. The signing of Robinson of course played a big role in the ultimate demise of the Negro Leagues, but so did something else which ended when the fighting in Europe and the Pacific did: wartime jobs.

A prime example of this was the shipbuilding industry, which flourished on the East Coast during the war and employed 200,000 African Americans during the war. But in 1946 it employed only 10,000 African Americans. Even the boom in the construction field that followed the end of the war did not increase the job market of blacks all that much. While there were countless new jobs available there were also countless new people in need of jobs returning to the country. In addition, individuals who had made their living in the lumber and oil towns that underwent a financial boom during the war now needed jobs, since that boom had ended. African Americans, for the most part, were returning to the financial straits they were in before the war.

The Negro Leagues could not continue as they had during the war years. In addition to less money in the pockets of its fan base, much of that would be spent on tickets to major league games to see Jackie Robinson play. Just a year or two away from selling out Yankee Stadium or Ebbets Field for Negro Leagues games, it was back to the prewar style of operation.

In 1939, according to James Overmyer in Queen of the Negro Leagues: Efta Manley and the Newark Eagles, the Eagles averaged 3,480 paid attendance on Sundays and 2,176 paid attendance on other dates at their home field of Ruppert Stadium, where they played 22 games on 15 different dates.

The Eagles did not get to keep all of the money that was made at these games. The stadium owners, the booking agent, and the visiting team each got a percentage of the gate, the amount made by ticket sales. Therefore, by taking into account the smaller crowds plus the division of the profits among three or four different entities, one can see that Negro League baseball home games were far from a cash cow. As a result Negro league teams owners had to find ways to make money and at the same time keep it in the coffers of black American and out of the pockets of the white stadium owners and white booking agents. A few owners took the next logical step.

Encased in the pages of Negro League history, hidden among the names of over 400 different ballparks that Negro League games were played in, there are only a handful that shared a common trait. These six parks were not grand or majestic. But these parks were special. They were the only home fields of major league-level teams that were owned by African Americans. Hilldale Park in Philadelphia, Martin Park in Memphis, Wilson Park in Nashville, Greenlee Field in Pittsburgh, Tate Park in Cleveland, and Dyckman Oval in New York City are names that mean little to most people today. But at one time they were traces of equality in a landscape of bigotry.

By playing in a black-owned ballpark, the team owners automatically cut down on the number of hands reaching for a piece of the gate. Also, public opinion could be swayed to the favor of the owner by allowing the park to be used by civic organizations when his team was out of town. The Martin Brothers, owners of Martin Park in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Memphis Red Sox, did just this. Thrice every year the park was turned over to local musicians for the Starlite Review, a concert used to raise money to send black handicapped children to school.

Such endeavors apparently helped the Red Sox and their standing in the city. Despite the fact that the only title the team ever won was the first-half Negro American League title in 1938, the team always had a solid fan base. It was one of the most stable franchises in the Negro Leagues, lasting from 1923 to 1960. But even with such solid fan backing and a rent-free park, the Red Sox proved an already well-known point, that league games alone did not generate the profits necessary to maintain a team in the Negro Leagues. Besides league games, Negro League teams had to find another way to supplement their income. This was done by barnstorming.

Barnstorming was the practice of traveling across the country, playing all comers, for either a guarantee or a percentage of the gate. A guarantee was an agreed-upon figure that would be paid by the sponsor of the game to a team. It has been stated by several former players that the best way to sure make a Negro League team got the highest amount available was to take the opposite of what was offered. The teams reasoned that if a sponsor offered a guarantee, then that person was sure that a large crowd would come to the game and so he would make back the guarantee plus a hefty profit. In such cases teams would reportedly demand a percentage of the gate.

At the same time, if a sponsor offered a percentage of the gate, the team owners would figure the sponsor was unsure how many fans would show up, and so they would demand a guarantee. If the game was to be played between two Negro Leagues teams rather than a local team, the gate was usually split into a winner’s and loser’s share, with as much as 60% going to the winner.

Negro League teams met outside their home parks for league games on a somewhat regular basis. The Yankees in the 1940s were making a reported $100,000 a year off Negro League games from renting out the team’s minor league stadiums and Yankee Stadium. Other teams, like the Washington Senators, depended on the rental fees to make ends meet. League games were also played in such out-of-the-way places as Springfield, Ohio’s Municipal Stadium or Oklahoma City, Oklahoma’s Holland Park. But the majority of the games played on tours were against local, semi-pro, or minor league teams.

Practically all of the traveling done by Negro League teams was by car or bus, not by train. The reasons were financial. Games that were played on these tours were no more lucrative than league games, and in a lot of cases less so. Therefore, the only hope of showing a profit was to play as many games as you could in as many towns as possible. An example of this is a 1939 tour made by the Newark Eagles in which the team, in 16 days, traveled to 17 cities and played 17 games. The tour, however, did not take place during any of the big summer holidays. If it had, the team might have played up to four games in three or four different cities in a single day. This was not an uncommon occurrence on the Fourth of July for some teams.

These teams managed to keep such demanding schedules by spending most of their time on the bus. It was a Negro League player’s home. Once a game was over, the team might not even take time to change clothes. If the next game was going to be played later in the day the players might just walk off the field and on to the bus and go on their way. If the players were given the time to change, then the uniforms, wet with perspiration, would be hung in the back of the bus or out the bus windows to dry.

Where the players ate on the road depended on where they were and how much time they had. If they were in one of the league cities, then there were black-owned restaurants that over the years gained popularity with the ballplayers. Two were the Crawford Grill in Pittsburgh and the Sky Rocket Grill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. If the team was on the road, however, getting food could be a problem.

While the South was better known for its segregation, stores and restaurants that would not serve blacks could be found all over the country. The annals of black baseball, as told by the men that played in them, are filled with stories of places that refused them service or would serve them only through a window in the back of the store or restaurant. When it came to places that the teams knew would just flat-out refuse them service, there were two options. The first was the one that was practiced by most teams, and that was to keep driving until they found a place that would sell them, for example, some bologna and crackers, and maybe some sodas. That was dinner.

The second approach to food on the road worked if the team had a light-skinned player. The team would send him into an establishment to buy food for the entire team. This exercise proved successful, unless something happened to make the owner of the restaurant or store suspicious. If the rest of the team stayed out of sight, however, it usually worked well.

When it came to staying overnight, many of the same problems teams faced when looking for a restaurant came back to haunt them. Once again, league cities did not cause a problem. In every major city in the United States there were actually two cities, one black and one white, with each offering everything the other did, from hotels to nightclubs. If a Negro League team was spending the night in a league city, everyone was happy. That night promised a real bed and a meal in a fine restaurant. Once you left the big cities, however, that all changed.

The chances of finding a place that would put up an entire baseball at the time was difficult enough, but if the team was made up of all black players, then the chances declined even further. In some towns where the teams appeared regularly, there were black boardinghouses that would take them in, or the team might divide up among the local black families. Most of the time, though, when away from the major cities, Negro Leaguers spent their nights on the bus.

Traveling for weeks at a time, sleeping, eating, basically living in a car or on a bus, and being able to play at least one game every day and do it at a major league level seems incredible. It is remarkable that despite the hardships of traveling, the level of their play didn’t suffer to any great extent.

While it could be argued that traveling continuously and playing seven to ten games a week would take a toll on a player, there are countless examples from the black baseball leagues that prove this argument wrong. The first to come to mind is Satchel Paige, who at times would pitch every day for a month. Catcher Larry Brown would also go a long way to dispel such an argument. Brown spent 30 years behind the plate in the Negro Leagues, including 1930 when he caught 234 games but could only muster a lifetime .260 batting average. Baseball has seen many that were the equal of him as a defensive catcher but probably none were better.

There were costs to be paid with that lifestyle, sometimes the ultimate price. Three Negro League players paid that while traveling with their respective teams, two in a car accident and one as the result of mechanical problems with a bus.

Catcher Ulysses “Buster” Brown and pitcher Raymond “Smokey” Owens, both with the Cincinnati Buckeyes, were traveling in a car with three other members of the team and team owner Wilbur Hayes on September 7, 1942. They were heading home from a series of games against the New York Black Yankees when one of the car’s tires went flat. The men stopped and changed the tire outside Geneva, Ohio. At around 3:00 A.M. as Owens, who was driving, pulled back onto the road, the car was struck from behind by another car. Both Brown and Owens were killed instantly. Two pitchers, Eugene Bremmer and Herman “Lefty” Watts, had to be hospitalized because of their injuries. Hayes and pitcher Alonzo Boone received only minor injuries.

In the summer of 1944, while the Memphis Red Sox were traveling home from a tour of the eastern states, the team’s bus developed mechanical problems and left the team stranded in the northern part of the state. It was a Friday night and the team had to be in back Memphis for a doubleheader on the following Sunday. The team left the bus and boarded a train. Reports vary as to what happened next, but the end result was that an intoxicated man, angered by some occurrence—some say over a dice game—drew a gun and fired one shot. The shot struck Memphis pitcher Porter Moss, an innocent bystander, just below the heart. The doctor at the next station refused to treat Moss, and so the injured man continued on the train for another hour to Jackson, Tennessee. There he underwent an operation, but died the next day. The shooter was later caught and sentenced to ten years.

While these were the only three deaths that occurred while teams were on the road, there were a great number of accidents. In the 1930s, the Newark Eagles bus crashed due to brake failure; the Philadelphia Stars’ team bus collided with an automobile; and the pair of cars in which the Homestead Grays was traveling both wound up in the ditch. September 1944 saw five players from the Birmingham Black Barons injured after the team bus collided with a car and then flipped over.

In the 1950s, after some clothing caught fire on the Monarchs team bus, the players stood and watched while the bus burned on the side of a Florida highway. Police radio reports, according to Buck O’Neil, were “Don’t worry, it’s just some niggers broke down.”

Problems faced by traveling teams were not restricted to traffic accidents or racism on the road. Name any major league ballpark of the era and chances are, Negro League games were played there. The same can be said for most minor league parks as well. At times, however, the diamonds on which Negro League teams played while on the road left much to be desired. It was not uncommon for local fields to have rocks in the infield or the occasional tree stump in the outfield. There were even times when there was no actual ball field at all, and a large farm field or open area was marked off and used for the game. That was just part of barnstorming, as were biased local umpires, threats on what would happen if the visitors beat a local team, and black teams being run out of town for winning.

The reason was that’s the way things were in the country at that time. Segregation was the reason for nearly every major problem associated with Negro League baseball.

One question regarding the Negro Leagues would be: Why did the players put up with hard schedules, the terrible traveling conditions, the dangers, and the racism? According to the Negro Leaguers themselves, they did it for the sheer love of the game.

SAMMY J. MILLER has co-authored four books on the Negro Leagues and is currently the editor of The Negro Leagues Courier, the newsletter of SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee.