This book came to be because in 2020 a significant change took place in the way the Negro Leagues were viewed by the mainstream baseball establishment. A movement had been underway for some time at that point, with a vanguard of historians—notably Todd Peterson—making the case that the Negro Leagues were major leagues.

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convened a committee on the subject, which quickly concurred with Peterson and identified specific leagues and years that ought to be designated “major.” Before that committee could announce its findings, Major League Baseball itself came independently to the same conclusion. In December 2020, Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred, Jr. announced a new MLB policy to recognize the Negro Leagues as major leagues.

To reflect the change, Baseball-Reference.com dramatically expanded coverage of the Negro Leagues and historical Black major league players on the site. Major Negro Leagues (from 1920 through 1948) are now listed alongside the National League and American League (and other historical major leagues such as the Federal League). In doing so, Baseball Reference did not bestow a new status on Negro League players or their accomplishments. The Negro Leagues have always been major leagues. Baseball Reference updated the site’s presentation to properly recognize that fact. We would especially direct you to Gary Ashwill’s piece on the building of the Seamheads database. This work forms the basis of the project and is a leap forward in the construction of a statistical record for Black baseball.

• E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues for FREE from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, Kindle/MOBI and EPUB formats.
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But the integration and presentation of Negro Leagues stats on the site were not the only update that took place. After all, the game and its players are not just their numbers. We commissioned articles from prominent Negro League historians, family members of Black baseball players, and others to explain the context behind the rise of Black baseball, how it operated, who was involved, and its part in the history of the game. We wanted to contextualize the numbers, and to recognize that the legend and lore of many of these players exist beyond stats.

The Negro Leagues data are not complete. While the quality of play in the Negro Leagues was on a major-league level, the wages, travel, playing conditions, press coverage, and record-keeping were more varied, primarily due to systemic racism. Additionally, Negro League teams played a shorter regular season schedule, but with an extensive amount of exhibitions and barnstorming games that made for seasons that often approached 200 or more games in total. These contests were not part of their league schedule and are therefore not included in this database. This is why Josh Gibson’s Hall of Fame plaque says that he hit “almost 800 home runs” while his page on Baseball-Reference shows 165, and why presenting the numbers in context is a key part of our mission.

The fifteen articles commissioned for the site now comprise the bulk of this book, and are supplemented with some of the significant past works of Negro Leagues history from the SABR archives. In this way we are documenting not only the legacy of the Negro Leagues, but also the effort to rebuild the lost history that led to the current recognition that the Negro Leagues are major leagues.

The Baseball-Reference Essays

• Negro Leagues By The Numbers, by Bob Kendrick, President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, with Joe Posnanski: A look at what the statistics of the Negro Leagues mean.
• Negro Leagues = Major Leagues, by Todd Peterson: An analysis of the quality of play of the Negro Leagues and the White major leagues.
• A Love Story, by Adam Jones, 14-year MLB veteran: What the Negro Leagues mean to a modern Black star.
• The Black Boys of Summer: A statistical observation, by Larry Lester: A look at how the Negro League stats were compiled and the effect on the record books.
• Gibson Family Reflections on the Publication of Baseball Reference’s Negro Leagues Statistics, by Sean Gibson, great-grandson of Josh Gibson: What it means to family members of Negro League stars to see this update.
• Women in the Negro Leagues, by Leslie Heaphy: A discussion of the women who were executives and players the Negro Leagues.
• A Black Baseball Legacy, by Michael E. Lomax: The evolution of Black Baseball from the 19th through the 20th century.
• Turkey Stearnes and the Inclusive Grand Slam, by Vanessa Ivy Rose, granddaughter of Turkey Stearnes: A reflection on the legacy of Hall of Famer Turkey Stearnes.
• Building the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, by Gary Ashwill: A look at how the data that you see on the site today was collected.
• Historiography of Black Baseball & Negro Baseball Leagues, by Gary Gillette: A timeline of important Black Baseball and Negro League histories and reference works.
• Still Standing: Where to See Extant Negro League Ballparks, by Gary Gillette: A look at which Negro League ballparks are still standing.
• The Long Road to Jackie Robinson: Nineteenth Century Pioneers in Black Ball, by Ryan Swanson: From Charles Douglass (son of Frederick) to Octavius Catto, all the way to Jackie Robinson.
• Latinos in the Negro Leagues, by Adrian Burgos Jr.: The history of Latin stars in the Negro Leagues from Alex Pompez to Luis Tiant.
• The Major Negro Leagues, by Adam Darowski: A look at the seven major Negro Leagues.

The SABR Articles

• The Negro Leagues Revisited, by Jules Tygiel: This 1986 article traces the history of literature and published sources of information about the Negro Leagues, from Sol White’s seminal Official Baseball Guide to Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball was White to John Holway’s Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues, and a plethora of oral histories, interviews, and academic studies that followed in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Rube Foster and Black Baseball in Chicago, by Jerry Malloy: Scholar Malloy, the namesake of SABR’s annual Negro Leagues conference, here paints the picture of Chicago’s Rube Foster, the “founding father” of the Negro Leagues, and goes on to detail how after the collapse of the leagues during the Great Depression, the resurgent leagues showcased their talent annually at Comiskey Park in the lavish East-West All-Star Game.
• The Black Press and the Collapse of the Negro League in 1930, by David Hopkins: Tracing the effects of the Great Depression on the Negro National League through the spotty and sometimes contradictory coverage found in the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black weekly newspaper with the largest circulation.
• Black Bluejackets: Great Lakes Negro Varsity team in 1944, by Jerry Malloy: As the Navy began to admit Black sailors to their ranks, they likewise admitted them to sports programs and teams that were important public relations and morale-building tools. The Great Lakes “Negro Varsity” would field numerous Negro League stars and pave the way for the eventual integration of baseball.
• Pitching Behind the Color Line—Baseball, Advertising, and Race, by Roberta Newman: A look at representations of African Americans and baseball imagery in advertising in the 1930s and 1940s, in the Black weeklies, local newspapers, and, eventually, television.
• Umpires in the Negro Leagues, by Leslie Heaphy: The history of umpires in the Negro Leagues, from the practice of using White umpires to pioneering Black umpires like Bob Motley and Julian Osibee Jelks.
• Quebec Loop Broke Color Line in 1935, by Merritt Clifton: Eleven years before Jackie Robinson integrated the Montreal Royals en route to the Brooklyn Dodgers, a pitcher-outfielder named Alfred Wilson joined the Granby Red Sox of the Quebec Provincial League, an unaffiliated independent league.
• The Double Victory Campaign and the Campaign to Integrate Baseball, by Duke Goldman: The two victories sought by the Double V campaign were to defeat Nazism abroad and racism at home. Launched by The Courier, the largest of the Black newspapers in the US, the campaign would ultimately score two victories: the desegregation of baseball and the US military.

It is important to remember that the history of Black baseball does not start in 1920 or end in 1948 and even from 1920-1948 our presentation is incomplete. There were hundreds of teams and thousands of players that would need to be included to make up a more complete and richer history of Black baseball. From 1920 though 1948 there were many star players and teams that found it more feasible to play a barnstorming schedule (not only in the United States, but also the Caribbean, Mexico, and Venezuela) rather than participate in leagues. These independent teams were often the equal of teams we are including as major league teams on the site now. The Baseball Reference complete register of baseball history contains a significant record of Independent and non-major Negro Leagues. For example, we have a page for the 1917 Chicago American Giants. Research on both the Negro Leagues and independent teams does not end here; this is but another step in the process.

Finally, we express our respect to the thousands of men and women who were involved in the Negro Leagues, with heartfelt acknowledgement to the very few who are still alive. Likewise, we express our respect to their descendants who keep the stories of their forebears alive—their struggles and also their accomplishments, not only on the field, but also off the field. We encourage our readers to seek out and support the likes of foundations and causes supported by the families of Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and others.

Umpires “Bullet” Rogan, Robert Boone, and Hurley McNair, Ruppert Stadium, May 2, 1940. (NOIR-TECH RESEARCH)

“What about our Negro baseball umpires? They are cussed, discussed, made the subject of all sorts of fuss. They are reviled and often as not, riled as they go about their highly-sensitive calling of calling ’em right, knowing that the fans in the stands are prejudicing them from the start, and that the players are the greatest umpire “riders” in the business. … All together, the life of the Negro umpire isn’t cheese and cherries by any means.” — Dan Burley1

Information about various aspects of black baseball can be difficult to find, and there are still lots of gaps in the story that need to be filled in — none more so than the role of umpires. Few stories in the newspapers ever said much about the umpires beyond their names unless something happened involving a bad call or a brawl. Some fans are familiar with the name Emmett Ashford as the first black umpire in the major leagues, but what about all the men who came before him? Who were these individuals who toiled in the shadows and never got any recognition for the difficult job they had on and off the field? Why did the leagues employ white and black umpires? How much of a difference did it make to have umpires who were white rather than black?

When the Negro National League (NNL) was created in 1920, one of the most important issues to be figured out was the way umpires would be chosen and paid. League President Rube Foster believed that the umpire needed to be in charge and provide order to every game. The umpire could maintain the legitimacy of the new league if he knew the rules and could command respect. There were mixed feelings among the owners about whether the umpires should be white or black. In 1920 most games had only two umpires rather than the four we see today. This made the role of the umpires even harder and more important. It was not until 1923 that the NNL owners voted to hire the first all-black crew for the league. Prior to that umpires were generally provided by the home team and were often white.

One of the earliest recorded stories of a black umpire involves Jacob Francis, who was chosen to represent Syracuse as one of the official umpires in the newly formed New York State League. In the census records of 1870 and 1880, Francis is listed as “mulatto.” He umpired at Stars Park throughout 1885 as one member of a three-man crew, becoming the first black umpire for an all-white league. In addition to umpiring, Francis managed the Syracuse Pastimes, a local black team. Francis first appeared in the 1870 census in Syracuse with his wife, Sarah, having come from Virginia. Fans generally supported Francis and even booed another umpire when he subbed for Francis. One news reporter said Francis “is one of the most popular men that ever officiated as an umpire before a Syracuse audience. An instance cannot be recalled where there was any trouble or delay in a game in which Mr. Francis officiated. He possesses an excellent judgment, is quick on his feet and gives his decisions promptly.”2

A 1909 Seattle article talked about Pete Johnson, a black umpire in the Jacksonville area during the late 19th century. Johnson appeared to be a fan favorite and well respected for his calls. Reporting on one game, a writer commented that “all the hotel guests were desirous of seeing Pete Johnson umpire as they were to witness the game itself.” He had a unique way of calling the game, deciding a runner who was out on the bases was “cancelled.” When a runner refused to leave the field after Johnson called him out Johnson simply said the player would be a “ghost runner.”3

Francis and Johnson were rarities: Most games involving black teams always had white umpires before 1923. That was partly due to the lack of trained black umpires, but more importantly most teams were owned by white men. They had control of the resources and therefore black men did not get the chance to umpire.4 Given the nature of race relations in the 1900s and 1910s, the idea that decisions by whites would be more accepted than those by blacks was not a stretch, and provided an additional rationale for the owners to justify using white umpires.

As early as 1910 the question of umpires for a proposed all-black league was being discussed. When Chicagoan Beauregard Moseley wrote about his proposed league, he noted many decisions that had to be made, but one he seemed to be adamant about was paid umpires. He said the umpires should receive $5 a game and be paid by the home team. Moseley did not comment on whether the umpires would be “race umps” or white arbiters but his proposal matched the pattern most often used by later leagues, with umpires provided by the home team. That added an extra burden to the men in black, who had to work harder to prove their impartiality.5

Foster did use black umpires for exhibition and benefit games. In 1910 he hired boxer Jack Johnson and vaudeville performer S.H. Dudley to work a benefit for Provident Hospital, a black-owned institution. The use of such stars gave the black community figures to look up to as role models. Foster himself umpired a benefit game in 1913, but for regular Chicago American Giants contests he used white umpires like Goeckel.6 With the creation of the NNL in 1920, Foster recognized the importance of umpires, writing in a 1921 column, “Future of Race Umps Depends on Men of Today.” He used this column to explain why the new league would be using white umpires rather than black. Foster’s basic explanation was simply that black men lacked knowledge of the rules. Opportunities were just not present, but the NNL was not a charity; it was business.7

Since there were no professional schools for black umpires, many of the best African American umps were former players who relied on their knowledge of the game from personal experience. For example, Newark Eagles first baseman-outfielder Mule Suttles umpired after he retired in the late 1940s. Pitcher Billy Donaldson turned to umpiring in the 1920s and 1930s, while second baseman Mo Harris umpired from the 1930s through the 1940s after his career with the Homestead Grays ended. Local Cleveland sports star Harry Walker umpired for the Cleveland Bears in 1939 to try to help support black baseball in his community. Cincinnati native Percy Reed played second base for a local athletic club and the Lincoln Giants. He started umpiring in 1929 and from 1935 to 1947 he called every Sunday game played by black teams in Cincinnati. Reed worked as part of a local two-umpire team with Harry Ward, known locally and in the papers as Wu-fang. Reed learned his trade from Bill Carpenter, who was an umpire in the International League.8 Hurley McNair, a pitcher and outfielder for a number of Negro League clubs, umpired after he retired as a player in 1937. He traveled for league games until his death in December 1948.9

The Baltimore Black Sox employed black umpires as early as 1917 when Charles Cromwell was hired by owner Charles Spedden. Cromwell umpired in the Negro Leagues through the 1947 season. In 1923 Rube Foster tried to hire Cromwell as part of a new team of African American umpires for the NNL. Foster wanted the best umpires and felt that white umpires had provided that in the first years of the league. With the creation of the Eastern Colored League (ECL) in 1923, Foster felt the time was right to find the best black umpires he could. His first hire was Billy Donaldson from the Pacific Coast League, and then he went after Cromwell. Cromwell turned Foster down to stay with the Black Sox after Spedden hired Henry “Spike” Spencer from Washington, D.C., to join him as the team’s umpires.

Spedden proved he wanted the Black Sox to succeed by spending money on the team, and so Cromwell opted to stay and umpire at the Maryland Baseball Park. By 1924 Spedden vowed to use all black umpires for Black Sox games, a move some said “is bound to meet with favor.”10 Cromwell’s choice did not turn out to be the best when the ECL decided in 1925 that teams should not hire their own umpires as had been the practice. This put Cromwell and Spencer out of work. Cromwell came back in 1926 when the ECL gave back the hiring of umpires to the teams. In 1927, when George Rossiter took over operations for the Black Sox, he fired Cromwell and Spencer. Rossiter felt that black umpires were not yet competent and that he would use white umpires until they were. Cromwell found work in a minor black league in the South before returning to umpire for the Baltimore Elite Giants through 1947. Cromwell’s career was like that of so many of the other black umpires, who always had to fight to prove they were as worthy as white umpires.11

Bob Motley umpired in the Negro American League from 1947 through 1958. (COURTESY OF BYRON MOTLEY)

When the Negro National League was being formed, Rube Foster talked with the press about a variety of subjects vital to the league’s success. One of those topics was umpires, who Foster stated needed to be totally in charge. Their decisions would be final and then needed to be supported by the league. Foster wanted “utmost good order on the ball field.” He saw the league as an investment, a business venture, and so the right arbiters would be essential to the success of the league. Foster commented, “I think an ump should be pacific but firm, positive but polite, quick but unshoddy, strict but reasonable.”12 On the question of the use of white versus black umpires, Foster wanted to use African American men but believed that there were not enough available and that anyway many people would accept the decisions of white umpires more readily. Reporter Charles Marshall thought colored umpires should be given a chance but agreed with Foster about white umpires. He wrote, “Of course we know that some players as well as some managers and fans alike feel that the white umpire’s decision carries more weight and generally comes closer to the right decision than the colored official. In most cases just because he is white.”13

With the creation of the Eastern Colored League (ECL) in 1923, the leagues continued serious discussions, deciding to hire all black umpires for the NNL. Reporter Frank Young began a campaign to hire black umpires in 1922. He called for training of black men and at the same time criticized the mistakes of white umpires. He tried to counter Foster’s concern that black umpires would be swayed by the cheering of black fans rather than engage in good decision-making. Young used his column to highlight the work of men like Jamison in Baltimore and Donaldson in California to show that there were African American men capable of umpiring for the league.14 Kansas City was the first of the cities to use two black umpires, Billy Donaldson and Bert Gholston.

Foster hired six black umpires for the league, with two-man crews responsible for different cities. Leon Augustine and Lucian Snaer worked around the Milwaukee area while Caesar Jamison and William Embry worked the Indianapolis region. When Foster failed to hire Charley Cromwell, he had to look harder for qualified men. Tom Johnson was the last of the original hires, being used as a rotating umpire.15

Finding arbiters with the necessary qualifications and abilities to control the game and the situations that could arise proved difficult from the beginning to the demise of the Negro Leagues. While owners like Foster and Kansas City’s J.L. Wilkinson favored all-race crews, they also knew having qualified umpires was even more important. Foster would not even use black umpires for Chicago American Giants games, preferring to pay white umpires while black umpires sat idle.16 By the end of the 1925 season, Foster released the black umpires who had been hired by the league and went back to the practice of the home team providing the umpires.17 At the end of the season the other owners hired back four of the six men who had been let go. These men continued to work for the league through the 1927 season without significant incident.

After Foster left the NNL in 1926, black umpires still had a difficult time being hired. However, when the short-lived American Negro League was created in 1929, it hired black umpires led by former players Bill Gatewood, Judy Gans, and former umpire Frank Forbes. Because of the Great Depression, pressure on the owners increased to give black men a chance. Unfortunately, the ANL collapsed after the 1929 season, ending one of the best opportunities for black umpires to be hired. Chicago Defender reporter Al Monroe stated in more than one column that black umpires needed to take better control of the game, they need to be less tentative and show control if they wanted respect. Without control they would never find regular employment.18

Umpires always had a tough time with players and fans who did not want to listen, but Negro League umpires often had a tougher time without much league support. Bert Gholston believed that the umpires always worked with the fear that they would be attacked and the league would not support them. He stated, “Several of the teams of the Negro National League are still under the impression that they shouldn’t take orders from the colored umpires. Several of them were threatening to jump on the umpires.”19

In 1934 NNL Commissioner Rollo Wilson tried to improve the situation by imposing fines and suspensions. One particular target was Jud Wilson, who had a temper and a reputation for attacking umpires. Wilson’s $10 fine was not much of a deterrent. By 1936 things had gotten so bad that $25 became the fine with a 10-day suspension for assaulting an umpire. New league secretary John L. Clark created a schedule for the three league umpires, Ray “Mo” Harris, John Craig, and Pete Cleague. The other umpires would still be chosen by the home team, which encouraged charges of favoritism. Unfortunately for the umpires, without strong support from league officials, they were pretty much on their own. Longtime umpire Virgil Blueitt stated, “If the club owners would order their managers and players to abide by the umpires’ rulings, much of this trouble could be avoided.”20

Another veteran umpire, Frank Forbes, was attacked on June 5, 1937, by New York Black Yankees players, and just a few games later he got into an altercation with Newark manager Tex Burnett. A month later Forbes and fellow umpire Jasper “Jap” Washington were attacked in their dressing room by Baltimore Elite Giants players. Washington resigned when nothing happened to the players involved. League honchos Gus Greenlee and Cum Posey finally responded with tougher policies, but the enforcement was lax depending on how a team’s players were affected. For example, when umpire James Crump forfeited a game, manager George Scales attacked him and the league let Crump go without any hearing at all. The lack of official support made an already hard job even more difficult for umpires, who earned no real respect for just doing their job.21

A reporter for the Kansas Whip stated that the “weakest link in a game is found in the set-up of umpires, which is limited to three.” He included a variety of criticism from around the league about the umpires not being harsh enough in their actions towards players who broke the rules.22

In 1944 Dan Burley wrote about the abuse umpires took for little pay. He reprinted a letter he received from Fred McCrary, a longtime umpire in the NNL. McCrary was upset at the lack of attention paid to umpires. For example, he worked in every East-West game from 1938 through 1944 and all the umpires got for each game was $10 and expenses. When McCrary asked for more money, the owners told him the umpire was not important for the game.23 Not all agreed with that assessment, as there were owners and players who treated umpires respectfully. By the 1940s some were also concerned about improving the respect because they feared the violence on and off the field might hurt the increasing push for integration.

In 1945 umpire Jimmy Thompson had his nose broken by player Piper Davis and pursued legal action against him since the league did little. Thompson won his case, though Davis only paid $230 in court costs. Later, President J.B. Martin added a league fine of $250 and indefinite suspension when the true story of the fight came out. Sometimes things got so bad that the police had to be called in to restore order. While police help was necessary it did not help the umpires exercise true authority. Sadly, it happened with both white and black umpires, as evidenced by Goose Curry harassing white umpire Pete Strauch until the police escorted Curry off the field. The Chicago Cubs finally raised the rent on Wrigley Field to keep black teams from using it if they could not control their players.24

Even the minor Negro Leagues had regular discussions about umpires and their roles. The Texas-Oklahoma-Louisiana League (TOL) decided in 1929 to hire four umpires who would be paid by the league. The league officials hoped this would give the umpires more authority and lessen incidents on the field. The Florida State Negro League in 1949 followed the pattern of having the home teams provide the umpires. But at the winter meetings before the 1950 season, discussion about the umpires’ situation dominated the talks. The league decided to hire two umpires, Williams Washington and Archie Colbert, and have the “balls and strikes” umpires travel around the league. At the same time, league President Skipper Holbert let two other umpires, Gus Daniels and Charles Merrit, go for inefficiency and misconduct.25

At the annual East-West Classic the leagues often used both Negro League and white minor-league umpires for the contest. Having a bigger pool to draw from allowed the Classic to have four umpires which often meant better control and legitimacy for the game. The only real difference in rules for the minor-league umpires was the fact that the spitball was legal in the Negro Leagues.26

The best-known black umpire from the Negro Leagues was Bob Motley, who in 2016 was the last living umpire from the leagues. Motley was born in Autaugaville, Alabama, in 1923, the sixth of eight children born to parents who were sharecroppers. Motley’s father died when he was 4, making it even tougher on the family to survive. Motley served in the US Marine Corps during World War II, earning a Purple Heart for a wound. While serving in the Marines, Motley umpired a few pickup games and discovered a career that would take off after the war. He umpired for over 25 years in the Negro Leagues and white minors. Umpiring from 1949 to 1956 in the Negro Leagues, Motley got to see some of the best players of the day and even umpired the 1953 and 1954 East-West Classics. Motley commented on umpiring, “An umpire has got to have guts. And force right; an ump can count on being no one’s friend — at least while on the diamond.”27

Motley attended the Al Somers Umpire School twice and graduated at the top of the class each time. His high scores did not help in the face of segregation; he never umpired above the Pacific Coast League.28 Motley recognized that umpires were not treated well by anyone. For example, he commented, “It was pretty common in the Negro Leagues, that if the catcher didn’t like the way an umpire was calling balls and strikes, he would purposely let a pitch go by and let it smack the umpire right in the facemask. That happened to me at least a half a dozen times.”29 After he called Hank Bayliss out on strikes and threw him out of the game, Bayliss came after Motley with a butcher knife on the bus home. The fans were even worse than the players in their continual comments. Motley said most fans had a favorite chant, “Kill the umpire, Kill the umpire!” You heard the chant so often you just expected it. Fans loved to blame the umpire when their team lost.30

While Motley has received some attention in his later years and Emmett Ashford is known because he was the first African American umpire in the majors, Julian Osibee Jelks never really got a shot. Jelks umpired for four years in the Pacific Coast League but never got a call to the majors. Before umpiring in the minors, Jelks was discovered by Alex Pompez when he came to New Orleans with his barnstorming Negro League teams. Pompez was so impressed with Jelks that he hired him to travel with his clubs in the mid-1950s. By 1956 Jelks got his first chance in the white professional leagues and began his climb to Triple A. Jelks umpired until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and then he stopped, fearing he or his family might become targets. In 2008 Jelks was invited as a guest to the major-league draft where teams symbolically selected a former player from the Negro Leagues.31

Throughout the history of black baseball and the Negro Leagues, the issue of who would act as arbiters for their games was always a concern. While Rube Foster and other owners might have favored in principle hiring black men as umpires, they were businessmen first and needed to put the best product on the field. This led to decisions to hire white umpires most of the time based on the beliefs that they knew the rules better and could control the behavior of players and fans. With that said there were still many fine black umpires, from Jacob Francis to Julian Jelks. Sadly, good umpires rarely get noticed and their stories are not told, making it hard to track them down and give them credit for their contributions.

LESLIE HEAPHY is an associate professor of history at Kent State University and has been a SABR member since 1988. She is the chair of the Women in Baseball Committee and serves on the committee for SABR’s annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference. She is the author/editor of six books on baseball history and editor of “Blackball,” a national peer-reviewed journal on black baseball.

Notes

1 Dan Burley, “Chicken-feed for Negro Umpires,” in James Reisler, Black Writers/Black Baseball: An Anthology of Articles From Black Sportswriters Who Covered the Negro Leagues (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2007), 136.

2 Sean Kirst, “In Syracuse, A Groundbreaking Umpire Finds Himself Called Out,” syracuse.com, February 17, 2011.

3 “Black Umpire Springs New One in Ball Game,” Seattle Times, January 31, 1909: 14.

4 Scott C. Hindman, “Blacks in Blue: The Saga of Black Baseball’s Umpires, 1885-1951,” Bachelor’s Thesis, Princeton University, 2003, 18-19.

5 “Tentative Plan National Negro Baseball League of America,” Chicago Broad Ax, November 26, 1910.

6 “Diamond Dashes,” Indianapolis Freemen, August 6, 1910; “Benefit for the Old Folks Home,” Chicago Defender, August 20, 1913.

7 Rube Foster, “Future of Race Umps Depends on Men of Today,” Chicago Defender, December 31, 1921.

8 Brent Kelley, The Negro Leagues Revisited (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2000), 32-35.

9 “Hurley McNair,” pitchblackbaseball.com.

10 Baltimore Afro-American, January 1924; “Best in League,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 11, 1926: 9.

11 Gary Cieradkowski, “Charles Cromwell,” Infinitecardset.blogspot.com; “Black Sox Want Cromwell Here,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 30, 1923: 14.

12 Dave Wyatt, “Chairman Foster’s View on Grave Subjects,” March 27, 1920, paper found on negroleagues.bravehost.com.

13 Charles D. Marshall, “Will Colored Umps Be Given a Tryout?” March 27, 1920 paper found on negroleagues.bravehost.com.

14 “Demand for Umpires of Color is Growing Among the Fans,” Chicago Defender, October 9, 1920.

15 “Seven Colored Umps Signed for League,” Kansas City Call, April 27, 1923.

16 “Rube Foster’s Sportsmanship,” Chicago Defender, July 11, 1924.

17 “Kansas City the First City to Use Negro Umpires,” Kansas Advocate, April 27, 1923; “Change the Umpires.” Chicago Defender, August 19, 1922; “Foster Explains Action in Releasing Umpires,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 22, 1925.

18 Al Monroe, “Speaking of Sports,” Chicago Defender, July 21, 1934.

19 “Gholston Says It’s Hard to Umpire in This League,” Chicago Defender, August 28, 1925.

20 Neil Lanctot, Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910-32 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 176; Leslie Heaphy, The Negro Leagues, 1869-1960 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2003), 110.

21 Lanctot, 176-77.

22 “National Association of Negro Baseball Clubs,” Kansas Whip, July 17, 1936.

23 Dan Burley, “Chicken Feed Pay for Negro Umpires,” September 9, 1944, in Jim Reisler.

24 Lanctot, 180, 181.

25 E.H. McLin, “Official of Negro League Swinging Ax on Umps,” St. Petersburg Times, May 30, 1950.

26 Dave Barr, “Monarchs to Grays to Crawfords,” MLB.com/blogs; Kansas Plain Dealer, August 20, 1948.

27 Byron Motley, Ruling Over Monarchs (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, LLC, 2007), Introduction.

28 Sportscelebs.com.

29 Bob Motley as told to Byron Motley, “ ‘No, I’m a Spectator Just Like You’: Umpire in the Negro American League,” Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2010.

30 Bob Motley.

31 Bill Madden, “Black Umpire Missed his Calling in the 1960s,” New York Daily News, February 10, 2007; Jay Levin, “Julian Osibee Jelks, 1930-2013: Pioneering Umpire Built a New Life Outside Baseball,” NorthJersey.com, July 4, 2013.

The war against the forces of fascism in Nazi Germany and Japan mirrored another war fought in the trenches of American life – that between the entrenched forces of racism and its ugly operating system of segregation, and a black populace straining to achieve equal treatment in a land ostensibly promising “liberty and justice for all.”

Coincidentally, the tenure of Adolf Hitler as the head of the National Socialist government in Germany –1933-1945 —mirrored the time frame of an informal campaign to integrate major-league baseball. In 1933 several sportswriters began to publicly question why major-league baseball should not have black performers. Several of these writers wrote in the mainstream press – Heywood Broun of the New York World-Telegram and Jimmy Powers of the Daily News both came out against baseball’s color line early that year, with other notable sportswriters such as Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror and Shirley Povich of the Washington Post weighing in later on during this period. The Daily Worker, the most prominent Communist newspaper, also produced hundreds of columns, starting in 1933, castigating major-league baseball for excluding black players. But not surprisingly, the prime participants in the battle to integrate baseball were the members of the black press, especially Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith. During his lengthy career (extending into the twenty-first century), Lacy wrote for several important black newspapers and was sports editor of the Baltimore Afro-American. Smith plied his trade during this time frame for the Pittsburgh Courier.1 The Courier was the leading black newspaper of the time, reaching a high of 350,000 in circulation in 1945 – in part because of the bold stands it took on the issues of the day.2

The Courier, with Smith as its sports editor, stepped up its campaign to integrate baseball in 1942, while at the same time championing a cause expressed in a letter it published on January 31, 1942, written by 26-year-old cafeteria worker James G. Thompson. He asked: “Is the kind of America I know worth defending?” His answer to this question stressed that dedication to victory abroad must be paired with a fight for victory against similar forces at home: “The first V for victory over our enemies without, the second V for victory over our enemies within. For surely those who perpetrate those ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”3 This crusade came to be known as the Double Victory campaign.

Thompson’s letter squarely addressed the “American Dilemma” examined by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in his landmark study of America’s race problem, to be published in 1944. Myrdal’s study explicated what he deemed a failure of the United States to exemplify its “creed” – that of a country dedicated to equality and liberty for all – by the relegation of the black population to second-class status.4 Thompson’s letter presaged Myrdal’s work by asking how America could fight a war abroad against prejudice and blind hatred while failing to address its racial issues at home.

One of those racial issues was the continuing segregation of the national pastime. As the Double V campaign swept black (and to a limited degree, even elements of white) America, especially in 1942 but to a lesser degree until V-J day in 1945, wartime Negro League baseball and some of its prominent figures championed the cause. One such champion, Cumberland “Cum” Posey, owner of the legendary Negro League powerhouse Homestead Grays, suggested in his weekly Courier column, called “Posey’s Points,” that every team in organized Negro baseball wear a Double V symbol on its uniform, stating his belief that the cause of “victory abroad and at home is more vital than any athletic victory any of us may attain.”5 Posey was prominent among those who worried about the future of the Negro Leagues if the white major leagues were integrated, so his eloquent dedication to the cause of Double Victory is noteworthy, as “victory at home” clearly would include ending employment discrimination such as the color line in baseball.

Another Negro League owner, Effa Manley, engaged in many activities supporting the war effort, including an active promotion of the Double V campaign.6 Similarly, Satchel Paige biographer Donald Spivey indicated that Paige was a supporter of the Double V.7 Paige was not shy in expressing his opinions, as he proved in the run-up to the 1942 East-West All-Star game, Negro League baseball’s preeminent showcase.

During the heat of the summer and the heyday of the Double V campaign, Paige felt compelled to speak over the public-address system to a throng of over 48,000 attendees before he came on in relief in the seventh inning. The reason: to deny reports that he questioned whether integration of major-league baseball was possible at that time. Paige claimed he was misquoted: He merely said that he doubted that a major-league team would pay him a salary commensurate with the $37,000 he earned in 1941 and that it would be better for a team of black players to integrate baseball rather than an individual who would face Jim Crow alone.8

Fans watched Satchel as he “gummed up the program with a three-minute pointless statement”9 in trying to defuse the controversy he created, and subsequently lost the All-Star game for the West, his first such loss after three earlier All-Star game wins. Meanwhile, the large crowd also saw symbols of the Double V displayed and distributed. The front page of the August 22 edition of the Courier carried a photograph of a woman wearing a Double V logo on her back selling “VV” buttons at the game. Inside the edition, a picture of a woman flashing “VV” with her fingers was captioned “At Chicago East-West All-Star Game.”10

By the time of the East-West All-Star game, the Double V campaign as covered by the Courier was slowing down, although it was by no means at an end. Starting with its February 7, 1942, edition through the end of 1942, the Courier printed 970 Double V items, peaking with 50 such items in its April 11 issue. The campaign spread throughout black America – “there were Double V dances and parades, Double V flag-raising ceremonies, Double V baseball games between professional black teams, Double V beauty contests, Double V poems, and a double V song, ‘Yankee Doodle Tan…’”11 In the June 13, 1942, issue the Courier reported on a Double V game in St. Louis. The thousands who attended watched as the New York Black Yankees defeated the Birmingham Black Barons, 8-4. They also saw a drum and bugle corps form a Double V on the mound, and a $50 Double V certificate being presented to the winner of a Miss Mid-West contest.12

The Double V campaign was also supported by other black newspapers. In another instance where black baseball was involved, the Atlanta Daily World reported on what it called a “true double-V victory” by the Birmingham Black Barons winning an opening day Negro American League doubleheader over the Memphis Red Sox in late May1943. The article mentioned as well that a high-school band formed a “V” before the game – the first victory of the day.13 All the prominent black newspapers of the day – the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland Call and Post, the New York Amsterdam News, the World, and many others – reported on the progress of the Double V campaign even if it was not with the sustained attention of the Courier.

During 1942 especially but also throughout the war, sportswriters Smith and Ches Washington of the Courier, Fay Young of the Defender, Mabray “Doc” Kountze of the Call and Post, Dan Burley of the Amsterdam News, and Lacy and Art Carter of the Afro-American were promoting the breaking of the color line, often invoking the theme, if not the explicit terminology, of the Double V. Washington told the story of a victorious boxer who invoked the themes of Double V. He also trumpeted the triumphs of black track stars and boxers over the “enemy abroad” while wishing that baseball stars like Josh Gibson be given a chance at home.14 Smith used military terminology as he suggested that Negro fans organize and fight the battle for baseball integration with a “concentrated, nationwide action” much like that of the Double V campaign.15 And on the same day, April 11, 1942, that the Courier provided its peak coverage of the Double V campaign, Kountze echoed the words of the American Negro Press’s Claude Barnett that “if a colored man is good enough to fight for his own country, he certainly ought to be good enough to work here” as Kountze made the case that “something ought to be done. This very year. I mean, Yeah, 1942” to integrate major-league baseball.16

While the Double V campaign’s momentum slowed down throughout the war, it did not disappear entirely from the pages of the Courier until victory was declared over Japan in September 1945. Until then, the Courier continued the practice started at the commencement of the Double V campaign of putting a “vv” at the end of each article to separate it from the article appearing beneath it. Meanwhile, the calls for baseball integration continued to build to a crescendo in the Courier and the other black newspapers from 1942 through the end of the war. In the summer of 1942, the black press reported that Bill Benswanger, owner of the Pirates, would be trying out Negro League stars Leon Day, Willie Wells, Josh Gibson, and Sam Bankhead. It never came to pass. At the end of 1943, the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association met with the American and National Leagues. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis, an ardent segregationist, went on record as not being against the move to place Negro players in the major leagues. Everyone knew otherwise. Yet Courier president Ira Lewis spoke at this meeting, and invoked the concept of national unity in suggesting that baseball integration would bring joy to 15 million black Americans and millions of white Americans as well.17 Even though the Courier was no longer actively promoting the Double V by then, it was certainly continuing the “campaign for the integration of Negro players into the major leagues,”18 as described by Wendell Smith in late 1943. As history would later prove, a partial victory against racism at home – the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers – would virtually coincide with the victory against fascism abroad in the fall of 1945.

Jackie Robinson had his own indirect connection to Double V. According to essayist and cultural critic Gerald Early, Jackie likely would not have become an officer in the Army without the publicity created by the Double V, along with a behind-the-scenes campaign started in 1937 by Pittsburgh Courier owner Robert Vann to start the process of getting black officers in the military.19 Joe Louis also applied pressure on the military to commission black officers; Jackie said that without Louis “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.”20 Louis was another supporter of the Double V campaign,21 and his wife, Marva, was the Double V girl of the week in the Courier of April 11, 1942.22

In the end, there is a consensus among historians who have researched the Double V, the black press, and African American history. The successful campaign to integrate baseball naturally fit within the larger themes of Double Victory. As Henry Louis Gates put it, one of the two most important legacies of the Double Victory campaign is that “through the columns of its sportswriter, Wendell Smith … it doggedly fought against segregation in professional sports, contributing without a doubt to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ decision to sign Jackie Robinson. …”23 The other legacy was the ultimate desegregation of the US Army by Harry Truman in 1948. A double victory – integrating baseball and one year later, the military – had now been accomplished. But the larger struggle for racial justice had just begun.

DORON “DUKE” GOLDMAN is a longtime SABR member who is specializing in research on baseball integration and the Negro Leagues. In addition to expanding his research on the Double Victory campaign, he is currently researching various aspects of the career of Monte Irvin.

Notes

1 On sportswriters supporting baseball integration, see Brian Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball (New York: Routledge, 2007), 69-87; Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters And The Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 3-21; Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 120-121.

2 Patrick S. Washburn, The African-American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 180.

3 Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1942.

4 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma Volume 1: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1996 reprint of original 1944 edition), 8.

5 Pittsburgh Courier, April 18, 1942.

6 Sarah L. Trembanis, The Set-Up Men: Race, Culture and Resistance in Black Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland& Company, Inc. 2014), 118.

7 Donald Spivey, If Only You Were White: The Life of Leroy “Satchel” Paige, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012), 186.

8 Associated Press, August 6, 1942, reprinted in Chicago Defender, August 15, 1942; New York Amsterdam News, August 15, 1942; Baltimore Afro-American, August 22, 1942; Pittsburgh Courier, August 22, 1942.

9 Art Carter, “From The Bench,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 22, 1942.

10 Pittsburgh Courier, August 22, 1942, 1, 13.

11 Patrick S. Washburn, “The Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V Campaign in 1942,” American Journalism (Vol. 74, No. 2 1986), 73, 74.

12 Pittsburgh Courier, June 13, 1942.

13 Atlanta Daily World, June 1 1943.

14 Ches Washington, “Sez Ches,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 21, 1942.

15 Pittsburgh Courier, July 25, 1942.

16 Cleveland Call and Post, April 11, 1942.

17 Pittsburgh Courier, December 11, 1943.

18 Pittsburgh Courier, December 25, 1943.

19 Author conversation with Gerald Early, October 11, 2012.

20 Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 92.

21 Spivey, If Only You Were White, 186.

22 Pittsburgh Courier, April 11 1942.

23 Henry Louis Gates, What Was Black America’s Double War? the root.com/articles/history/2013/05/double_v_campaign_during_work

Well before the Great Migration of the early 20th century served as a catalyst for the formation of significant African American communities in Northern cities, giving rise to a lively black press, ads for games played by “colored” teams appeared in the mainstream dailies. Contests featuring the Cuban Giants, for example, were advertised in the New York Times as early as 1886. In plain, straight-forward language, one such ad reads, “BASEBALL. POLO GROUNDS TO-DAY. Colored Championship match. CUBAN GIANTS VS. GORHAMS, Game 4 P.M. Admission, 25 cents.”1

According to Sol White, black baseball’s first historian and its first hagiographer, “the ‘Cuban Giants’ were heralded everywhere as marvels of the baseball world. They were not looked upon by the public as freaks, but they were classed as men of talent.”2

White’s statement is belied, however subtly, by this ad’s placement in the newspaper. Appearing in small type at the bottom of a column of advertising under the heading “Amusements,” it is the sole baseball announcement among ads for “Imre Kiralfy’s latest, greatest, and supreme triumph, NERO; OR THE FALL OF ROME,” complete with 2,000 performers and a Terpsichorean corps of 1,000 on the very largest stage of all time, and “Pain’s ‘1666’ GREAT FIRE OF LONDON,” reenacted at Manhattan Beach on Coney Island. An ad in the same column for “THE BIGGEST SHOW ON EARTH! America’s Most Mighty Exhibition. BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST,” is even more telling.3 Capitalizing on the popular taste for reenactments evident here, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show featured an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage and a tableau vivant of Custer’s Last Stand, among other wonders.4

The “Colored Championship” match between the Cuban Giants and the Gorhams, taken in the context of its companions in the Amusements column, most particularly the Wild West show, may be seen in quite a different light. Just as Cody’s spectacular offered New Yorkers a glimpse into the exotic world of cowboys and indians, essentially creating the popular American notion of the West, the Cuban Giants’ appearance at the Polo Grounds presented spectators with the exotic spectacle of ballplayers of color engaged in an actual championship game. In fact, close scrutiny of the ad suggests that, contrary to White’s assertion, embedded in the name “Cuban Giants,” is the prospect of a freak show of sorts.

As if to offer an explanation, quoting a mention of the team in The Sporting Life, a writer for the New York Sun noted that the Cuban Giants were, in fact, “neither Giants nor Cubans, but thick-set and brawny colored men.”5 Certainly, baseball enthusiasts, of whom there was no shortage in New York, would have recognized the name Giants as referring to the regular tenants of the Polo Grounds, and the Cuban Giants as an African American club of some merit. This ad, however, appears neither on a sports page nor in the nascent sporting press. Baseball enthusiasts— cranks—are not its primary target. Proximity to the ad for Buffalo Bill Cody’s enterprise, not to mention those for the spectacles of Nero’s fiddling and London’s conflagration, seems to suggest that, for at least some of the Times’ overwhelmingly Caucasian readers, the Cuban Giants were, at best, exotic curiosities—thick set, brawny colored men. At worst, they were freaks.

One of the earliest forms of printed advertising is the trade card. Generally associated with tobacco and candy, baseball trade cards were also distributed as souvenirs to commemorate specific events. While trade cards featuring African American players and teams, produced prior to the desegregation of the major leagues, were certainly uncommon, they were not completely unknown. A rare example of such a card features the 1897 Fence Page Giants, an African American club formed by two players who, contrary to convention, had played in Organized Baseball with otherwise white or integrated teams, Bud Fowler and Grant “Home Run” Johnson, in conjunction with two white businessmen, to advertise the Page Woven Wire Fence Company of rural Adrian, Michigan, and Monarch Bicycles. The Page Fence Company, notes Jerry Malloy,

was not unfamiliar with inventive promotional techniques. As a permanent demonstration of the capacity of its product to contain livestock, the company maintained a park in town stocked with various animals corralled by its woven wire fencing. This menagerie was transported by rail to nearby country and state fairs with Page Fence cages, thus displaying the strength and versatility of the company’s line of goods.6

The team, dressed in their natty black uniforms emblazoned in large white letters with the words “Page Fence Giants,” are pictured on the front of the card, along with their white manager, identified as A. S. Parsons. Printed on the reverse side is an ad for the company, reading, “Play Ball! Play Ball! Make Fence!!! Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might.” Clearly, the language of the trade card, which would have been distributed to fans lured to games by the appearance of the luxurious private railway carriage in which the team traveled, as well as by the players themselves, who, after disembarking, paraded through town on their Monarch bicycles,7 equates ball playing with building fences.

According to Sol White, the notion that the team should be transported from town to town by a private train bearing the name Page Fence, affording the players the certainty of comfortable lodging in Jim Crow America, was the brainchild of Johnson and Fowler.8 As such, it served as a sort of protective enclosure for the players on the road. At the same time, it also served to keep them at a safe distance from the white people for whom they played, functioning as their own Page Fence. In this regard it bears a fairly close, though perhaps uncomfortable, resemblance to the fence separating the company’s traveling menagerie that traveled the same roads to the same towns as the team separated from fairgoers. Coupled with the private railway carriage, this trade card, and the very promotional nature of the team itself seem to suggest to white spectators that colored ballplayers, while entertaining to watch, are best kept at a comfortable distance, separated from spectators by a sturdy fence, be it real or implied.

With his Official Guide: The History of Colored Base Ball, Sol White did more than provide a window into a past populated by teams like the Page Fence and Cuban Giants; he also provided 14 pages of baseball-related advertising. The Guide’s ad copy differs substantially from newspaper advertising for the Cuban Giants and Page Fence’s promotional baseball machine, both of which targeted predominantly Caucasian consumers. That White’s Guide, originally published in 1907 on the cusp of the Great Migration, is aimed at African Americans is borne out in its advertising.

Some businesses, like John W. Connor’s Royal Cafe and Palm Gardens in Brooklyn, make it clear in their ads that they are black-owned. The Royal Café ad does so by specifying that the establishment serves as headquarters for the Royal Giants, owned and managed, not so coincidentally, by John W. Connor. On the facing page, Connor is pictured as a dignified, middle-aged African American with an avuncular smile.9 Even more direct is an ad for “The Roadside,” whose bewhiskered African American proprietor is pictured prominently, illustrating the minimalist copy, limited to the name and address of the establishment almost as if to say, “the only other thing you need to know about the Roadside is that it is black-owned.”10

A full-page ad for the Philadelphia Tribune, billed as “Our Only Colored Daily Paper,” also features a photograph of an African American man, city editor, G. Grant Williams. Not only does this ad target potential African American readers, using the pronoun “our” to denote a connection between the publisher, the editorial staff, and black baseball fans perusing White’s Guide, but also other businesses. With a small line of type at the bottom of the page, the Tribune lays claim to the role of “the best Medium for advertising when you want to reach the people.”11 And who are the people? They are members of the same community at which White’s Guide is aimed, baseball fans of color.

But not all the advertising in White’s Guide pitches black-owned businesses. One large ad sings the praises of promoters Schlichter and Strong, booking agents for the Philadelphia Giants, who call their outfit “the premier attraction among colored teams” whose “presence is eagerly looked for in all sections of the country.”12 That H. Walter Schlichter should advertise in White’s book is hardly a surprise, given that he is billed on the title page as the original editor. Nor is the presence of Nat Strong’s name unusual. Strong, a promoter based in New York, controlled booking in the majority of the area’s semi-professional baseball venues. In order to play lucrative Sunday games in the better semi-pro parks, it was necessary to deal with white booking agents like Strong.13 Even though some teams, like the Royal Giants, may have been black-owned, this ad is a reminder that African American baseball was still subject to white control, a factor which would provoke conflict and controversy at various times in its history.

The advertising in White’s Guide, even Schlichter and Strong’s ad promoting black baseball, exhibit a certain race pride, a pride that would continue to grow in African American communities in Northern cities fueled by the Great Migration. But to suggest that these ads signal a momentous advance for African Americans would be a gross overstatement. The status of African Americans, even the sophisticated Northern readers of the Philadelphia Tribune, as second-class citizens with limited possibilities, is indicated, however indirectly, in two other ads in White’s Guide. The “Headquarters for North Philadelphia Sports,” the Chauffeur’s Rest claims to be home to first-class pool parlors as well.14 While the ad suggests that its patrons are the upper crust of the sporting life—that is, boxing men, vaudevillians, gamblers, even pimps, and, presumably, sporting women15—the name says something else, that its high-class clientele are, in fact, tired chauffeurs.

Washington’s Manufactory, a dry goods emporium, advertises for sale its “High-grade Stationery, Finest Perfumes, and all kinds of Toilet Articles,” but judging by its prominent place in the ad and its type size, first and foremost among the products available at Washington’s Manufactory appear to be “Waiters Supplies.”16 Like the patrons of the Chauffeur’s Rest, Washington’s Manufactory’s target consumers are service workers, not business executives. The first-class sports that use high-grade stationery and the finest perfumes are, in reality, drivers and waiters.

As the ad in White’s Guide rightfully claims, the Philadelphia Tribune was an excellent medium to reach “the people,” especially the people who were African American residents of large cities such as its home, Philadelphia, as well as Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York, and Baltimore. Between 1900 and 1925, the percentage of the population identified as black in these cities increased as much as four-fold,17 leading to the proliferation of a whole series of race institutions, among them businesses like the saloons, hotels, and retail shops that advertised in White’s Guide, fraternal organizations, record labels, and, most notably, a lively black press, intended specifically for consumption by African Americans.18

By this time the Tribune, which commenced publication in 1884, was a major voice in the political, social, and economic life of African American Philadelphia.19 Along with the Tribune, weekly papers such as New York’s Amsterdam News and Age, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American became mainstays of their communities. The rapidly expanding African American urban population also led to the growth of black baseball aimed, specifically, at a black audience. According to Lawrence Hogan:

Prior to this time, black baseball clubs played for essentially a white clientele. The rise of black enclaves in the North, however, was too important for black ball to ignore. A new generation of both black and white entrepreneurs would attempt to tap into this growing market.”20

But how, exactly, were they to do so? In addition to the most consistently cost-effective and reliable method of marketing, word of mouth, spreading information by means of an informal network of neighborhood institutions like barbershops, beauty parlors, and social clubs,21 as well as displaying game placards in store windows, on taxicabs, and streetcars,22 black baseball’s entrepreneurs relied upon the weeklies. Since African American ball clubs depended upon gate receipts for revenue,23 publicity in the weeklies was an absolute necessity.

Ed Bolden’s Hilldale Club, one of the very few African American teams to control its own diamond, Hilldale Park in Darby, Pennsylvania, advertised regularly in the Tribune. According to the team’s ledgers, the Hilldales routinely budgeted between six and nine dollars monthly during the season to promote their games in the Tribune in the early 1920s. Although this seems like a paltry sum to dedicate to newspaper advertising, it represented a significant investment for a team that operated in the red during this period.24 In order to ensure that Philadelphia residents would be able to find their way to Darby, a mill town close to the city, long home to a considerable African American population, many of the team’s newspaper ads include specific directions to the park, via the “No. 13 Car on Walnut Street.”25

The relationship between the black press and the teams was reciprocal. Teams depended upon advertising on the sports pages, as well as promotion by the editorial staff, to ensure attendance, and the papers depended on teams to provide content. Directly below a series of ads for the Hilldale Club, an announcement in the Tribune reads “Feature your Own Ball Game—Send Snappy Accounts to the Tribune as soon as the game is over.—We Boost Clean Sports.”26

As was true of the black weeklies in general, the Tribune could not afford beat reporters to cover local African American teams as the mainstream press could. This made it necessary for teams to provide their own coverage. Such coverage, however snappy, was often unreliable at best. But no matter how snappy an account may have been, the Tribune’s ad copy makes it clear that news of games tainted by gambling or other unsavory activities were not acceptable. Only “clean” games were deserving of the Tribune’s support.

By virtue of its proximity to Hilldale ads, this notice serves yet another purpose. However indirectly, it tells readers that Bolden’s team is nothing if not on the up-and-up. The connection between the Tribune, the Hilldale Club, and good sportsmanship was further reinforced by the relatively huge sign atop Hilldale Park’s scoreboard, the only ad in the park, urging fans to “Read the Philadelphia Tribune.”27

With the rapid increase in urban America’s black population came an increased demand for housing. In Baltimore, for example, this led to the expansion of the city itself, including the annexation of formerly rural areas like Catonsville, home to a small African American community.28 With expansion came real estate development. And with real estate development came its natural by-product, advertising. A large ad in the Afro American of October 29, 1920, announces the opening of a “New Colored Development, Sale of Choice Lots, McDonough Heights, Catonsville.” “Ideally situated on high, healthy ground,” reads the pitch, offering prospective purchasers the opportunity to own beautiful lots, starting at 98 dollars each, which could be financed with the “Easiest of Easy Terms.”

But this offer to own a prospective piece of the American Dream was not enough to lure Baltimore’s black residents to fairly remote Catonsville, only a streetcar ride away. No, for that a “special attraction Sunday,” and the chance to watch Piedmont Tigers take on the Catonsville Social Giants in a game of baseball, would be necessary.29 That developers of a “colored” subdivision would advertise in the pages of the Afro American, using a game between blackball clubs as bait, certainly points to the growth of a vibrant community, a community to which baseball was clearly important during this period. But it also points directly to the harsh realities of African American life in Baltimore circa 1920. There was strict segregation on the playing fields and strict segregation in the housing market.

Game announcements and other baseball-related advertising regularly appeared in the many of black weeklies throughout the 1920s, despite the fact that attendance at the games themselves declined toward the end of the decade, a casualty of worsening economic conditions.30 And baseball was not alone. Even before the crash of 1929, black-owned businesses, a source of race pride and, more important, income, failed at an unusually high rate.31 The last to be hired, black workers were the first fired. By 1932 the black urban unemployment rate stood at close to 50%. Nearly half of all African American families in Northern cities were on relief rolls by 1935.32 Once again the economic profile of black communities was reflected by the advertising related to baseball in the black weeklies.

Alongside pitches for hair straighteners, pomades, and patent medicines claiming to alleviate “male problems” on the sports pages were ads for publications like Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dream Book, Stella’s Lucky Dream Book, and Number Hit Forecast and Guide, asking black baseball fans, “Want to change your luck? Release your Lucky Number at glance.”32 Specifically, each of the publications claimed to guarantee success in playing policy or the numbers, a popular form of gambling in urban America during the Depression, especially black urban America. According to Paul Oliver:

Black superstition was the subject of lucrative exploitation of charms and philters, and cheap pseudo-religious votive ornaments and accessories alike, but it was in the systematic organization of the Numbers Racket that the most relentless and deliberate exploitation took place. The policy racketeers published “Dream Books” which gave lists of numbers which were supposed to have a mystic connection with aspects of human experience, with objects natural and man-made, and with every conceivable circumstance that might occur in dreams.34

Among the dream symbols to which numbers were attached, several were, in fact, related to baseball.

Numbers lotteries gave impoverished African Americans—in this case, readers of baseball news in the black weeklies—a chance to achieve social mobility, no matter how slim. With as paltry a bet as a single penny, numbers players, who had little opportunity for economic or social advancement, due in large part to race, could hope for a payoff as high as 500-1. And pay off the numbers did, particularly for the bankers who controlled the rackets. While in Harlem the numbers were controlled by Dutch Schultz during the 1930s,35 elsewhere numbers bankers were, in fact, race men, like Abe Manley, Alex Pompez, and, most notably Pittsburgh policy kingpin, Gus Greenlee, Negro League owners all. “Black underworld figures,” writes Neil Lanctot, “long a part of the industry and seemingly impervious to Depression conditions, would provide a necessary influx of capital into the moribund enterprise” of black baseball.

As the nation’s economy improved in the late 1930s, so too did the economic circumstances of black baseball’s primary fans, urban African Americans, though more slowly than that of their white counterparts. This improvement is reflected in baseball-related advertising, particularly in the black press. A series of ads, for example, appeared in the Chicago Defender, distinguishable from the paper’s editorial content only by the fine print at the top reading “advertisement,” with the headline “Piney Woods School Offers Youth Unusual Opportunities.” “A school that is famous for its extracurricular activities,” the ad touts Piney Woods’ black baseball pedigree in this way:

Followers of the Kansas City Monarchs like to see Ivy Barnes pitch who is sometimes called a carbon copy of Satchell (sic) Paige. This year, the Homestead Grays will present to the baseball loving public three Piney Woods boys, Leroy Bass, catching; Buddy Thompson, pitching; and Luke Easterling, third base. All of those boys received training with the Piney Woods Giant Collegians who have bested some of the fastest semi-professional teams in the country, including the famous “House of David.”37

The Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi’s Black Belt, here offering young Chicago boys with a talent for baseball the opportunity to secure scholarships, was founded in 1909 by Lawrence C. Jones, known to his students as Professor Ed or Uncle Ed, who began his career in education teaching sharecroppers to read in a sheep shed. According to an article published in McClure’s in 1922,

at Piney Woods they learn things like these: plowing, horse shoeing, washing and ironing, sewing, cooking, basket making, carpentry; they are working with the white people and never against them.38

Baseball was also a major part of their curriculum, though more so in 1940 than in 1922.

To a great extent, this ad does more than try to attract prospective ball-playing boys to a traditional black boarding school, it uses baseball in an attempt to reverse the trend of the Great Migration, to save poor young black children from the squalor of the city by offering them an education in country life. The ad promotes the school as a sure path to the Negro Leagues, one followed by Thompson, Bass, and Easterling, but in reality, what it offers is an education in manual labor and working for white people, never against them. The ad for the Piney Woods School sends two separate messages. On one hand, it banks on race pride associated with star Negro League players to attract students. On the other, it seems to refer back to the accommodationist attitudes of Booker T. Washington, who in 1895 told African Americans to “cast down your buckets where you are,” in the segregated South.39 In this way, it expresses a conflicted attitude about race that is reflected in baseball-related advertising in general.

As America moved closer to war, more and more African Americans were attracted to urban areas by the prospect of employment in the defense industries. Increased employment meant increased disposable income, which also meant increased attendance at games and increased purchasing power. But not all baseball-related advertising during this period pitched games or products. Some baseball-related ads spoke to a more important purpose. With a drawing of a beefy ballplayer of indeterminate race and the headline, “What is SWOC’s Batting Average?” the Steel Workers Organizing Committee urged readers to vote for the SWOC in the labor board election of September 25, 1941, in a nearly full-page ad on the “Afro Sports” page of the Baltimore Afro American. It reads:

This is baseball season and everybody thinks in terms of batting averages. If you know a man’s batting average you can tell he’s a big-leaguer. If you know a team’s batting average, you can tell whether that team is going places. So it’s a fair question to ask the SWOC: What is your batting average.40

It goes on to give a series of reasons to vote the union in, each ending with the tag line, “Not a bad batting average is it?” in bold print.

Why does the SWOC use baseball language and images to promote its cause, the unionization of Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrow’s Point plant? After an extremely contentious three-year battle to unionize the plant, at which many African Americans were employed, the SWOC, an affiliate of the CIO, forced an election. Perhaps in order to fight charges that unionization was anti-American, the SWOC chose that most American of images, the baseball player in mid-stride. It is no wonder that the player bears some resemblance to Lou Gehrig, who, though no longer the Iron Horse, had come to represent not only resilience but grace under pressure.

In a very pointed way, this ad differs substantially from the majority of baseball-related advertising in the black weeklies. While the race of the player is indeterminate, the language of the ad is not. The ad claims that if you know a player’s batting average, you can tell if he’s a big leaguer. Quite apart from the spotty statistical reporting for which black weeklies were known, there is one thing that readers of the Afro American knew for sure in 1942, that the players on teams they followed were not big leaguers, no matter how gaudy their batting averages.

Rare for an ad in a black weekly in 1941, this one makes no attempt to pitch its point directly to African Americans. Instead, it tries to reach the black readership with the same ad used to appeal to white steelworkers. Although the language seems insensitive, given baseball’s color line, it is, in its own way, quite the opposite. By refusing to change its language to speak specifically to one segment of its demographic, it indirectly points toward an emerging move toward equality within the union, if not within baseball or society as a whole. Editorial support of SWOC by the Afro American as well as the fact that it was voted in overwhelmingly by workers, African American and Caucasian alike, supports this notion.

Beginning in the 1920s, a mainstay of print advertising in the mainstream media was the celebrity product endorsement. And often the celebrities in question were baseball players. This practice proliferated in the 1940s, but not in the black weeklies. Certainly Negro League baseball, then in its heyday, had its fair share of star power. But for all the Josh Gibsons, Cool Papa Bells, and Satchel Paiges, product endorsements were virtually nonexistent. Paige and Gibson, when mentioned in a game ad, might guarantee a good gate, but they were not paid to sell Camel cigarettes or Gillette razor blades to African American consumers.

As popular as these exceptionally talented players were, they could not hold a candle to the iconic black athlete of this period, boxer Joe Louis. Endorsing everything from hair pomade to local tailor shops across America, he stands out as the lone African American product endorser of note during the late ’30s and ’40s. Even before his knockout of Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, made him a champion to Americans, regardless of race, Louis was featured prominently in ads in the black press. So popular was he that he inspired the naming of the Brown Bomber Baking Company of New York City, by their own account, “The World’s Largest Negro Baking Company,” whose ad was illustrated with a drawing, in monumental style, of a strong black pugilist pummeling a white boxer. Brown Bomber Bakery, pitching its product with the slogan “11 cents spent for Brown Bomber gives you double value… a loaf of tempting delicious bread plus part payment of some Negro’s salary,”41 did not rely entirely on the sweet science to promote their “soft bread.”

One of the company’s most notable marketing ploys was its sponsorship of a semi-professional team, the eponymous Brown Bombers. In a way, the bakery took a page from Page Fences, using a baseball team as a living promotional tool. But while Page Fences sold enclosures, Brown Bombers sold race pride.

Oddly, bread, not hair pomade, dream books, or beer, was the one of the first beneficiaries of an endorsement by an African American ballplayer in the 1940s. Though his testimonial takes a position subordinate to a large endorsement by a bathing beauty who has clearly availed herself of one of the many skin- lightening products advertised throughout the black weeklies, praise is heaped upon Bond Bread by a proud-looking player in pinstripes, wearing the well- known interlocking NY of the lily-white New York Yankees, identified as “Walter Wright, famous ‘Brick Top’ of the Black Yankees.” It reads, “With rationing cutting down on the muscle builders we used to get in meat, I’m mighty glad to get Bond’s extra protein.”

Bond bakery, unlike Brown Bomber, was not black-owned. It did, however, advertise regularly in the New York Amsterdam News. While Bond routinely relied on the image of a happy African American homemaker to sell its products to New York’s black population here, the bakery capitalizes on the community’s enthusiasm for baseball. Unlike so many of the other baseball-related ads, however, Bond Bread did not advertise on the sports page. This ad appeared in the retail advertising section, where products were pitched almost exclusively to women. In this regard, Bond seemed to realize that African American women were a largely untapped market of baseball fans, and one that often controlled its family’s purse strings.

The dearth of product endorsements by African American baseball players in the pages of the black weeklies did not last into the 1940s. Seemingly from the very moment Jackie Robinson stepped across the major league color line, his name and image seem to appear on virtually every page. “For a treat instead of a treatment…I recommend Old Gold Cigarettes,” reads a testimonial ad by Robinson, a non-smoker, for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ radio sponsor, not just in the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, but also in black weeklies across the country. Where ads for Tuxedo Club Pomade, “the Pomade of Champions,” had once featured the profile of a black pugilist, now it sported a baseball player. And Jackie Robinson sold Bond Bread to New York City’s women, too. Appearing in the Amsterdam News in August 1947, one Bond ad relies on one of the oldest tricks in the advertising book, hearkening back to the days of the Page Fence Giants. Depicting a trade card with an image of the Dodger, the ad reads, “Your grocer will give you a pocket-size reproduction of this Jackie Robinson photograph, free for the asking.”42 The ad also features a little cartoon baker, decidedly Caucasian, saying “Take It From Jackie Folks, Homogenized Bond Bread is Really Something: It Stays Fresh Days Longer, Too!”

Jackie Robinson’s emergence as a major product endorser, coinciding with his emergence as a major leaguer, heralded a change in the connection between baseball, advertising, and race. What was once an extremely limited practice, using images of black baseball players to sell consumer goods, appealing to a marginalized demographic, became far more widespread, appealing to a much larger segment of the American buying public. In many ways, Robinson would lead the way to changes in the way in which African Americans were perceived in the media as much through his role as pitchman as through his role as ballplayer.

As other players followed Robinson from the Negro Leagues to the majors, they also followed him into the ranks of major product endorsers, often for national advertisers like Beechnut Gum, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, and a variety of tobacco products, in both the black weeklies and the mainstream media. Televised baseball, emerging, along with Robinson, as a force in 1947, contributed to the process, acclimating American consumers to the vision of baseball in black and white. Advertisers, while hardly color-blind, increasingly recognized the power of testimonials by black ballplayers to sell their products to a broader spectrum of potential purchasers.

The desegregation of major league baseball sounded the death knell for the organized Negro Leagues, as well as barnstorming and semi-professional African American baseball. But black baseball’s demise, and with it the demise of related advertising, was far from sudden. As the official souvenir program of the 1949 East-West Baseball Classic illustrates, Negro League baseball at its best was still popular enough to attract significant advertising dollars. With ads on virtually every page, the souvenir program attracted national advertisers like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Oscar Meyer, selling products associated with baseball, no matter what the race of the players and, more important, the fans might be. Longtime advertisers in the black weeklies, it is hardly surprising to see their ads in the program.

More thoroughly represented than national advertisers, however, are local, primarily black-owned Chicago-land businesses, courting African American consumers. Funeral homes, pharmacies, saloons, and segregated hotels make up the bulk of the program’s advertising copy. In this respect, the ads in the souvenir program resemble those published in Sol White’s Guide, half a century earlier. With the slogan, “For a Winning Personality,” for example, an ad for the Payne School of Modeling and Charm features a photograph of an elegant African American woman, clearly a product of the South Side school’s instruction in “Fashion Modeling, Photographic Modeling, Wardrobe Assembling, Body and Figure Control, Self Assurance, Corrective Make-up, and Hair Styling.”43

But unlike the tired chauffeurs and newly supplied waiters targeted by the advertising in White’s Guide, this ad is aimed at women. The women it targets, moreover, are not aiming for jobs which are functionally equivalent to those held by the original consumers of White’s Guide, maids, waitresses, and the like. Nor are they housewives, looking for the extra protein in Bond Bread. Rather, they are younger women considering careers in modeling, or those presumably looking to improve their prospects, seeking professional employment or simply in search of suitable young men.

Connecting athletics with ad copy, several of the ads in the program are visually and textually tied together with a theme, “From sports to business.” The enduring popularity of Joe Louis is apparent in a full-page ad for the Chicago School of Automotive Trades, Inc., with the slogan, “From the Boxing Ring to Business.” Ostensibly a profile of the heavyweight, entitled “The Influence of Sports on the Life of Joe Louis,” penned by sportswriter Wendell Smith, the copy reads, “He soared from the poverty-stricken cotton fields of Alabama to the heavyweight championship, like a shooting star zips across the azure skies.”44

Following a brief, though no less hyperbolic, synopsis of the Brown Bomber’s career, the profile tells consumers that since his retirement, “he has devoted all his time to his various enterprises and businesses. He is president of the Chicago School of Automotive Trades.” As the producers of Brown Bomber bread knew in the 1940s, Louis’s endorsement branded their product with the image of African American strength and resilience. Like Louis, the ad implies, students at the Chicago School of Automotive Trade might also ascend like a shooting star across the azure skies of success and financial security. Although its target consumer differs from that of Payne’s school by gender, its message is not entirely different. In its own way, each of these ads seems to suggest that entry into the middle class, even into the elite, is hardly out of reach.

Like Joe Louis and the beautiful woman gracing the Payne’s ad, a little hard work and proper training may be only a phone call away for the predominantly African American fans at the East-West game. And unlike the ads in White’s Guide, these speak to a rising sense of African American empowerment in a still largely segregated society, rather than representing the segregated status quo.

African American empowerment is also the unspoken message in an ad for John B. Knighten Jr. and Co., a South Side, Chicago, real estate company. It features an illustration of the nearly perfect nuclear family, consisting of a pipe-smoking father, a well-coiffed mother, perhaps a graduate of Payne’s school, and a little girl in pigtails, dreaming, via a balloon, of their slice of the American pie, in the form of what appears to be a spacious home, surrounded by ample open space. Outside the dream balloon, there is a nest resting on a branch, complete with chirping baby birds. The ad reads “Birds Have Nests! Do You Have a Home?” The only thing that distinguishes this ad from similar real estate advertising which might have been placed in the mainstream press, or in souvenir programs from a major league game, is the fact that the skin of the family in the illustration is shaded with crude lines. Its message seems to be, “You, too, African American baseball fan, can participate in the American Dream of Home Ownership.”45 With the appropriate training from the Chicago School of Automotive Trade and Payne’s, the final step toward the post World-War II American ideal is a visit to John B. Knighten Jr. and Co.

While, as the relatively large number of advertisers in the 1949 East-West game program suggests, African American baseball was still a going concern two years after Jackie Robinson made his debut in Brooklyn, that was not the case only a few years later. The 1952 East-West Game, for example, drew only 14,122 fans, as opposed to 46,871 nine years earlier.46 In a sense, black baseball ended as it began, not with organized leagues but with barnstorming teams owned by enterprising white promoters, traveling to small towns, often in the upper Midwest, playing in front of predominantly Caucasian audiences. Harkening back to the first professional African American baseball team, the latter-day Cuban Giants, owned and promoted by former Kansas City Monarchs owner Thomas Young Baird, were one such team. But the 1950s Cuban Giants, unlike their 19th-century namesake, were, in fact, Cuban.

Touring towns like Aurora, Illinois, Dubuque, Iowa, and Yankton, Nebraska, in the early 1950s, appearances by the Cuban Giants were touted in “advertorials,” promotional speech masquerading as editorial content. Long a mainstay of African American baseball reporting, Baird raised the black baseball advertorial to a high art, going as far as to pay at least one sports journalist in Texas, under the table, in order to promote an appearance by one of his teams.47 In the St. Joseph Michigan Herald Press on June 4, 1952, for example, on the same page as a one-inch-high ad, stretching across all seven columns on the bottom of the page, is an advertorial with the headline “Baseball Blends With Dancing At Ausco Park.” It reads,

President Ty Baird of the visitors has signed up three entertainers, two musicians who play an instrument called a ‘bongoe’ (sic) and a dancing comedian named Peter Sel who reportedly will imitate a waltzing penguin.48

Taking a page from his occasional business partner, Syd Pollack, the baseball impresario responsible for keeping alive the Indianapolis Clowns, Baird insisted that good baseball was simply not enough to put fans in the seats. Competing with the same increasingly popular medium that brought Jackie Robinson into American homes, television, a crisply played, interracial, multi-ethnic ball game was not enough. Much like the fans of the previous century, who were faced with the choice of whether to spend their precious entertainment dollars and leisure time on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Nero’s fiddling, or exotic black baseball, residents of St. Joseph were lured to Edgewater Park in its “twin city,” Benton Harbor, to see the Cuban Giants take on the team fronted by Ausco Products, Inc., a major area brake manufacturer.49

Fans were attracted not just with the promise of the slugging prowess of “Havana’s Babe Ruth,” ‘Bambino’ Berrera,50 but with penguin imitators, accompanied on that most exotic of instruments, not heretofore seen in person in the upper Midwest, the bongo. For the well-heeled readers of the Herald-Press, African Americans calling themselves Cuban would no longer be acceptable. For an audience increasingly familiar with “real” Cubans like Desi Arnaz’s alter ego, Ricky Ricardo, who made his first appearance on their television screens in 1951, only authentic Cubans would do. Despite the desegregation of the major leagues and the increasing visibility of African American baseball players in advertising, racial and, in this case, ethnic stereotyping still served as popular entertainment and promotional fodder.

Although large sections of the country, South and North alike, resisted desegregation, both formal and informal, the blurring of the color line by African American baseball players did herald changes, pitifully slow, but changes nonetheless, in the way in which race was perceived in America. The legacy of Page Fence Giants, The Chauffeur’s Rest, the SWOC, and Payne’s School of Modeling and Charm is on display in advertising today, be it in print, on television, or online. One of baseball’s ubiquitous pitchmen, Derek Jeter, may be seen as the new image of the “all-American boy,” one formerly held by the likes of the blond-haired Mickey Mantle. Most tellingly, Jeter defines himself as neither black nor white but both. This self-definition, as much an example of the social construction of reality as Effa Manley’s self-definition as black, speaks volumes about perceptions of race in America. Though, as reviled slugger with precious few endorsement opportunities, Barry Bonds, notes, race prejudice is still very much a part of American culture, its presence in advertising is conspicuous by its absence. Today, manager Willie Randolph sells Subway sandwiches in a New York Mets uniform, not Page Fences.

ROBERTA J. NEWMAN is a member of New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Science, specializing in the cultural history of both baseball and advertising. The recipient of a SABR-Yoseloff grant, Dr. Newman has published a number of articles on the socio-historic implications on the intersection of baseball and advertising.

NOTES

1. “Amusements,” New York Times, July 5, 1888, 7.

2. Sol White. Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball with Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886-1936. Lincoln:Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995, 12.

3. “Amusements,”7.

4. “William F Cody, Buffalo Bill,” www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/buffalobill.htm, March 9, 2006.

5. Jerry Malloy, “The Strange Career of Sol White,” in Out of the Shadows: African American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson, ed., Bill Kirwin. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005, 64.

6. Jerry Malloy, “Sol White and the Origins of African American Baseball,” in White, xxxiii.

7. White,24.

8. Ibid.,24.

9. Ibid.,83.

10. Ibid.,52.

11. Ibid.,69.

12. Ibid.,79.

13. Neil Lanctot. Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. Philadelphia: Univ.of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 24.

14. White,116.

15. Geoffrey C. Ward. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. New York: Vintage, 2004, 67.

16. White, 7.

17. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States,” www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076.html, March 10, 2006.

18. Lanctot, 4.

19. Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson. A History of the Black Press. Washington, DC: Howard Univ. Press, 1997, 133.

20. Lawrence D. Hogan. Shades of Glory. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2006, 128.

21. Lanctot,190.

22. Janet Bruce. The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1985, 45.

23. Lanctot, 196.

24. Hilldale Club Ledgers, 1921-1922, Cash Thompson Collection, Box 3, African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA.

25. Philadelphia Tribune, May 3, 1928,11.

26. Philadelphia Tribune, May 16, 1925,10.

27. Undated photograph, Cash Thompson Collection, Box 6, African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA.

28. Catonsville Historical Society,“Catonsville History,” http://catonsvilleweb.com/history.html, September 28, 2006.

29. Baltimore Afro-American, October 22, 1920,8.

30. Hogan, 204.

31. Lanctot,6.

32. Hogan,204.

33. New York Amsterdam News, September 23,1939,14.

34. Paul Oliver. Blues Fell this Morning: Meaning in the Blues. London: Cambridge Univ Press, 1960, 132-135.

35. Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate.” New York: Da Capo, 1992, 95.

36. Lanctot,9.

37. “Piney Woods School Offers Youth Unusual Opportunity,” Chicago Defender, April 20, 1940, 8.

38. Alma and Paul Ellerbe, “Inchin’Along,” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 54, no. 2, April 1922, 45.

39. Ward, 40.

40. “What Is SWOC’s Batting Average?” Baltimore Afro American, September 20, 1941, 22.

41. New York Amsterdam News, April 6,1940,12.

42. New York Amsterdam News, August 23,1947.

43. East-West Baseball Classic: Official Souvenir Program, August 14, 1949. Collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY.

44. East-West Baseball Classic: Official Souvenir Program.

45. Ibid.

46. Negro American League Expenses from the East-West Game, 1943 and 1952, Ty Baird Papers, 414:2:2, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.

47. Baird Papers,414:2:4.

48. “Baseball Blends With Dancing at Ausco Park,” St. Joseph Michigan Herald Press, June 4, 1953, 12.

49. www.fortmiami.org/museum.html,October6,2006.

50. “Baseball Blends With Dancing at Ausco Park.”

Obviously, no history of major league baseball in Chicago could ignore the White Sox or Cubs. So, too, no account of the national pastime in Chicago would be complete if it did not include black baseball. The central role Chicago played in the history of the Negro Leagues can be indicated by considering (1) the astonishing career of Andrew “Rube” Foster, the Father of Black Baseball, and (2) the annual celebration of black baseball excellence that took place each year at Comiskey Park, the Negro League’s East- West All-Star Game. Both are as much a part of the rich fabric of Chicago’s baseball history as the “Homer in the Gloamin’” or the interminable foul balls off the bat of “Old Aches and Pains” himself.

First, there’s Rube Foster. Historian John Holway is right: “White baseball has never seen anyone quite like Rube Foster,” although I suspect that Al Spalding comes closest. Foster was a giant of a man who took giant steps in everything he did. He fit right into Chicago about the time that city planner Daniel Burnham was exhorting: Make No Little Plans! When Thomas Carlyle wrote that history is the biography of great men, he might be summing up black baseball for the entire first quarter of the 20th century. Rube Foster, cutting an unimaginably wide swath through Negro baseball, proved impervious to the Peter Principle; he never found a level of incompetence as a player, manager, team owner, league founder, or commissioner.

Foster’s later multifarious success in baseball can obscure his talent as a player. For the first decade of the century, he may have been the best pitcher in black (perhaps even white) baseball. He signed on with Frank Leland’s Chicago Union Giants, a powerful all- black team, in 1901, for $40 a month plus 15 (GL_cents sign) per meal. He was a strapping, pistol-toting, 22-year-old, right-handed son of a preacher from Calvert, Texas. His chief baseball weapon was a nasty screwball thrown from a submarine delivery. Later, he pitched in Philadelphia and New York. Along the way, he met a lot of people and made a lot of fans. White sportswriters compared him with the likes of Joss, Rusie, Radbourne, and Cy Young. Indeed, he got his nickname by whipping the A’s Waddell in an exhibition game. Some say that John McGraw hired him as a pitching coach and that he taught Christy Mathewson his “fadeaway.” There’s no denying that he certainly could pitch. No less a hitter than Honus Wagner called him “one of the greatest pitchers of all time. He was the smartest pitcher I have ever seen in all my years in baseball.”

The cleverness and guile that Wagner recognized in Rube’s makeup became increasingly apparent as his baseball presence expanded into larger and more extensive realms. In 1907 he returned to Chicago, this time to stay, as player-manager of the Leland Giants. Upset at the team’s share of the gate when the Giants played white teams, Foster convinced Frank Leland to let him try his hand at negotiating the split. Soon he was able to demand a 50-50 split, and never again did a Rube Foster team play for less than half the proceeds.

The Leland Giants played in Auburn Park at 79th and Wentworth (and, at 69th and Halsted and, at 61st and Racine) became a perennial powerhouse in Chicago’s strong, integrated city league. This circuit included the talented semi-pro teams with large followings such as the Logan Squares, Gunthers, and Duffy Florals. Major leaguers such as Johnny Kling, Joe Tinker, and Johnny Evers often picked up a few extra bucks by playing as ringers on these teams. The Leland Giants (and, later, Chicago American Giants) also had great success during the harvest season, when, for about a month each year, the best touring teams from the Midwest converged on Chicago for some ferocious baseball battles.

The 1907 Leland Giants had a record of 110-10, including 48 straight wins. Following the 1909 season, the Leland Giants played a three-game exhibition series against the Cubs, who had finished second in the National League that season. The Cubs won all three games, by scores of 6-5, 4-1, and 1-0. Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown won two games and Orval Overall won one in the hard-fought series, which was covered by the white press, including the Tribune’s (GL-ital) young sportswriter Ring Lardner. Foster tried throughout the remainder of his career to get the Cubs to consent to a rematch, but never succeeded. This was partly due to Commissioner Landis, who, during the 1920s put the kibosh on annual exhibition series that the Chicago American Giants played against a team of white major leaguers put together by Harry Heilmann.

By 1910, Foster had compiled what he considered to be the greatest team of all time, black or white. Featuring such stars as John Henry Lloyd, Pete Hill, Grant “Home Run” Johnson, Bruce Petway, Frank Wickware, and Pat Dougherty, the Leland Giants won 123 games and lost only six!

In 1911 Foster entered into a partnership with a white businessman named John Schorling. Together they bought the ballpark that Charles Comiskey was vacating as he moved his White Sox into their sparkling new stadium, the current Comiskey Park, on 35th and Shields. The Old Roman’s old ball park, at 39th and Wentworth, thus became the first home for one of the greatest sustained success stories in the history of Negro sport in America: the Chicago American Giants. This great team would cast a giant shadow for the remaining years of apartheid baseball in the United States. So vast was this team’s impact that the inclusion of the word “American” in its title, whether due to greatness or good fortune, proved apt indeed. And so clear was Rube Foster’s imprint on them, that they were often referred to as simply “Rube Foster’s Giants.”

Like all successful black baseball teams, the Chicago American Giants could survive only by touring extensively and abandoning the notion of an “off season.” Traveling to areas as remote from Chicago as the West Coast and Cuba, Rube Foster’s team created excitement, a festive carnival atmosphere wherever it played. With Foster insisting on nothing less than first-class accouterments, what a spectacle it must have been when the American Giants burst into town in the epitome of opulence: their own private Pullman coach! Dave Malarcher, Foster’s star third baseman, who later succeeded him as manager of the team, recall:

I never shall forget the first time I saw Rube Foster. I never saw such a well-equipped ball club in my whole life! I was astounded. Every day they came out in a different set of beautiful uniforms, allkinds of bats and balls, all the best kind of equipment.

The American Giants traveled everywhere, as you know. No other team travel as many miles as the American Giants. When Rube gave them the name American Giant, he really selected a name. That was a good idea, because it became the greatest ball club that ever was. That’s right: the way he played, the way he equipped his team, the way he paid his men, the way he treated his men, the miles that they traveled.

As a manager, Foster’s style was ruthlessly aggressive. He built his attack around relentless speed and hustle. He consistently defeated teams that hit for higher averages or more power by using bold base running. He was an exponent of the hit-and-run bunt, wherein a fast base runner would advance two bases on a bunt play, usually going from first to third, but often scoring from second base. All of Foster’s players, even his rare power hitters, such as the Cuban Cristobal Torriente, were expected to be excellent bunters. Bunting drills included laying down bunts into Rube’s own strategically placed hat. Foster’s passion for the bunted ball was demonstrated in a 1921 game against the Indianapolis ABCs. The American Giants fell behind by the score of 18-0, with only two innings left. Foster signaled for bunts on eleven (11!) straight hitters. A couple of grand slams later, the Giants had scored nine runs in each inning to tie the game, 18-18. Foster often used his ubiquitous pipe to send in plays, waving it in certain ways, or sending up a couple puffs of smoke. He also used it as an implement of discipline, thumping the skull of a player who missed or played through one of his signs.

Off the field, Foster could be charming. He often entertained players, writers, and fans with stories from his colorful career, addressing everyone, male and female alike, as “Darling” in his Texas drawl. But once a game began, he was strictly business, and would not tolerate disobedience. One of Rube’s players, Arthur Hardy, recalled Foster’s firm manner:

I wouldn’t call him reserved, but he wasn’t free and easy. You see, Rube was a natural psychologist. Now he didn’t know what psychology was and he probably couldn’t spell it, but he realized that he couldn’t fraternize and still maintain discipline. He wasn’t harsh, but he was strict. His dictums were not unreasonable, but if you broke one he’d clamp down on you. If he stuck a fine on you, you paid it—there was no appeal from it. He was dictatorial in that sense.

He was able to command the respect and admiration of his players, many of whom went on to successful careers as managers after their playing days were over. There are those who speculate that he purposely cultivated his acquaintanceships with white managers such as Connie Mack and John McGraw in the hope that one day he would be asked to form a black major league team. Perhaps. But baseball minds surely would recognize a fellow member in the brotherhood of great managers.

As great a player, owner, and manager as he was, Rube Foster’s most impressive accomplishment was the creation of the Negro National League in 1920. (An all-Negro Eastern League was formed in 1923). Among the many changes wrought by World War I was a redistribution of the black population of the country. When Rube Foster first arrived in Chicago at the turn of the century, Negroes comprised only about two percent of the population of the city. By the middle of the century’s second decade, however, blacks from the South were pouring into Chicago and the other large urban centers in the North.

This great migration occurred just as Foster was in the process of establishing the Chicago American Giants. In 1917 alone, the black population of Chicago increased by 65,000. But this unprecedented population boom was not an unmixed blessing. After the war, racial tensions throughout the nation intensified, resulting in a series of race riots, the worst one occurring in Chicago, where 23 blacks and 15 whites died. (Foster’s team was on the road at the time and had to postpone its return home since their ballpark was occupied by soldiers.)

While the advantages of creating a Negro League were obvious to many, it had been unsuccessfully attempted several times, as far back as 1887 and as recently as 1906 and 1911. But it remained for someone of the prominence and perspicacity of Rube Foster to accomplish the Bismarkian task of pulling together the divergent independent teams into a united league. What Hulbert and Spalding did for the National League and Johnson and Comiskey did for the American League, Rube Foster alone did for the Negro National League. Created at a meeting held in Kansas City in February 1920, the NNL’s charter members, besides Foster’s Chicago American Giants, were: Joe Green’s Chicago Giants, the Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs, St. Louis Giants, Detroit Stars, Cuban Stars, and Dayton Marcos.

Rube Foster was the de facto czar of this league until his disabling illness in 1926. From his office at Indiana and Wentworth, he ran the NNL as a benevolent autocrat. Realizing the need for a semblance of balanced competition, he moved players around from team to team, even depriving his own Chicago American Giants of the great Oscar Charleston, whom he sent to Indianapolis. When the Dayton franchise, which he financed out of his own pocket, failed, he moved it to Columbus, Ohio.

When teams ran out of money on the road, he wired money so they could return home. When teams ran short of dough and had problems meeting their payroll, Foster advanced loans for players’ pay. Even among such energetic and successful owners as J. L. Wilkinson of the Kansas City Monarchs and C. Taylor of the Indianapolis ABCs, Foster was acknowledged as the undisputed kingpin of the league, overseeing matters great and small. He even composed the league’s motto: “We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea,” an accurate analogy for Rube’s role within the league itself.

The Negro National League never totally established stability and unity over a long period of time. Compromises had to be made to accommodate more traditional forms of income (such as exhibitions and barnstorming), and teams played unbalanced schedules. The league turned out to be an aggregation of essentially independent teams. But it did succeed in giving concrete form to the model of self-help and self-reliance, free from white interference or control, envisioned by Booker T. Washington as the best hope for the well-being of the race. In forming the NNL, Foster said he wanted “to create a profession that would equal the earning capacity of any other profession,” to “keep Colored baseball from the control of whites,” and “do something concrete for the loyalty of the Race.” The Chicago American Giants provided a paragon of black excellence. He set a standard for those who followed to admire and emulate. That was his real genius.

Rube Foster died December 9, 1930, after spending the last four years of his life in an asylum for the mentally ill in Kankakee, Illinois. One of the greatest baseball minds of all time suddenly and sadly collapsed, and he was remanded to the institution by a judge. Black Chicagoans did not forget his contribution to their community. Thousands paid homage as the body of the most famous black in Chicago lay in state at a funeral home. Fifty-one years later, Rube Foster became the tenth veteran of the Negro Leagues to be enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

Neither the Chicago American Giants nor the Negro National League as Foster built them survived long after his death. The Great Depression had a devastating impact upon the already impoverished black baseball fans of the country. However, in the 1930s a new league was formed, largely under the leadership of Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee. The Chicago American Giants were revived, and continued to play a prominent (though less opulent) role in Negro baseball through the remaining years of segregated baseball.

In the 1930s and 1940s Chicago became the mecca of Negro baseball, as Comiskey Park was the site of the most spectacular annual event in black sports: The East-West All-Star Game. The Negro League World Series, which pitted the East Coast and Midwest champions against each other, never attained the glamour or aura of historical moment that the major league World Series did. Instead, the focal point of the season in the Negro leagues was the mid-season East-West Game. (Several times second games, usually called “All-Star Classics,” were played in various eastern cities, but never achieved the heights of the annual Comiskey Park extravagance). When the current owners of the White Sox desert that fine and noble structure known as Comiskey Park, they will be abandoning the home of one of the most distinguished elements of the heritage of black baseball in America.

The East-West Game originated as the brainchild of Roy Sparrow, an aide to Gus Greenlee, in 1932, a year before the major leagues’ first midsummer classic, which also was played at Comiskey Park. The game quickly established itself as the undisputed centerpiece of the black baseball season, an unsurpassed festival of black baseball pride. Chicago’s Grand Hotel became the center of the Negro League universe as thousands flocked to Chicago for the East-West Game. League cities even sent bathing beauties to represent their teams, adding to the hoopla. In 1935, the game was tied in with Joe Louis’ fight with King Levinsky. Year after year, railroads added cars to all trains headed to Chicago to accommodate the fans eager to see their all-stars play. By the 1940s, the game had become such an event that the Chicago Defender, one of the major Negro newspapers in the country, would refer to a crowd of 35,000 as “disappointing!”

The Negro League’s All-Star Game preceded the major league’s by a year. In fact, the black event often outdrew its white counterpart’s during the 1940s.

Attendance figures were regarded as omens for eventual integration by many. At a time when attendance in many major league cities was slipping, the Negro Leagues showed impressive growth. The Kansas City Monarchs regularly outdrew the Blues, the Yankees’ minor league team in that city. In 1942, the Monarchs, with Satchel Paige, defeated a team of white major leaguers in Wrigley Field before 30,000 fans, while only 19,000 watched the White Sox host the St. Louis Browns on the same day. Such figures encouraged many Negro leaders to hope that this would be their entree into the major leagues. A market this vast, they calculated, would simply be too lucrative for organized baseball to ignore. And, in fact, one of the motives frequently attributed to Branch Rickey in his decision to sign Jackie Robinson was his desire to capitalize on the expanding Negro market that he was shrewd enough to notice.

And attendance figures at Comiskey Park for the East-West Games were very imposing indeed. By the time the fourth game was played, in 1936, the Negro League All-Star Game attendance exceeded that of the major league counterpart. The black game also outdrew the white game in 1938,1942,1943,1944,1946, and 1947—with no game held by the major leagues in 1945 due to wartime restraints. Attendance hit its peak in 1943, when 51,723 fans jammed into Comiskey Park. In the following year, 46,247 watched the East-West Game, while only 29,589 watched the major league All-Star game at Forbes Field.

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).

Those of us who discovered baseball during our formative years in the 1950s confronted a paradox which our youthful minds could not quite appreciate. We knew of Jackie Robinson and his heroic efforts to end segregation, and we gloried in the achievements of Black players, who only a decade earlier could never have appeared in a big league game. Yet we had no sense of where the Roy Campanellas and Don Newcombes, the Larry Dobys and Monte Irvins, had learned their craft and polished their skills while awaiting the call of the majors. For most of us, these players had materialized out of thin air, sent by the gods of baseball to thrill and delight and to usher in a golden age of brotherhood and base stealing. That there had once existed a flourishing domain in America known as the Negro Leagues had been instantly forgotten. To know that several such teams still struggled on the margins of the national pastime would have greatly surprised us.

Thus, the Negro Leagues, “invisible” during their best years, almost totally disappeared from American memory in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the Black community, baseball fans savored the hard-won fruits of integration and turned their gaze away from the legacy of Black baseball. “The big league doors suddenly opened one day,” wrote sportswriter Wendell Smith, “and when Negro players walked in, Negro baseball walked out.” Not until 1970, when Robert Peterson published his path-breaking Only the Ball Was White, did the veil that had dropped over the Negro Leagues begin to lift. Today [1986 -Ed.], while the stars of Black baseball remain under-represented in the Hall of Fame, they have received a far fairer share of attention in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s, giving us a broad appreciation of the role of the Negro Leagues in baseball history and in the culture and community they served.

Nowhere is the neglect of the Negro Leagues more apparent than in the two primary academic histories of baseball. Both Harold Seymour and David Voigt in their multi-volume studies deal briefly with the exclusion of Black players in the 1880s. Black ballplayers then disappear from both narratives, reappearing again only in Volume III of Voigt’s work in a brief prelude to the Robinson saga. The Negro Leagues fared no better in accounts of baseball integration. Most biographies of Robinson written in the 1950s, including Robinson’s own Wait Till Next Year, co-authored with Carl Rowan, mention his stint with the Kansas City Monarchs, but provide few details other than a critique of the heavy travel schedule and loose style of play.

Those determined to learn more about the Negro Leagues in the 1950s and 1960s had to search diligently. The standard work on the topic was Sol White’s Official Baseball Guide. White, a former professional player, chronicled the nineteenth century travails of Blacks in organized baseball, their ultimate exclusion, and the formation of the early Black barnstorming clubs. But White’s book, originally published in 1907, had long since passed out of print. (Camden House in South Carolina reissued this classic in 1983.)

Brief glimpses of life in the Negro Leagues could be found in at least two of the books about the first Black players to cross baseball’s color line. Although “Doc” Young’s 1953 volume, Great Negro Baseball Stars And How They Made the Major Leagues, focused primarily on those players who had advanced from the Negro Leagues into the majors, chapters on the Black stars of the pre-integration era and those in the minor leagues offered insightful information. A skillful, perceptive writer whose talents rank him with Wendell Smith and Sam Lacy, the deans of Black sportswriting, Young provided an introduction to the stars, if not the world, of Black baseball. In 1964 Jackie Robinson provided another overview of the integration process in Baseball Has Done It. This wonderfully revealing collection of interviews with Black major leaguers also included reminiscences by Negro League stars Terris McDuffie and Bill Yancey.

Player autobiographies offered other information on Black baseball. Roy Campanella’s It’s Good To Be Alive (1959) gave one of the best accounts of life in the Negro Leagues. Campanella chronicled his discovery by the Bacharach Giants as a 15-year-old prospect, his later career with the Baltimore Elite Giants, and his apprenticeship as a catcher under the tutelage of Biz Mackey. Campanella’s account, still fascinating reading, introduces the reader to barnstorming in the United States and winter ball in the Carribean. Intermingled with the interminable travels and poor accommodations was the special amalgam—power and speed, “spitballs, shine balls, and emery balls”—which characterized Negro League play. Campanella’s frustrations of being relegated to a Jim Crow league are evident, yet he concludes, “A Negro ballplayer playing ball in the United States might not have lived like a king, but he didn’t live bad either.”

Far less enlightening is Satchel Paige’s autobiographical effort, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, published in 1962. Paige’s legendary reputation had always transcended the Negro Leagues and his brief, but successful, major league stint had firmly fixed him in the public mind. Writing in a folksy style, fully in keeping with the image he had long cultivated, Paige and co-author David Lipman dwelled more on the pitcher’s skills, eccentricities, and exploits than Black baseball itself. Nonetheless, the weak administrative structure of the Negro Leagues and the team-hopping habits of the players are readily apparent.

For the remainder of the sixties, books about the Negro Leagues or books even mentioning the era of Black baseball, remained rare. Both Willie Mays and Hank Aaron devoted a few pages to their brief tenures with the Birmingham Black Barons and Indianapolis Clowns respectively in their early autobiographies Willie Mays: My Life In and Out of Baseball (1966) and Aaron, r.f. ( 1968). Jack Orr included a chapter on the Negro Leagues in The Black Athlete in 1969. Little existed to sate the curiosity of those who remembered Black baseball or younger people who had seen references to it.

The long drought came to an end in 1970 with the publication of Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White. Poring over Black newspapers and interviewing former players, Peterson painstakingly pieced together the history of Blacks in baseball from the days of Bud Fowler, a nineteenth-century second baseman, to Jackie Robinson’s historic breakthrough. Peterson introduced a new generation of readers to John Henry Lloyd, “Cool Papa” Bell, Rube Foster, and a host of other Negro League stars. Appendices to Only the Ball Was White included capsule biographies of Negro League greats, year-by-year standings for the leagues, box scores for the East-West All Star Games, and an alphabetical listing of hundreds of players and the teams they had performed for. Peterson’s book, marked a watershed in the historiography of the Negro Leagues, opening up a broader interest in the research of others and spawning a new generation of Negro League historians, most of whom had never seen a segregated contest.

Two events in 1971 further contributed to the sudden growth of interest in Black baseball. The National Baseball Hall of Fame, succumbing to pressures from fans and the media, belatedly began to recognize the Negro Leagues by admitting Satchel Paige and setting up a Negro League committee to consider additional nominees. (The Hall of Fame insensitively planned to commemorate these stars in a separate section until protests of “Jim Crow” forced full inclusion.) In August 1971 the “Cooperstown 16” launched the Society for American Baseball Research. As the organization grew, it established a Negro League committee to coordinate research and facilitate communication among members interested in Black baseball. SABR journals, most notably the Baseball Research Journal and later The National Pastime, offered a place for Negro League writers to publish their works and a forum for discussion.

The new breed of Negro League aficionados faced a difficult task in recreating baseball in the Jim Crow era. As Peterson had warned, unearthing the history of the Negro Leagues was “like trying to find a single Black strand through a ton of spaghetti.” Team records were largely unavailable. Major newspapers and mainstream sports journals like The Sporting News had rarely covered Black games. Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender offered a more promising source, but only major public and university libraries held significant collections of back issues. As a result, oral history became the primary tool of the Negro League chroniclers. The most prolific of the interviewers was John Holway, whose Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (1975) became the model for the genre. Holway had sought out Negro Leaguers since the 1960s and his collection includes talks with 18 players and Effa Manley, the former owner of the Newark Eagles. Using their own words, the Black athletes brought alive the itinerant lifestyle and flamboyant play of the Negro Leagues. One controversial theme ran through both the player accounts and Holway’s writing: that in the age of Jim Crow the quality of Black baseball was equal, if not superior, to the major league variety. In addition to editing the colorful accounts of the long-forgotten stars, Holway compiled records of games between Black players and major league squads between 1886 and 1948. In the 445 contests which he unearthed, Holway discovered that Blacks had won 269 and lost only 172, with four ties.

In 1973 two unique and entertaining looks at the Negro Leagues appeared simultaneously. Some Are Called Clowns by Bill Heward is one of the most unusual and delightful baseball books ever written. Heward, an aspiring pitcher, described his three seasons in the early 1970s with the Indianapolis Clowns, the final remnant of the old Negro Leagues. Heward complements his own experiences on the barnstorming tour with a keen sense of the club’s history. The result is a fine blend of entertainment and analysis, a glimpse into a dying world which has now passed into oblivion. Novelist William Brashier offered another look at Black barnstormers in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, a fictional account which became a very entertaining and underrated feature film.

By the mid-1970s national interest in Black baseball had reached a level surpassing anything that had existed while the leagues were still alive. Ocania Chalk amassed information on the Negro Leagues in Pioneers of Black Sports (1975). Art Rust Jr. combined his own reminiscences with those of Negro League players in “Get That Nigger Off The Field” (1976). Sam’s Legacy, a second novel dealing with Black baseball appeared in 1974. By 1977, the Hall of Fame had admitted eight Negro Leaguers, before abruptly and inexplicably disbanding the special committee which considered them, effectively barring the door to future admissions [until later resumed under a new committee].

Long ignored by the media and the baseball establishment, players like Buck Leonard, Ray Dandridge, and Willie Wells found themselves besieged by amateur and sometimes professional historians armed with tape recorders. Interviews with former Negro League players began to appear in numerous regional and national periodicals and in SABR publications. In one of the best of these interviews, Pulitzer Prize winner Theodore Rosengarten teamed with Lorenzo “Piper” Davis to produce “Reading the Hops” in Southern Exposure. James A. Riley and Dick Clark produced additional articles based on player reminiscences. In 1983 Riley produced a Who’s Who of Negro League play, The All-Time All-Stars of Black Baseball, which profiled several hundred athletes who had appeared during the Jim Crow era. John Holway continued his contributions with a series of short profiles including Bullet Joe and the Monarchs (1984) and Smokey Joe and the Cannonball (1985), as well as numerous articles.

Two books by Negro League participants supplemented the work of the oral historians. In 1976 Effa Manley published her own account, Negro Baseball … Before Integration, which unfortunately proved far less outspoken and interesting than the author herself. The following year, Quincy Trouppe, a former catcher, who had once had a “cup of coffee” in the majors, offered his autobiography 20 Years Too Soon, which lovingly recreated his decades in the Negro Leagues, on the barnstorming tours, in Latin America, and finally in organized baseball. Trouppe’s book, generously decorated with photographs from his scrapbooks, contains a wealth of information about Black players and Black baseball.

The oral histories and autobiographies of the 1970s and 1980s capture the flavor of life in the Negro Leagues and greatly enhance our knowledge, but as analytical tools they have severe limitations. Human memories tend toward the exaggerated and romantic. They deal largely with selected moments and places rather than the broader picture. As oral history piles upon oral history, the reader often receives variations on the same theme with little focus or historical direction. Contrary to popular opinion, oral histories do not speak for themselves; they require commentary to place them into historical perspective.

Often, good biographers will provide this perspective, but book-length chronicles of Negro League stars have been rare. In 1978 William Brashler published Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues, a good effort which amply demonstrates the pitfalls of books of this type. Brashler knows the Negro Leagues and writes well, but apparently could not gather enough information to fill a book about the great catcher. This slim volume includes both Brashler’s personal recollections (not of Gibson, but of Ted Williams) and a chapter on what happened to Gibson’s best friend, Sam Bankhead, after Gibson’s death. Thus Brashler’s book is pleasurable, and in spots, revealing, but ultimately unsatisfying. One author who has attempted to move beyond the usual Negro League focus is Jerry Malloy. Malloy has published two excellent articles in The National Pastime. In “Out at Home” (1983) Malloy gives a detailed account of the 1887 International League season: the key turning point for Black exclusion in the nineteenth century. “Black Bluejackets” [1985, and reproduced later in this book -Ed] examines the history of the Great Lakes Naval Station team, which included numerous Negro League stars and future major leaguers Larry Doby and Chuck Harmon during World War II.

In the early 1980s, academia belatedly discovered the Negro Leagues. My own volume on baseball integration, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, appeared in 1983. Although primarily concerned with Black players in organized baseball, the Negro Leagues took their rightful place as an integral part of the story. In the 1940s and 1950s they became the fount of major and minor league talent, an important transitional agency in the recruitment of Black players. I chronicled their ultimate decline and the fate of the great Black stars of that age, and analyzed the manner in which Negro League playing styles transformed the national pastime and improved the game.

Baseball’s Great Experiment was published simultaneously with Donn Rogosin’s Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues, the first major overview of the subject since Peterson’s book. Rogosin’s work derived from his Ph.D. thesis in American Studies and offered a rich cultural panorama of “The World That Negro Baseball Made.” Rogosin addressed not only the activities on the field or the internal league dynamics but the importance of baseball in Black communities during the first half of the twentieth century. Rogosin stressed the origins of the players, their role in Black America, their itinerant lifestyle, and the “Latin Connection.” Based on extensive interviews, Invisible Men provided a systematic and in-depth look at the Black athletic experience in the years before integration.

While both Rogosin’s book and my own received widespread publicity, a more recent study, The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball (1985) by Janet Bruce, has gone largely unnoticed. This is unfortunate, because not only has Bruce produced one of the best books about the Negro Leagues, but her work marks an important new direction for baseball history in general. Relying not only on oral histories, but local newspapers and archival sources, Bruce examines the often talked about, but seldom studied, relationship between team and community. She places the history of the Monarchs firmly within the context of the evolution of Black life in Kansas City, describing how Blacks embraced their baseball representatives and where the team itself fit into Black society. Bruce also traces the impact of the club’s decline on Kansas City itself. Historians studying any baseball team, Black or White, will benefit greatly by Bruce’s pioneer work.

A soon-to-be-published manuscript, Rob Ruck’s Sandlot Seasons, takes a similar, yet equally original approach. Ruck studied the history of Black sports in Pittsburgh, the home of both the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. Ruck’s emphasis, however, is not only on professional sports, but on their relationship to the games played in the city’s sandlots. En route, he takes us on a tour of the Black community rarely seen in most histories, from bourgeoisie to numbers runners, and from schoolyards to stadiums. While some readers may find both Ruck’s and Bruce’s books too “academic,” no serious student of Black baseball should bypass them.

Thus, after forty years of baseball integration, and two decades of relative obscurity, the Negro Leagues have become a fertile ground for both baseball history and broader sociological approaches. Black baseball has attracted both widespread interest among baseball “buffs” and a level of respectability in academia. Dozens of taped interviews exist as primary sources for future writers. Yet much work remains. Additional team studies, analyses of the barnstorming phenomenon, and bicultural attempts to understand Latin baseball represent but a few of the areas requiring further efforts. If indeed baseball played a significant role in the Black community, we must also assess how the disappearance of the Negro Leagues affected Black culture. No one has yet attempted a thorough analysis of how integration changed the way in which baseball is played or the large number of sons of Negro Leaguers who have reached the major leagues. In addition, evidence must continue to be amassed on behalf of the many Black athletes still unfairly barred from the Hall of Fame.

Those who tread in this arena must also bear in mind the ultimate irony of baseball integration. The Jackie Robinson saga stands as one of the most sacrosanct in our folklore. It symbolizes American fair play and the beginning of the end for the national disgrace that was “Jim Crow.” The universal acceptance of Blacks in baseball stands as a testament to the achievement of Robinson and those who followed him. No one would question that the appearance of the Negro Leagues marked a step forward in our social evolution. Yet something vital and distinctively American died with the passing of Black baseball. At their height, the Negro Leagues were a $2 million empire, largely controlled by Blacks, employing hundred of players and offering a form of cultural identification to millions of fans. Today more Blacks play in the major leagues, yet fewer make their living from baseball. Black athletes serve as role models for both Black and White youth, but they do so in an economic and organizational context far removed from their own ethnic and racial communities. We cannot resuscitate the Negro Leagues, nor would we want to. Nonetheless as the efforts of Negro League historians demonstrate, we can honor them and utilize them as portals to our divided past.

Negro League Bibliography

The following is a list of books and articles referred to in this review. This is by no means a complete listing of all writings on the Negro Leagues.

Aaron, Henry as told to Furman Bisher. Aaron, r.f. (Cleveland World Publishing, 1968).

Brashler, William. Bingo Long and His Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

—. Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

Bruce, Janet. The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball (University Press of Kansas, 1985).

Campanella, Roy. It’s Good To Be Alive (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1959).

Chalk, Ocania. Pioneers of Black Sport (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1975).

Heward, Bill and Oat, Dimitri V. Some Are Called Clowns: A Season With the Last of the Great Barnstorming Teams (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1974).

Holway, John. Bullet Joe and the Monarchs (Washington, D.C.: Capital Press, 1984).

—· Smokey Joe and the Cannonball (Washington, D.C.: Capital Press, 1985).

—· Voices From the Great Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975).

Malloy, Jerry. “Black Bluejackets,” The National Pastime (1985): 72-77.

—· “Out At Home,” The National Pastime (1983): 14-28.

Manley, Effa and Leon Hardwick. Negro Baseball … Before Integration (Chicago: Adams Press, 1976).

Mays, Willie and Charles Einstein. Willie Mays: My Life In and Out of Baseball (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972).

Neugeborn, Jay. Sam’s Legacy (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1974).

Orr, Jack. The Black Athlete: His Story in American History (New York: Pyramid Books, 1970).

Paige, Leroy “Satchel” and David Lipman. Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever (New York: Doubleday, 1962).

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970).

Riley, James A. The All-Time All-Stars of Black Baseball (TK Publishers, 1983).

Robinson, Jackie. Baseball Has Done It (New York: Lippincott, 1964).

Rogosin, Donn. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues (New York: Atheneum, 1983).

Rosengarten, Theodore. “Reading the Hops: Recollections of Lorenzo ‘Piper’ Davis and the Negro Baseball League,” Southern Exposure (1977): 62-79.

Rowan, Carl T. with Jackie Robinson. Wait Till Next Year (New York: Random House, 1960).

Ruck, Rob. Sandlot Seasons (Evanston: U. of Illinois Press, 1986).

Rust, Art, Jr. “Get That Nigger Off The Field” (New York: Delacorte, 1976).

Seymour, Harold. Baseball. Vol. 1: The Early Years (New York: Oxford, 1960).

—· Vol. 2: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford, 1971).

Trouppe, Quincy. 20 Years Too Soon (Los Angeles: Sands Enterprises, 1977).

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford, 1983).

Voigt, David. American Baseball, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966, 1970, 1983).

White, Sol. Sol White’s Official Baseball Guide (Columbia: Camden House, 1983).

Young, Andrew S. “Doc”. Great Negro Baseball Stars and How They Made the Major Leagues (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1953).

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Vol. 4, No. 2, Winter 1985.

“It is always wrong to consider that something which begins in a small way cannot rapidly become important.” — Plutarch

On June 5, 1942, Doreston Luke Carmen Jr. became the thin end of a very large wedge. That was the day the nineteen-year-old native of Galveston, Texas, became the first black recruit at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois. Having been jettisoned from the United States Navy during the interwar years, blacks were being allowed back into the armed forces’ most exclusive white man’s club.

The large scale reentry of blacks into the Navy would have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences, not only for the Navy, but for American society as a whole. The United States’ entry into World War II suddenly made the armed forces the largest employer of blacks in the country, by far. Historian Morris J. MacGregor points out that in altering race relations “… the armed forces could command where others could only persuade.” And command they did, to the extent that black participation in the military during World War II became the origin of the modern civil rights movement in the nation.

In baseball, as well, World War II furnished a peek into the future. The rigid barriers of segregation gradually broke down on the fields of play as well as on the fields of war. Conflict over racial policy in the military services foretold the coming of the civil rights movement, and blacks on military service teams were unheralded and unwitting precursors of what Jules Tygiel has termed “baseball’s great experiment”: the breaching of the color line.

One such group of ballplayers came together to form a team at Great Lakes in 1944. The Great Lakes white team, the Bluejackets, under the direction of Mickey Cochrane, was well publicized and highly regarded. Some called it “the seventeenth major league team.” This is an account of another team from Great Lakes, the all-black team created in 1944—the Great Lakes Negro Varsity, as they were called. In their own way, these “Black Bluejackets” helped clear the path for Jackie Robinson.

The Negro and the Navy

By the end of World War II, the Navy had adopted the most progressive racial policies of any of the military services. But three and a half years earlier, when the United States entered the war, it was the most blatantly racist. Black men had served with distinction on mixed crews in every war since the Revolution, but during the course of WWI, the “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy,” they were relegated to the menial chores of the Messman’s (or Steward’s) Branch. During the 1920s the black man virtually disappeared from the Navy, as Filipinos and Guamanians served as “seagoing bellhops.” In 1932, with the independence of the Philippines approaching, the Navy once again began to recruit blacks, but only as “chambermaids of the Navy,” in the Messman’s Branch. Escalating manpower requirements after Pearl Harbor changed this. Civil rights groups mounted a “Double-V Campaign” to defeat racism at home as well as fascism abroad. The Army pressured the Navy to assist in assimilating blacks into the armed forces. Franklin Roosevelt, prompted by a combination of idealism and political considerations, also played a key role in forcing the Navy to open its ranks to blacks. The Navy’s initial efforts to modify its racial policies often failed because the decision to do so was thrust upon it by outsiders. Consider:

• Not only were there no black men at Annapolis (in fact, the Navy had no black officers until 1944), the Midshipmen refused to allow a black man from Harvard University to participate in a lacrosse game.
• In July 1941 a Navy commission determined that “Negro characteristics” made black recruits suitable only for messman’s duty. Six months later, the Commandant of the Marine Corps viewed the inclusion of blacks in the Navy as “absolutely tragic” and said that since the Negro could serve in the Army, his desire to enter the Navy was an attempt “to break into a club that doesn’t want him.”
• Throughout the war, the Navy, as well as the other armed services, segregated blood banks, despite the utter lack of scientific evidence to support such a policy. Not lost upon the black press was the fact that Dr. Charles Drew, a pioneer in the development of plasma transfer techniques and the director of the first Red Cross blood bank, was a black man.
• Black recruits eventually stationed at Great Lakes were required to spend Sunday evenings singing spirituals in an ill-considered attempt to foster black pride. Many blacks, especially those from the North, found this practice repellent and demeaning.

It is little wonder that Dennis D. Nelson, one of the first thirteen blacks to become Navy officers in 1944, recalled that “Recruits who felt they had been treated as sub-citizens found it likely they would be classified as sub-sailors as well.” Another one of the first black ensigns, James Hair, remembers a very hostile atmosphere at Great Lakes, as though the attitude was that “These n******s coming in is gonna change the Navy.”

The rigid segregation that the Navy imposed in training, housing, and— as we shall see—sports gave many blacks a dose of government-sanctioned discrimination that they had never experienced before. The situation of Larry Doby typified that of many recruits. Doby, who had been a popular star athlete at an integrated high school in Paterson, New Jersey, looked back upon his plunge into racism in the Navy:

“… I enlisted and wore a US sailor’s uniform at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. For the first time I was conscious of discrimination and segregation as never before. It was a shock. If you’ve never been exposed to it from the outside and it suddenly hits you, you can’t take it. I didn’t crack up; I just went into my shell. … I thought: ‘This is a crying shame when I’m here to protect my country.’ But I couldn’t do anything about it—I was under Navy rules and regulations and had to abide by them or face the consequences.”

Mickey Cochrane’s Bluejackets

In the spring of 1945, Chicago Sun columnist James S. Kearns wrote that “the most successful producer of winning sports teams in America the last three years [has been the] U.S. Naval Training Center at Great Lakes.” The following chart helps explain how he came to this conclusion:

GREAT LAKES SPORTS TEAMS
1942 to Spring 1945

*No home football field in 1942

In these three baseball seasons, the team was managed by Mickey Cochrane; in 1945 Bob Feller and Pinky Higgins managed it. Kit Crissey, in Athletes Away, has written that “The Navy scored a tremendous public relations coup when it recruited… Mickey Cochrane…. Many professional players specifically chose the Navy and Great Lakes so they could play for him, and thus he was able to field outstanding teams in 1942, 1943 and 1944.” During these three seasons, Cochrane managed 39 men who played in the major leagues before, during, or after the war.

One such major leaguer was Chet Hajduk, whose career consisted of a lone, and unsuccessful, pinch-hitting appearance for the White Sox in 1941. But Cochrane also managed two players who later would join him in the Hall of Fame: Billy Herman and Johnny Mize. Twenty-nine of these Great Lakes Bluejackets played in the major leagues for at least five years; and 18 of them played in at least eight big league seasons: Frankie Baumholtz, Tom Ferrick, Joe Grace, Billy Herman, Si Johnson, Bob Klinger, Johnny Lucadello, Johnny McCarthy, Barney McCosky, Johnny Mize, Don Padgett, Eddie Pellagrini, Frankie Pytlak, Johnny Rigney, Schoolboy Rowe, Johnny Schmitz, Virgil Trucks, and Gene Woodling. (The 1945 team, which went 25-6, included ten players with major league careers, among them: Bob Feller, Pinky Higgins, Denny Galehouse, Johnny Gorsica, Walker Cooper, Johnny Groth, and Ken Keltner.)

The 1942 team, with an overall record of 63-14, was the only one of Cochrane’s Bluejacket squads to have a losing record (4-6) against major league competition. The following year, the sailors won seven of thirteen games against big league teams. However, this 1943 team, which compiled a 52-10-1 record, was 0-1 against the Negro Leagues. In the only game ever played during World War II between the Bluejackets and an all-black team, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe’s Chicago American Giants defeated the Navy team, 7-3. With Lt. Bob Elson announcing the game, the American Giants battered Tom Ferrick and Vern Olsen for seven runs on 17 hits through seven innings. Johnny Schmitz finished up, allowing no runs on two hits in the final two innings. Ralph Wyatt, Lloyd Davenport, and player-manager Ted Radcliffe had three hits apiece for the Giants. Pitcher Gentry Jessup went the distance, despite surrendering a dozen hits and seven walks. Three double plays helped hold the Bluejackets to three runs.

Radcliffe recalls that it was only the speed of his star center fielder, Davenport, that held Johnny Mize to a double and a triple for two of his four hits. Had the ballpark been enclosed, Mize would have had at least two home runs, but Davenport was able to chase these clouts down in time to prevent Mize from scoring. The Chicago Defender wrote that the 10,000 fans in attendance were “startled” by the outcome. Perhaps the Navy was, too. “They wouldn’t let us come back again,” says Radcliffe.

The 1944 team was the best ever assembled at Great Lakes, largely due to an excellent pitching staff. Virgil Trucks went 10-0, en route to a Navy career pitching record of 28-1. His 0.88 ERA was slightly better than Bob Klinger’s 0.93, but a bit behind Si Johnson’s 0.73. Jim Trexler, the only member of the team who never played in the major leagues, went 14-1. The other pitchers were Lynwood “Schoolboy” Rowe and Bill Brandt. Every position player had been, or would become, a major leaguer, and none batted below .340. The lineup consisted of: Johnny McCarthy (1B), Billy Herman (2B), Albie Glossop (SS), Merrill “Pinky” May (3B), “Schoolboy” Rowe and Mizell “Whitey” Platt (platooning in LF), Gene Woodling (CF), DickWest (RF, a catcher in the majors), and Walter Millies (C). Infielder Roy Hartsfield was the only utility player on the Great Lakes squad.

They won their first 23 games of the season before losing, on July 5, to a Ford Motor Company team in Dearborn, Michigan. (The Ford team was managed by Rabbit Maranville, who had played for the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet team during World War 1.) After this defeat, later avenged, they ran off a sixteen-game winning streak, before losing to the Brooklyn Dodgers on August 8. They ended the season with nine straight victories. Against major league teams, they beat the Phillies, Red Sox, Browns, Cubs, White Sox, Giants, and Indians, while losing to the Dodgers. Their overall record was a stunning 48-2.

Trucks thought this team could have won the pennant in either major league. Skipper Mickey Cochrane gave the base newspaper, the Great Lakes Bulletin, the following midseason assessment: “We’ve got a good team. Give me one more outfielder, and an extra infielder and we’d tackle them all—in the American or National League.”

The Black Bluejackets

By the autumn of 1943 enough black sailors had entered Great Lakes for the Navy to begin a black sports program. The first all-Negro team to represent the base was a basketball team in the 1943-44 season. Coached by Stanford’s All-American Forrest Anderson, this squad won 19 of 22 games, outscoring its opponents by an average score of 56-36. Four members of this team, Jim Brown, Larry Doby, Art Grant, and Charley Harmon, later played on the 1944 baseball team.

Many of Doby’s teammates felt that he was better at basketball (and football) than he was at baseball. Later in the war, in the Pacific, Mickey Vernon first noticed Doby’s great athletic ability—on a basketball court, not a baseball diamond. Harmon, whose favorite sport was basketball despite his future career in the National League, had played on the University of Toledo team that made it to the NIT final game against St. John’s University in 1943.

Jim Brown’s later career as basketball coach at DuSable High School in Chicago bespeaks his knowledge of the game. A powerhouse through the 1950s and 1960s, during Brown’s tenure, his 1953 DuSable Panthers became the first all-black team with a black coach to play for the Illinois state high school basketball championship. So it is small wonder that the Great Lakes Negro basketball team got the base sports program off to such a successful start. DePaul University basketball coach Ray Meyer recalls the Great Lakes black team working out at DePaul. Several members of the team inquired about enrolling at the school to play basketball. Meyer had to regretfully decline the offer, since “nobody was playing black players” in those days, and he would not have been able to put together a schedule. “With three or four of them joining big George Mikan, we would have had a team nobody could have touched,” recalls Meyer.

Before the 1944 baseball season began, the Navy took a new tack in addressing the problem of race relations. Focusing on the importance of White officers directly in command of Black sailors, the Navy sought to identify the more mature non-commissioned officers with experience in integrated situations. These NCOs, many of whom had been in charge of physical training and drill instruction, were commissioned as officers and assigned to Black units. The Navy adopted a new official policy which rejected all “theories of racial differences in inborn ability.” To help educate these newly commissioned ensigns, the Navy published, in February 1944, an important booklet entitled Guide to the Command of Negro Naval Personnel. A full decade before the United States Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Navy explicitly renounced segregation and Jim Crow social arrangements:

The idea of compulsory racial segregation is disliked by almost all Negroes, and literally hated by many. This antagonism is in part a result of the lesson taught the Negro by experience that in spite of the legal formula of “separate but equal” facilities, the facilities open to him under segregation are in fact usually inferior as to location or quality to those available to others.

One of the new officers promoted from the ranks was Elmer J. (“Al”) Pesek, who was commissioned on April 10, 1944. His assignment was to manage Great Lakes’ first all-black baseball team, the Negro Varsity of 1944. It is unlikely that Pesek had heard of any of the players he would be managing, but he soon discovered a promising pool of talent. Some had starred in the Negro Leagues, and others would make their mark in Organized Baseball after the war.

A Navy manual published at the beginning of the season listed the players and their prior baseball affiliations (ages are shown where available):

The New Kensington Elks may not have been much of a team. But the Birmingham Black Barons, Cleveland Buckeyes, Homestead Grays, Newark Eagles, and Pittsburgh Crawfords were established members of the Negro Leagues. The future major league careers of Doby and Harmon vouch for their abilities. Brown, Campbell, Coates, Randall, and Watts all proved to be capable hitters. Herb Bracken would lead the pitching staff with a 13-1 record. And Ensign Pesek knew he had a great pitcher when he told the Great Lakes Bulletin prior to the season that his biggest problem would be finding a catcher able to handle the formidable stuff of John Richard Wright.

At 5’11” and 168 pounds, Wright pitched for Navy ballclubs throughout World War II. After the war, he became the second black player—after Jackie Robinson—to be signed by Branch Rickey to a Dodgers contract. Before the war, he had been an outstanding pitcher for one of the most famous teams in the history of the Negro Leagues: the Homestead Grays. His teammates there included future Hall of Famers Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Buck Leonard. In 1943 his record was 30-5, and he started four games in the Negro League World Series, twice shutting out the Birmingham Black Barons on the way to a 4-3 series triumph. He also pitched in the Negro League All-Star game that year, before a record crowd of 51,723 in Chicago’s Comiskey Park. While players such as Richardson, Doby, and Harmon were just beginning their careers while at Great Lakes, John Wright, to those familiar with the Negro Leagues, had already arrived.

The Season

The “Negro Varsity” joined five other teams from various military bases and technical schools in the Chicago area to form the Midwest Servicemen’s League (MSL). A double round-robin was scheduled, with the teams playing other, non-conference games against semipro, industrial, and independent clubs. After the first round of games in the MSL, an all-star team of league members would play against Mickey Cochrane’s Bluejackets on June 17. Seven of Pesek’s black players eventually would be selected to play in this game. However, at no time did the full Great Lakes Negro Varsity play the white Bluejackets. The closest the two teams came to meeting each other came in the last week of April, when rain canceled a scheduled six-inning practice game.

After a practice game in which the Negro Varsity barely defeated Waukegan (Illinois) High School, 1-0, John Wright got the team off to a propitious start, hurling a three-hitter in a 3–2 win over Chanute Field in downstate Rantoul, Illinois. After two more victories, the team lost three straight games to even its record at 3–3. One of these losses was to the Cincinnati-Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. Wright pitched one of his worst games of the season in the 7–5 loss, yielding 11 hits and seven walks. After another three-game winning streak, the team missed a chance to defeat the Douglass Aircraft nine on June 6 when, as the base newspaper informed its readers, the game “was postponed because of the Invasion.”

On June 14 Ensign Pesek sent John Wright to the mound against Ft. Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan. In a tough loss, Wright drove in both Great Lakes runs with a home run as the team lost, 3–2. Wright gave up only four hits, but Ft. Custer benefited from five Great Lakes errors plus some questionable umpiring. “With the bases full in the ninth inning,” according to the Great Lakes Bulletin, “John Wright hit a pop fly to Peanuts Lowry, former Chicago Cub. The umpire refused to call it an infield fly. Lowry trapped the ball, forced Charles Harmon at home and then William Campbell was doubled.” All three of Ft. Custer’s runs came in the sixth inning, two of them unearned due to a throwing error by Wright. This loss dropped the black Bluejackets’ record to 6-4.

Herb Bracken, Jim Brown, Leroy Clayton, Larry Doby, Charley Harmon, William “Sonny” Randall, and Wright were chosen to represent the Great Lakes Negro Varsity on the MSL’s all-star team that played the white Bluejackets three days later. Tall, slender righthander “Doc” Bracken took the mound that day to face a ballclub that had mowed down every opponent in its path to that point. In a game that the soft-spoken St. Louis native modestly recalls today as “one of the better games I pitched that year,” Bracken hurled a brilliant one-hitter, but lost the game, 3–0. The lone hit was a second-inning double by Johnny McCarthy, who then took third on what was ruled a passed ball. Bracken says he tried to sneak a quick-pitch by the hitter, but crossed up catcher Leroy Clayton instead. McCarthy later scored on a double-play grounder by Dick West. Bob Klinger pitched for Cochrane’s team and held the all-stars to four hits. But the story of the game was Bracken. Years later Larry Doby would recall this game as proof of how the Navy’s policies of segregation unfairly deprived blacks of the chance to represent the base in sports. Several members of the team recall trying to play especially well in this game, not because they were playing against White major leaguers, but because they were playing against a good team. Like athletes everywhere, they bore down whenever they faced a good opponent.

On July 8, Wright pitched a seven-inning no-hitter against the Naval Aviation School at 87th and Anthony in Chicago. He struck out ten, walked two, and drove in three runs in the 14–1 shellacking.

On July 12, the sailors avenged their earlier loss to Ft. Custer (and Peanuts Lowry) with a 1–0 victory at Constitution Field, scoring the game’s only run with two out in the ninth inning. After three more wins, the team traveled to Rantoul, Illinois, and beat Chanute Field, 5–2. “Trailing 2-0 with two out in the sixth,” reported the Great Lakes Bulletin, “the Negro nine went ahead with four successive home runs by Larry Doby, Charley Harmon, Bill Randall, and Jim Brown. Brown squeezed Harmon home for the fifth run in the ninth.”

After an easy win at Urbana against the University of Illinois Signal School, the black Bluejackets clinched the MSL title by defeating Glenview NAS, 6-2, before 10,000 spectators at Great Lakes’ Constitution Field. Bracken yielded six hits as he won his seventh game of the season. Larry Doby hit a home run, and Andy Watts hit a double and two singles, as the team improved its record to 20–7.

The Negro Varsity won eight of its last ten games to finish the season with a record of 32–10. They played one game in front of 25,000 fans in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. After splitting two games against the Colored Athletics in Grand Rapids, Michigan, they defeated the Negro Leagues’ Chicago American Giants, 5-2, in East Chicago, Indiana.

Other games that Pesek’s black Bluejackets played in 1944 are lost from the historical record. Bracken and Watts recall the House of David as being the best team they faced that year, even better than Cochrane’s. Jim Brown says that they also played a barnstorming team that included Satchel Paige and Dizzy Dean. None of these games—and who knows how many others?—were reported by the press.

The Great Lakes Bulletin did not print the season statistics for the Negro Varsity, as it did for the White Bluejackets. It did point out that Wright’s final record was 16-4, and that Bracken led the staff with a 13-1 record. While stationed at Pearl Harbor, Bracken received a handsome trophy from the Navy for his 1944 accomplishments. Charley Harmon was the team’s leading hitter. The Navy presented the MSL championship team members with rings. After the war, when Andy Watts showed his Cleveland Buckeyes teammate, Sam Jethroe, the Navy ring, Jethroe said it was better than the one he received for being a member of the Buckeye team that won the Negro World Series in 1945.

The winds of war dispersed the Great Lakes Negro Varsity baseball team for good shortly after the season ended. Some players never left the United States, while others were sent to the Pacific. Several played on integrated teams later in their Navy careers. Bracken, for example, was one of two black players on a team in Pearl Harbor. Watts played on an all-Black team in an otherwise White league on Guam, where he hit .519 while playing against major league veterans Pee Wee Reese, Hal White, Johnny Rigney, and Mace Brown. (One of Watts’ teammates on Guam was Charley Harmon’s brother, William.)

During the long decades of segregated baseball, there always remained a slender thread of contact between the races on the diamond with exhibition and training games. The military service teams during World War II continued this legacy and expanded upon it. Many major league players played with or against blacks for the first time during their military careers. By no means was integrated baseball limited to the Navy. In 1945 the Army organized a well-publicized tournament of teams representing the European and Mediterranean Theaters of Operation. Upwards of 50,000 GI’s watched such Negro League stars as Willard Brown, Leon Day, and Joe Greene participate in the championship finals in Nuremberg.

Epilogue

On February 27, 1946, the Navy issued the following order:

Effective immediately, all restrictions governing the types of assignments for which Negro naval personnel are eligible are hereby lifted. Henceforth, they shall be eligible for all types of assignments in all ratings in all activities and all ships of the Naval Service. . . . In the utilization of housing, messing and other facilities, no special or unusual provisions will be made for the accommodation of Negroes.

Nineteen days later, Jackie Robinson walked to the plate in Jersey City, New Jersey, for his first at-bat as a member of the Montreal Royals.

JERRY MALLOY (1946–2000) was a pioneer researcher who has been honored by the creation of an annual Negro League Conference named for him, as well as a book prize. His first great contribution to baseball history was “Out at Home: Baseball Draws the Color Line, 1887.” This monumentally important essay, published in The National Pastime in 1983, transformed our understanding of Black baseball and won commendation from C. Vann Woodward, the preeminent historian of American race relations. Malloy’s subsequent work included a contextual republication of Sol White’s “History of Colored Baseball with Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886–1936.” The late Jules Tygiel, also a Chadwick Award recipient, said of him, “His articles for SABR were pathbreaking and exceptional and rank among the very best this organization has ever published. Even more so, I doubt that the best among us have ever been as generous with their research and support as was Jerry.”

That distinction belongs to an otherwise obscure but determined and courageous pitcher-outfielder named Alfred Wilson, who joined the Granby Red Sox of the Quebec Provincial League in July 1935. The paradox that Robinson, not Wilson, re-integrated Organized Baseball is resolved by pointing out that the Provincial League then labored in the same twilight zone as the all-black Negro National and Negro American leagues.

Just as baseball had a color line, so it also had a language line. French-speaking players weren’t overtly barred from the American professional leagues, as black players were, but they faced strong xenophobic prejudice, especially if they didn’t speak good English and were born in Canada. Some weathered it, aided by U.S. citizenship, like former Dodger first baseman Jacques Fournier, Others, like Fournier’s successor Del Bissonette, tried American baseball for a time but eventually retreated back north of the border, where French prevailed. Still others, like Roland Gladu, spent almost their whole careers in the Quebec bush leagues, becoming legends of similar order to Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, but making only token appearances anywhere else.

The Quebec Provincial League, unlike the Negro National and Negro American leagues, was admitted to the Organized Baseball hierarchy off and on – 1921-1923, 1940, and 1950-1955. But mostly it remained independent from hazy origins in the nineteenth century through dissolution in early 1970. Even Wilson may not have been the first black participant, because in early, unstructured days the league included several teams in Missisquoi County, formerly the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad. A substantial black population lived there until around the turn of the century when, like many of their white neighbors, most sold small farms and moved westward. Some blacks definitely played on the Bedford town team, as verified by old photographs, although Bedford was never actually a Provincial League member. Bud Fowler, often referred to as the first Negro baseball player of note, is rumored to have appeared with several Quebec teams in the late 1870s, despite lack of written evidence.

However, once formally chartered, the Provincial League was all white. It remained all white until after restructuring in 1935 as an “independent” league, which meant that the teams supported themselves by gate receipts alone rather than through political patronage or industrial sponsorship. The team owners therefore had to stress winning and entertainment to a greater degree than ever before, and this in turn led to innovation.

Exactly who first thought of introducing black players isn’t recorded. The Granby owner, Homer Cabana, had organized exhibition games with barnstorming black teams in previous years and had undoubtedly been impressed with their talent. Meanwhile, Ace Corrigan, the Granby manager, had attended spring training with the New York Giants the year manager John McGraw tried to pass off black centerfielder Oscar Charleston as a white Cuban. But whoever had the idea, they agreed it was a good one and contacted Chappie Johnson of Chappie Johnson’s All-Stars (the prototype of “Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings”) for help in recruiting.

Alfred “Freddy” Wilson was born somewhere in Alabama during 1908 probably in a Cajun district, because he did speak some French as well as English. He may have had a college education and was certainly reputed to have a good head for business despite personal financial misfortune — not uncommon for anyone during the depths of the Great Depression. He was articulate, dignified, proud and an extremely hard worker who made the most of limited natural talent. He stood about six feet tall, weighing 170 pounds, medium-sized among American professional ballplayers, but a giant in Quebec, where even today few men top six feet.

Wilson broke into the black bush leagues at age 21. For several years he belonged to the Zulu Cannibal Giants, who outwardly conformed to Jim Crow and lived up to the worst white stereotypes. But playing names like Bissagoos, Wahoo, Tanna, Rufigi, Taklooie, Kangol, Limpopo, Mofike and Ny Ass Ass concealed a hard edge of self-respect and defiance. Some of these “African” names were actually obscenities directed at white ignorance. Others harked back to actual African heritage. And the Zulu Cannibals weren’t afraid to whip hell out of white teams by any score they could manage. While Chappie Johnson cautiously instructed his All-Stars not to exceed a two-run lead, lest white fans take violent exception, the Cannibals often won by ten runs or more, depending upon guts and luck to save their lives.

The Cannibals dropped Wilson in favor of someone more talented. Johnson promptly picked him up, then dispatched him north in 1935 when Granby summoned. Wilson responded to the challenge by playing the best baseball of his life. He won all five of his pitching decisions while batting .392 with 20 runs batted in 79 trips to the plate.

Newspaper accounts don’t record what antagonism he may have faced, but one afternoon in Sorel the fans beat up the entire Granby team after a game Wilson pitched. Wilson’s race may have been advanced as an excuse. However, one must note that such conduct wasn’t uncommon in Sorel, a shipyard town where the umpires sometimes carried guns. On the other hand, racism was as prevalent in Quebec as in the United States. The all-Mohawk team from the Caughnawaga reserve was subjected to all manner of indignities by the team sponsored by the Montreal Police, while headlines called them the “Red Injuns” and referred to the barnstorming Hawaiian All-Stars as the “Japs.”

As Sorel ran away with the 1935 pennant race, revenue from exhibitions with barnstorming teams became essential to keeping the league afloat. Wilson used his black baseball connections to arrange tours by the Cleveland Browns, Boston Black Giants, the white House of David, the Boston ABC, the Hawaiians and, of course, his own former teams, the Zulu Cannibals and Chappie Johnson’s. The black barnstormers brought portable floodlights with them, the first time Quebec ever saw night baseball. By the end of the year, Granby had floodlights, too, and in future years night baseball became the Provincial League rule rather than the exception.

Wilson most distinguished himself in these exhibitions. He beat the ABCs with a five-hit shutout while hitting the first home run ever to clear the Granby stadium. Then he defeated the Zulu Cannibals, 7-6, before a then-league record 7,500 fans. The box score suggests the Cannibals might have given the game to him on purpose, committing several uncharacteristic errors in the last two innings. He was a brother, after all, and they wanted him to look good.

Wilson’s success in that regard was fleeting, however. An impressed Chappie Johnson dispatched Jack Wilson, no relation, to run an all-black Provincial League entry in 1936 and 1937. Called the Black Panthers, they replaced the Montreal Police, who were finally expelled for taking entirely too many liberties with the law. The Black Panther players were mostly teenagers from the Deep South, away from home for the first time and miserable. Their lineup changed from day to day and week to week as players steadily defected and were replaced.

One black player remained in the Provincial League, 17-year-old pitcher Clifford Johnston, already an imposing 6’4″ and 200 pounds. Some researchers have felt this Johnston actually was Clifford “Connie” Johnson, who at age 31 joined the Chicago White Sox in 1953 to begin a six-year major league career. However, Johnson denies that, claiming he didn’t play in the Provincial League until the late 1940s.

When the Provincial League rejoined Organized Baseball in 1940, it was again conformingly white. One year later the league relinquished its ties with O.B.

After a decade of obscurity, Fred Wilson ironically re-integrated the Provincial League in 1945, this time with Drummondville, where he mainly pinch-hit. This was still a year before Jackie Robinson’s Montreal debut. Lloyd MacKeen was then teaching school in Drummondville. “When we heard the team had a black pitcher coming with his family,” he remembers, “we told the kids that they’d soon have a classmate who was a little bit different, and they should be nice to him. We shouldn’t have worried. The pitcher’s son was a little hooligan, and he soon was the most popular kid in the school. I shouldn’t say he was a hooligan. He was a good kid, but lively. You know, the team didn’t pay the players much, and when the season was over we had to take up a collection to send the family back home to Alabama.”

Post-Robinson, the Provincial League became an entry league for blacks gaining their first crack at white baseball. Among the graduates were Dave Pope, Ed Charles, Vic Power, Hector Lopez, Ruben Gomez and Al Pinkston, who never played in the majors but who made the Mexican League Hall of Fame after hitting a lifetime .372. Connie Johnson won 15 games and struck out a league-leading 172 batters with St. Hyacinthe in 1951 on his way up at last.

And toward the end, after the last flirtation with Organized Baseball in 1950-1955, the Provincial League harbored a new kind of proud black ballplayer – men who knew they were good enough to play with whites, but who felt they had nothing to prove and preferred low pay and obscurity to taking guff somewhere south of the border. Nova Scotia-born John Mentis was one of these. He hit .340 in 13 Provincial League seasons, picking up a pair of batting titles. Twice he topped .400. “I had offers to play American baseball,” he remembers, but softly adds, “I wasn’t ready for that, where someone else could walk on the sidewalk and you couldn’t.” A quiet, gentle man, Mentis preferred the Alfred Wilson role-model to Jackie Robinson’s, even if it doomed him to the same fate.

MERRITT CLIFTON, journalist, statistician, and historian, is the author of Relative Baseball, described by John Thorn as “a sabermetric classic self-published in 1979,” as well as Disorganized Baseball, a three-volume history of the Quebec Provincial League and Vermont Northern League, and the novella A Baseball Classic. Merritt has been published in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal and The National Pastime on topics ranging from Quebecois history to Japanese baseball, and has contributed work to many other publications. Merritt and his wife Beth together produce the www.animals24-7.org website, continuing the investigative news service to the humane community that has been his full-time career since 1986.