Edwards: A filmmaker’s quest to tell the unknown story of Hall of Famer Pete Hill
From Breanna Edwards at The Root on February 22, 2015:
Pete Hill.
He’s a largely unsung hero in the baseball world, even as a Hall of Famer who played the majority of his career in the pre-Negro Leagues era for legendary teams such as the Pittsburgh Keystones, Cuban X Giants and Chicago American Giants; and yet most people have never heard of him.
According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Hill, whose playing career dated from 1889 to the mid-1920s, was a fearsome center fielder with a powerful arm and “excellent glove.”
Babe Ruth. That name ring any bells? Funny, since Pete Hill may have been better than him.
It’s the story of disturbed graves at Burr Oak Cemetery, just south of Chicago, the legend of Pete Hill and a newspaper article titled something along the lines of “Is a Hall of Fame Baseball Player Buried Here?” that sent Canton, Ill., native Keith Carmack on a quest to make the slugger’s name known.
“They had dug up about 300 graves,” Carmack explains to The Root, “and resold the plots in the cemetery that was predominantly poor, African-American … and it just so happened that around that time there were a lot of Negro League baseball players buried there because a lot of those guys died poor, and so they were in this kind of cemetery with the unmarked grave or one little marker.
Read the full article here: http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/02/a_filmmaker_s_quest_to_tell_unknown_slugger_pete_hill_s_story.html
Originally published: February 23, 2015. Last Updated: February 23, 2015.