Taylor: Effa Manley’s hidden life
From Shakeia Taylor at SB Nation on April 30, 2020:
She was sure and confident in everything she did. She was tall, smart, and intimidating, a shrewd businesswoman unafraid to speak her mind. For years I’d recognized Effa Manley for many things: her civil rights work, co-owning and managing a Negro League baseball team, her stint as Negro National League treasurer, her role in Larry Doby integrating Major League Baseball’s American League, and being the first African-American woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
But for everything Manley was, there is one thing she really wasn’t: Black.
“Everything in my life has been Black,” Manley told sportswriter Henry Hecht of the New York Post in 1975. For many years, that’s seemed like the last word on the matter. While I knew Manley was not the first woman to own a team — a distinction actually held by Olivia Taylor, who became the owner of the Indianapolis ABC Clowns after her husband C.I. Taylor died 1922 — I had always assumed she was African American. Her race, however, has been a source of quiet controversy for years, one of which I was unaware. It wasn’t until I started researching more into her life I found out perhaps Manley wasn’t exactly who she seemed.
Read the full article here: https://www.sbnation.com/2020/4/30/21238190/effa-manley-hall-of-fame-negro-league-newark-eagles
- Related link: Read our SABR biography on Effa Manley, by Amy Essington
Originally published: April 30, 2020. Last Updated: April 30, 2020.