Whirty: Before white supremacy, baseball trailblazing in Wilmington

From SABR member Ryan Whirty at Home Plate Don’t Move on September 24, 2015:

Of all the cities in the newly repaired Union, why, of all places, was the Southern coastal burg of Wilmington, N.C., one where African Americans actually led the way in baseball?

This was, after all, the place where one of the most open and violent coups d’etat in U.S. history occurred — in 1898, a group of white insurgents bloodily overthrow a democratically elected, biracial city council, in what many historians now believe was the final nail in the coffin of Reconstruction and the official ushering in (along with Plessy v. Ferguson) of a new era of severe Jim Crow political and social policies and white supremacy in the South.

But more than 30 years before, in 1867, Wilmington became one of the select few cities in which, apparently, the first organized base ball (two words back then) team materialized was black.

Read the full article here: https://homeplatedontmove.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/2656/



Originally published: September 24, 2015. Last Updated: September 24, 2015.