Whirty: Rediscovering the Colored Southern Baseball Association
From SABR member Ryan Whirty at Home Plate Don’t Move on February 27, 2015:
Friend and colleague Bill Staples Jr. sent me a clip from the March 27, 1905, Dallas Morning News that details the recent founding and impending start of play for … a southern colored league!
The existence of such an organization had, to my knowledge, been unknown until this point — or at least remained extremely hidden. The idea of an African-American loop in Dixie had been tried before, in 1886 with the Southern League of Colored Base Ballists, but that was a dismal failure.
It was until the Negro Southern League was formed in 1920 — the same year Rube Foster, C.I. Taylor and additional visionaries founded the famous and landmark Negro National League — that a more or less permanent blackball circuit existed in the South.
So the discovery of an attempt — an apparently quickly failed one — to coalesce an association of colored ball teams below the Mason-Dixon line in 1905, two decades after the SLCBB and 15 years before the NSL, is a pretty big find.
Read the full article here: https://homeplatedontmove.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/a-league-discovered/
Originally published: March 2, 2015. Last Updated: March 2, 2015.