The Kansas City Call and the Kansas City Monarchs

This article appears in SABR’s “When the Monarchs Reigned: Kansas City’s 1942 Negro League Champions” (2021), edited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill Nowlin.

Were it not for the Chicago Defender, New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, and other African American newspapers, there would have been scant coverage of Black professional baseball. White-owned and -run dailies like the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Washington Post published few informative articles on the African American baseball teams in their cities. In Kansas City, Missouri, the Kansas City Star included periodic articles on the city’s main African American team, the Kansas City Monarchs, but the Black-owned and -operated weekly Kansas City Call covered the team much more thoroughly. Without a doubt, the Call provided the most complete record of the Monarchs, one of the best teams in the history not only of Black baseball, but all of baseball.

Serendipitously, the Call was founded in May 1919, a year before the formation of the first successful professional Black league, the Negro National League, and the organization of the Kansas City Monarchs. The Call’s founder was Chester Arthur “C.A.” Franklin (1880-1955). Franklin was born in Denison, Texas, to a barber and a teacher at a time when African Americans were leaving Texas and other Southern states in search of better educational opportunities for their children. In 1887 the Franklin family moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where C.A.’s father established a newspaper, the Omaha Enterprise. C.A. attended the University of Nebraska for two years, but because of his father’s ill health had to leave school to take over as editor of the Enterprise. To improve his father’s health, the family moved to Colorado in 1898 and bought another paper, eventually called the Star.

In 1913 C.A. Franklin moved to Kansas City, where six years later he began publishing the Call. The paper started as a four-page sheet with a weekly run of 2,000. Its circulation grew rapidly, soon reaching 18,000. Before long nearly every African American home in Kansas City was receiving a copy from a carrier. At the same time, mail circulation throughout Missouri and the states to the southwest expanded. The Call was on its way to becoming one of the largest, most successful Black businesses in the region. By the 1950s the Call had expanded to 32 pages with 40,000 copies sold each week.1

As soon became obvious in his first weekly editorials, C.A. Franklin was a strong advocate of Black self-reliance, endorsing the philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois. For example, in the January 14, 1922, edition of the Call, under the headline “The Manhood of Kansas City Negroes Is Challenged,” Franklin decried the manipulation of Blacks in Kansas City politics, concluding “[we] are not underlings because other men say we are, we are masters of our fate. Strong men, just men of every race, will applaud the day when we cease to be measured by the scorn of our contemners, and offer our own proved merit.”

During its first decades the Call covered fully the campaign to expand the right to vote for African Americans and for equal opportunities for Blacks in employment, education, and housing. One of the Call’s first victories was breaking the ban in Kansas City that prohibited African Americans from serving on juries.

Nor did the Call shy away from addressing the most highly charged national issues facing African Americans. The paper strongly endorsed the struggle against segregation in the armed forces and the fight for nondiscriminatory hiring in government agencies. It also ran front-page stories on the scourge of lynching and kept track of the numbers of lynching victims state by state.

Some of the Call’s first subscribers were members of the Paseo YMCA volleyball team, on which Franklin played. Whether at the YMCA, where in 1920 the meeting to organize the NNL was held, or another venue, Franklin met and became good friends with J.L. Wilkinson (1878-1964), founder and principal owner of the Kansas City Monarchs. For the nearly three decades Wilkinson owned the Monarchs, he and Franklin worked closely together, and the paper was an enthusiastic supporter of the team and Black baseball in general. In its coverage of the organizational meeting of the NNL, the Call enthused in its February 27, 1920, edition that “[i]t was the first time in the history of a baseball meeting that there was exhibited so much harmony and good spirit.”

Known for his acumen as a promoter, Wilkinson quickly recognized the importance of a good relationship with Franklin and the Call. He assigned the Monarchs business manager, Q.J. Gilmore, the responsibility of providing the Call with a steady stream of positive articles about the Monarchs. The Call reciprocated with frequent endorsements of the team. When Wilkinson decided to name the team the Monarchs (upon the recommendation of one of his players, John Donaldson), the Call later proclaimed that the team had proven in its first years of play, in the words of eighteenth-century poet William Cowper, that they were “MONARCHS OF ALL THEY SURVEY.”2

C.A. Franklin recognized the role that Wilkinson and the Monarchs were playing in improving racial harmony in Kansas City. In its October 22, 1922, edition the Call noted that “[f]rom a sociological point of view, the Monarchs have done more than any other single agent to break the damnable outrage of prejudice that exists in this city. White fans, the thinking class at least, cannot have watched the orderly crowds at Association Park … and not concede that we are humans at least, and worthy of consideration as such.” When the team began playing games in Association Park, Wilkinson had insisted that the signs marking “colored section” be taken down and that patrons, regardless of race, be allowed to sit anywhere in the stands.

When the Monarchs moved to Muehlebach Field in 1923, Wilkinson’s agreement with the stadium’s owner, brewer George Muehlebach, allowed Black spectators to sit throughout the stands. In reporting on the agreement, the Call noted that “[f]ans from both races will continue to be able to sit side by side, and, after a while, the same relation may be carried to the workshop” (November 3, 1922). The Call had long recognized that Wilkinson expected clean play on the field, noting his slogan for how the Monarchs players were expected to deal with an opponent was “treat him right, but get him out.”3

In the July 20, 1923, edition of the Call, sports editor Charles A. Sparks claimed that the Monarchs and other Black teams were showing that the racist attitude of “the superiority of the whites and the inferiority of the Blacks” is dead. The Monarchs were proving that “Negroes play the game with much more thought and snap than the average white player.” The public is beginning to question, Starks maintained, the results of a World Series championship played between two white teams “when perhaps there are one of several colored teams in the country better than the contenders.”

When necessary, the Call also could be critical of the Monarchs and Black baseball, as in a scathing December 16, 1927, editorial by sports editor A.D. Williams that laid out the concerns he claimed needed to be addressed in the Negro leagues. Williams also chastised African American fans in Kansas City for lack of support of the team. At the end of the 1929 season Williams wrote, “If there ever was a club deserving the support of a city – it is [the Monarchs]. Their brand of baseball is second to none in the country. [J.L. Wilkinson has] always placed a real ball club on the field. … I wonder where that old Monarch loyalty is.”4

When Wilkinson introduced portable lights in 1930 to make night games possible, Williams and the Call were among the first to endorse the scheme that other journalists and baseball executives were rejecting as foolish and unworkable. In its January 10 and 24, 1930, editions the Call explained Wilkinson’s rationale for the experiment and Williams declared that the Monarchs owner had tested the lights sufficiently to go ahead. “Believe it or not,” Williams concluded, “there’s method in the supposed madness of friend Wilkinson. There’s one thing about him – he knows baseball … and the highway to the dollars.” After the lighting scheme had proved successful, the Call asserted that Wilkinson had risked everything financially and kept the Monarchs afloat “for the sake of the men who played for him. …”5

After six years (1931-36) spent exclusively barnstorming with his portable lighting system, as far north as Canada and south into Mexico, Wilkinson decided it was time to return the Monarchs to league play. He had a key role in the formation of the Negro American League in 1937 and was elected the new league’s treasurer.

In 1942 the Call’s reporting began with a January 2 article on the annual meeting of the NAL. The key issue at the meeting was the decision to join with the NNL in banning all clubs from playing the Ethiopian Clowns. Tom Wilson, president of the NNL, who was present at the NAL meeting, said that “the Eastern owners had long been of the opinion that the painting of faces by the Clowns players, their antics on the diamond and their style of play was a detriment to Negro league baseball.”

For Wilkinson and the Monarchs, not playing the Clowns represented a change in policy. The Call reported on Monarchs and Clowns preseason exhibition games and tours in 1940, playing in towns as far north as Winnipeg, Canada, and in 1941. For scheduling games with the Clowns, the Monarchs had drawn the ire of Cum Posey, owner of the Homestead Grays, and other Negro Leagues magnates, who claimed that the Clowns were playing to white stereotypes of Black baseball. However, Wilkinson maintained that the Monarchs played the Clowns not only because their showmanship drew crowds but because they played excellent baseball.

The 1942 Monarchs trained in Monroe, Louisiana, beginning their exhibition season on Easter Sunday, April 5, with a game against the Cincinnati Tigers. On April 24 the Call reported to the delight of Monarchs fans that Satchel Paige would be with the team for the 1942 season. On April 26 an overflow crowd of 15,000 at Pelican Stadium in New Orleans watched Paige pitch five innings against 1941’s top team, the Homestead Grays. It was the second game of a doubleheader, won by the Grays 10-7. The Monarchs took the first contest, 6-5, with Hilton Smith and Connie Johnson on the mound.

The 1942 Monarchs were considered by many, including Buck O’Neil, to be the best team in the franchise’s history, and games when Paige pitched drew large crowds; however, as the season got underway overall attendance began to decline. The Call’s new sports editor, Sam McKibben, questioned why African Americans were supporting the white Kansas City Blues instead of their own Monarchs. At Blues games, Blacks were still forced to sit in the bleachers, exposed to the sun and rain. “Apparently,” McKibben wrote sarcastically, “rank discrimination doesn’t spin their enjoyment of the game.” By contrast, at the Monarchs home opener, McKibben observed, “whites and Negroes sat together, cheered together, slapped each other on the back.”6

The Monarchs opened the 1942 regular season in Chicago on May 10, taking both games of a doubleheader with the Chicago American Giants, 7-4 and 6-0. Paige earned the shutout victory in the second game, and, according to the Call of May 15, “Old Satchel” showed “some of the smartest pitching of his brilliant career.”

The home opener at Ruppert Stadium on May 17 against the Memphis Red Sox featured a patriotic theme, with War Bonds on sale and soldiers in uniform admitted free (as they were throughout World War II). The Monarchs and Red Sox split a doubleheader as Paige took the loss in the second game.

On May 24, 1942, the Monarchs and Satchel Paige faced off at Wrigley Field in Chicago against a white team composed of major and minor leaguers led by Dizzy Dean. The game drew nearly 30,000 fans. The Call noted in its promotional article for the game (May 22, 1942) that Dean was still smarting at the losses he had suffered to Paige several years earlier. Indians ace Bob Feller was scheduled to play but had to withdraw when he was called back to active service in the Navy; he donated his fee to a Navy relief fund. The Monarchs won the game, 3-1, with both Dean and Paige taking the mound. As he would often do, after Paige pitched the first innings (in this game, six), Hilton Smith finished the contest. According to the Call’s game report (May 29, 1942), several of the big leaguers on Dean’s team “were loud and sincere in their praise of the Monarchs[,]” saying the several Monarchs could play in the white majors. However, the game drew the attention of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The Call reported on July 3, 1942, that Landis was about to rule that games between teams led by Paige and Dean would not be allowed to be played in white parks.

On June 5, 1942, the Call reported that Frank Duncan, who had been sharing managerial duties with Dizzy Dismukes, was named permanent skipper. According to the Call, with the departure of J.L. Wilkinson’s brother Lee from team duties, Dismukes resumed the role of business manager and traveling secretary. The ban on NAL teams playing games against the Ethiopian Clowns did not stop the Call from publishing a picture of Clowns pitcher Peanuts Nyassas, “who performs antics that keep fans in an uproar.” On June 26 the Call noted that the Clowns were playing throughout the Midwest, drawing an average of 5,000 per game.

The lure of a big payday proved too great. Skirting the ban on games by NAL and NNL teams against the Clowns, “by special arrangement with KC Monarchs management[,]” a game between the Ethiopian Clowns and Birmingham Black Barons was played at Ruppert Stadium in Kansas City on August 9, 1942. In a promotional article on August 7, the Call noted that “all the Clowns’ stunts will be on display.” For example, Pepper Bassett would catch the game seated in a rocking chair, the Call reported. The Clowns were currently barnstorming before huge crowds through the Dakotas, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois. More than 600,000 fans had paid to see them, the Call added. They had played to crowds as large as 25,000. In his “Sports Potpourri” column, Sam McKibben wrote that the Ethiopian Clowns would present their “baseball tomfoolery” … “Incredible feats will be accomplished before the final ball is thrown.” The game was a “must” for baseball fans, he dutifully wrote. They will “clown their way into the hearts of the Heart of America.” The Clowns lost both ends of the doubleheader before 4,000 fans.

NAL owners decided at their February 1943 meeting not only to allow teams to play the Ethiopian (now Cincinnati and later Indianapolis) Clowns but also to allow the Clowns to join the league.7 The Clowns played their home games at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. In August 1943 the Monarchs played a profitable series against the Clowns.

In 1942 the Call was also lending its voice to the campaign to break the through the color barrier in major-league baseball. On June 12 the paper published the full text of a resolution adopted by the 2,000 members of the National Maritime Union calling for Negro players to be allowed in the major leagues. Another union, the United Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store employees, had already passed a similar resolution. A copy was sent to Commissioner Landis.

In addition to its NAL schedule, the 1942 Monarchs were continuing to barnstorm. The Call reported on a June tour through Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, including a no-hitter hurled by Paige and Booker McDaniel against the Frigidaire Icemen at Ducks Park in Dayton, Ohio, on June 16.8

During the 1942 campaign Wilkinson made the turnstiles spin by booking games for the Paige All-Stars. The Original House of David team continued to be a popular rival, as on July 5 in Louisville, Kentucky. The Call enthused that “there is little doubt about the magnetic quality of Paige’s box office appeal.” In 1942 he was, according to the Call, having one of his best seasons, noting that “his fast hopper is jumping.”9

On Friday, July 17, 1942, the Monarchs met an Army team, Johnny Sturm’s Jefferson Barracks All-Stars, which featured several former major leaguers. The game took place at Ruppert Stadium, and the Call made clear in its July 24 issue that there would be integrated seating. The game was the brainchild of J.L. Wilkinson and Monarchs co-owner Tom Baird. They covered all the Monarchs’ expenses and the New York Yankees, for whom Sturm had played, and who owned the white Kansas City Blues, covered the ballpark expenses. The proceeds were to go to charity. The Monarchs staged a rendition of the popular pepper game before the first pitch and then shut out the All-Stars, 6-0.

In its July 24, 1942, edition the Call’s Sam McKibben noted that on July 17 “death claimed Segregation, Discrimination and Jim Crow, father, son and grandson, all pioneer residents of Ruppert Stadium. … There were no mourners, just 6,000 enjoying a baseball drama. The ushers, who are usually rude to Negro patrons, were bubbling with friendliness. That’s democracy at work. Whites seated next to Negroes without incident and asked, ‘Why don’t they allow the [white Kansas City] Blues to play the Monarchs?’ and ‘Why are Negroes kept out of the majors and minors?’ There was no trouble-making, no vile language, no fights. The Ruppert management had contended that white patrons would object to sitting next to Negroes at ball games. Oh well, if it never happens again, it happened Friday night. There was no segregation nor discrimination. Whites will benefit more than Negroes as a result of the charity proceeds, but Negro fans came out in huge numbers in support of the game.” McKibben went on to write that Commissioner Landis has let it be known he had not laid down a law saying Negroes cannot play in the majors, that it is up to club owners. There were some White owners willing to sign Negroes. “Let Negro league teams like the Monarchs play leading major league teams and owners could tell how Negro and white players compare in ability,” McKibben concluded.

The next week the Call printed the full statement of Commissioner Landis. In part, Landis proclaimed: “If [Leo] Durocher, or any other manager, or all of them want to sign one or 25 Negro players it is all right with me. That is the business of the manager and the club owners.” The statement was provoked by comment from Durocher that “he would hire Negro players if he were permitted.” The Call also included a response to Landis by civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph that “the door was now open for Negro players, but it will not remain open. It is up to Negroes themselves with the support of their white friends to keep it open and open it wider. With so many players going into the military, the demand is now greater than the supply. If Negro players do not break in during the war, it is not likely they will after the war. We do not want Negroes to enter the majors as Negro teams we want them integrated into every baseball club in the country.”10

The July 31 edition of the Call returned to the July 17 game in an editorial by McKibben headlined “Modern Version: Dr. Jekel [sic] – Mr. Hyde.” He again contrasted the courtesy of the white ushers at the Monarchs-Jefferson Barracks game with the attitude toward Black fans attending games between the Kansas City Blues and other white teams. At a Blues-Toledo Mud Hens game, attendants insulted Black fans with racial slurs. Two Negro men responded to the ushers, saying, “[w]e are American citizens and entitled to the rights of Americans.” Before long Negro players, McKibben asserted, will be in the majors, and “the jim-crow practice will be drowning in its own sweat.” McKibben had guessed three weeks earlier that “some cellar-dwelling big-league team would buy some Negro players. [Josh] Gibson, [Buck] O’Neil, [Joe] Greene, [Satchel] Paige, [Hilton] Smith, [Willard] Brown, and [Ted] Strong, to name a few, are “on the threshold of a new day.”

On August 7, 1942, under the headline “The Monarchs Owner Is Elated,” the Call published an Associated Negro Press wire story. According to the release, “J.L. Wilkinson, co-owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, champions of the Negro American League, gave approbation this week to the plan of William E. Benswanger, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, to give Negro baseball players a tryout with his team. Moghuls [sic] of major league teams expressed themselves pro and con on the issue. ‘I think it would be a fine [day] for the game,’ said Wilkinson, ‘although we would lose some of our stars.’ Wilkinson is a former minor league pitcher who has been [involved with] Negro ball teams with his partner, Tom Board [sic], since [1920].” Wilkinson said he had talked “with Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige, the pitching great” recently “and said he advised the right hand speed-ball [artist], ‘we certainly won’t stand in your way if you have a chance to play.’ Paige is under a two-year contract with the Kansas City club. … Wilkinson said he believed Josh Gibson, catcher for the Washington Homestead Grays, would attract the most attention next to Paige. … ‘There are at least a score of players who could make any major league team,’ added the Monarchs owner.”

Sam McKibben conducted an interview with Satchel Paige at the 1942 Negro Leagues East-West All-Star Game played on August 16 before 45,179 at Comiskey Field in Chicago. It was published in the August 21 edition of the Call under the headline “Paige Says Abolish Jim Crow and He Will Be Ready for His Major League Debut but Not Before at Any Price.” It clearly showed that Paige had given careful consideration to the prospect of his signing with a major-league team. McKibben wrote, “Satchel Paige doesn’t want a major league tryout, nor to play major league ball … unless two things come to pass: the complete abolition of JIM CROW on a NATIONAL scale … and he is given a contract identical to that tendered a white player getting a tryout. The white papers have been saying Paige is through. When Paige told a reporter that he wouldn’t sign a $10,000 contract with a big-league team, and refused to reveal his current salary, it was written that he was receiving $40,000 a year. Satchel is an enthusiastic talker and I just let him talk,” McKibben commented. “‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘me living at a Negro hotel although I play with a white team. Record my feelings when dishes, out of which I eat, are broken up in my presence. How could I pitch a decent game with insulting jeers coming from spectators and even some of the players? … Just convince me that agitation can be halted and I’ll push fast balls by Joe DiMaggio.’ ‘Why,’ he says, ‘if the President hasn’t made southern DEFENSE plants hire, and use Negro labor in government plants, how can Judge Landis, Connie Mack or anyone make the southern white folk accept the Negro as a ball player. His training camp life in the South would be miserable … and the camps won’t be moved for one or two Negroes. … What about the tryouts allegedly scheduled by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Who will ‘bell the cat’ (meaning end jim crow)? Will the white trainers work on a Negro to say nothing to take care of him. Indeed not. I’ve never been able to get any service out of one. … Tell the reading public,’ says Satch, ‘not to believe half of what it reads that I say in the [white] daily papers. I say to others what I am saying to you, but my statements are twisted. Negroes will never get into the major leagues because of jim crow. It’s a wonderful dream but will never come true. With the nation at war not one is going to try to abolish jim crow …. and even in peace time, jim crowism will flourish. Me, I am going to stick with Wilkie, J.L. Wilkinson, Monarchs owner, and whoever says I am afraid I can’t make the grade … is just plain nuts. I experience enough prejudice now, why court more?’”

In the same edition, in his “Sports Potpourri” feature, McKibben opined that “Negro soldiers are being killed in the South while in uniform for ‘mixing’ with whites. What will happen to Negro ballplayers training in the South?” He said that as a native Southerner, he believed “Jim Crowism will keep Negroes out of major league baseball. … Jim Crow must be destroyed but who will accomplish it? Truthfully, I am 100 per cent for Negroes in the majors – but too young to attempt self-disillusionment when overwhelming odds are stacking against it. … [I]t will take two years to properly season and infiltrate Negroes into major league ball.” “It’s time we sport writers cease sugar-coating. …”

The next week the Call noted reports of “[Ku Klux] Klan activity in a plot to stir up race hatred in the war industry” and “destroy national unity behind the administration’s win-the-war program.”11

In its September 4 edition the Call began its coverage of the 1942 Colored World Series between the Monarchs and the Homestead Grays, with the prediction that 32,000 would strain the capacity of Griffith Stadium in Washington when the Grays crossed bats with the Monarchs in the opening game of the 1942 Colored World Series on September 8. The Call noted that “the great Satchel Paige will be on the mound with power hitting Josh Gibson in the box. In two previous meetings this season in Washington, the Grays have edged out the Monarchs in extra-inning games.”

Since the Call was published weekly, fans would already have learned the outcomes and likely seen the box scores of the Series games, so the rest of the Call’s reporting on the Series (in the September 18 and 25 editions) focused not on individual games but on Satchel Paige’s famed confrontation with Josh Gibson in the second game, played in Pittsburgh on September 10, and a controversy that threatened to derail the Series. The former clash has become part of Negro Leagues baseball lore, but the latter event has received lesser attention.

In the September 25 Call, McKibben wrote an article headlined “Grays Employ Outside Talent to Beat Monarchs, 4-1” in which he gave a straightforward description of what the Grays had done. “With the aid of the Newark Eagles’ ace pitcher, Leon Day, who is reputed to be one of the classiest performers in baseball today, and who was aided and abided [sic] by more of his Newark Eagles’ teammates, Pearson and Stone, and Buster Clarkson of the Philly Stars,” McKibben wrote, “the Homestead Grays et al. defeated the Kansas City Monarchs 4 to 1, Sunday afternoon [September 24], at Ruppert Stadium. If the Monarchs had won[,] it would have ended the series. If won by the Grays[,] the series would have been extended from 4 of 7 to 5 of 9. … The facts make known the desperation of the Homestead Grays and explained why the ‘ringers’ were brought in to stem the tide.” The game was interrupted several times because someone was using emery to scuff the ball, but the offender was not discovered.

McKibben noted that the game was nullified at a meeting of NAL moguls called by Wilkinson and Baird. That left the Monarchs with a 3-0 lead in the series. Additionally, the use of emery boards and “other infractions of sportsmanlike ethics were ironed out to the satisfaction of all parties concerned.” The game was replayed in Philadelphia on September 29 and the Monarchs prevailed for a 4-0 Series win.

During the 1942-43 offseason the Office of Defense Transportation ruled that, effective March 15, 1943, the use of all privately owned buses by baseball teams would be forbidden. The order drew a quick reaction from NAL and NNL owners. They pointed out that Negro League teams appeared in several different parks each week and would not be able to play enough games to have financial stability without travel in private buses. In addition, since Black ballplayers were denied hotel accommodations in some cities, the buses were essential as sleeping quarters. The owners also emphasized that Negro League games provided much-needed entertainment for Black war workers in 11 metropolitan areas as well as competition for military teams.

Unmoved, the ODT refused to grant Black baseball an exemption to the ban. Wilkinson and Call editor C.A. Franklin joined forces in mounting a campaign to overturn the ruling. The Call published a series of articles condemning the ban and printed a “Save Negro Baseball” petition.12 It took until midway through the 1943 season for the campaign to convince the ODT to reverse its decision and to allow teams to use private buses.

The Monarchs continued to draw decent crowds through the 1945 season and peaked when Wilkinson and Baird signed Jackie Robinson. The turning point for the Monarchs and other Negro Leagues clubs was, of course, Branch Rickey’s acquisition of Robinson’s contract in August 1945, followed by Robinson’s joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947.

The Monarchs fielded teams in various manifestations into the 1960s and the Call continued its coverage, although more sporadically. In the final years of the Monarchs, the greatest attention in the Call’s sports section was devoted to Monarchs whose contracts were sold to major-league teams, more than from any other Negro League teams. The list includes Hall of Famers Paige, Willard Brown, Andy Cooper, and Ernie Banks, and the first African American to play for the New York Yankees, Elston Howard.

Sources

In addition to the articles in the Kansas City Call cited, other Kansas City Monarchs game reports are drawn from a timeline for the 1942 season compiled by Bill Nowlin.

Portions of this essay are drawn from William A. Young, J.L. Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs: Trailblazers in Black Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2016).

Notes

1 William H. Young and Nathan B. Young Jr., “The Story of the Kansas City Monarchs,” Your Kansas City and Mine (Kansas City: Midwest Afro-American Genealogy Interest Coalition, 1950), 137-38, 142.

2 Kansas City Call, July 27, 1928.

3 Kansas City Call, June 17, 1922.

4 Kansas City Call, August 30, 1929.

5 Kansas City Call, January 26, 1934.

6 Kansas City Call, May 15 and 22, 1942.

7 Kansas City Call, February 26, 1943.

8 Kansas City Call, June 19, 1942.

9 Kansas City Call, July 3, 1942.

10 Kansas City Call, July 31, 1942.

11 Kansas City Call, August 28, 1942.

12 Kansas City Call, April 9 and 16, 1943.