TWENTY-THREE

MAY 11, 1930

Opening pitch at Hamtramck Stadium, the new Negro League ballpark. The stadium is located in the heart of Detroit’s Polish community, illustrating still positive relations between black and white immigrant communities—relations that were soon to shift. In 1930, the Polish mayor of Hamtramck is there to catch the opening pitch; a decade later he seeks political capital by opposing housing projects for black Detroiters. The Stars’ star is Turkey Stearnes, one of the great baseball players of the time, denied the opportunity to prove himself on the national stage by the major leagues’ strict if unofficial segregation policy.

On Sunday, a record throng attended the dedication ceremonies at the new Hamtramck Stadium and saw the Detroit Stars win both ends of a doubleheader. The Stars blanked the Hamtramck Municipal Nine, 11–0, in the initial contest and trimmed the Cubans, 7–4, in the nightcap. Ty Cobb threw out the ceremonial first pitch in the Cuban game, with Dr. Rudolph Tenerowicz, mayor of Hamtramck, on the receiving end. The teams were presented a floral offering by the fans.1

That day, ten thousand people watched the Detroit Stars of the Negro National League (NNL), whose home was now be in Hamtramck—a city that had incorporated eight years earlier to avoid being swallowed up by Detroit, which now surrounds it on all sides. Although the Sunday afternoon games were officially the opening games at the stadium, the chance to generate revenue on a Saturday had been too good to pass up, so the Stars and the Cubans had played the previous afternoon as well—the Cubans took the first game, 6–4, while the Detroit Stars took the second, 7–4.²

It was the Detroit Stars’ eleventh season in the NNL. It had gotten off to a bad start when their star player of the previous seven years, Norman “Turkey” Stearnes, jumped to the Lincoln Giants of New York. The Giants had played in the rival Eastern Colored League, which had folded in 1928, then joined the American Negro League, which was born and died in 1929, and they were still looking for competition at the start of 1930.3 In a segregated sport, hardly anybody in the mainstream sports press bothered to celebrate the achievements of black players; nonetheless, “Turkey” Stearnes, who owed his nickname to his unusual running style, was, without a doubt, one of baseball’s greats. While only pieces of the statistical records of the Negro League players have survived, Stearnes stands out with a career 176 home runs and 585 RBIs for a batting average of .344 in over 3,000 plate appearances.⁴

John Roesink had bought the Detroit Stars franchise in 1925, and like owners Frank Navin and Walter Briggs, named the facility after himself (although it was renamed Hamtramck Stadium in 1935). The stadium reportedly cost around $30,000 to build, a bold investment in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929.⁵ It was a significant commitment by Roesink, a successful Detroit tailor who also owned a chain of haberdashery stores in the downtown.⁶ The new build was required after Mack Stadium had burned down the year before. The stands could accommodate around six thousand people, and the whole arena ten thousand. Charmingly, fans could also sit on the other side of the stadium fence in the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, finding seats in the parked boxcars waiting to be loaded up at the Dodge Main plant next door.⁷

The eight teams of the NNL played a split season, with the pennant decided in a playoff between the winner of the first half and the winner of the second. Without Stearnes in the first half, Detroit finished in fourth place, behind the first-place St. Louis Stars. By midseason, however, the Lincoln Giants had folded, and Stearnes returned to Detroit for the second half.⁸ A week after his return, on June 27, the stadium staged a first for Detroit baseball: a night game. Lighting equipment had been acquired by the Kansas City Monarchs, who loaded it on trucks and took it with them on the road, no doubt in exchange for a share of the gate. The system was basic, with a noisy generator placed in midfield; wires everywhere threatened to trip up the fielders.9 But the evening was a success, and the Detroit Free Press reported that 6,432 packed into the stadium to witness the innovation.¹⁰

Detroit won the second half of the split season, tied on win percentage with St. Louis. For the first time in their history, the Stars had a shot at the pennant. By contrast, the Tigers were coming to the end of a dismal season, and by mid-September were twenty-five games behind the leaders, with only two weeks left to play. The seven-game NNL title series started on September 13. The first four games were in St. Louis, and the teams returned to Detroit with the series tied a week later. The home team won game 5 and needed just one more victory on home soil to take the championship. Game 6 ended in a 4–3 loss, even though Stearnes hit a huge home run. His batting in the series was remarkable. In twenty-two at bats, he had thirteen hits, including four doubles, one triple, and three home runs, for a slugging percentage of 1.273. But game 7 was a huge disappointment: Stearnes went without a hit in five appearances at the plate, and St. Louis overwhelmed Detroit 13–7 to take the pennant.¹¹

Even when they were playing for the championship, the Detroit Stars were already on the skids. One reason Stearnes had left at the beginning of the season was the grim outlook for baseball in Detroit at that time. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 was already weighing down on planned automobile production for 1930, and it didn’t look good for leisure spending. Everyone in Detroit was dependent on the economic health of the car industry, but the businesses that served the 8 percent of the population who were black were especially at risk. While the motor industry had welcomed black workers, few others did, and they were always the first to be laid off. Apart from the car industry, the African American economy in Detroit in that era depended largely on bootlegging and gambling.¹²

The Detroit Stars played baseball at a very high level, but the sport’s segregation meant that they could never hope to prove themselves superior by beating a white team. The major leagues’ ban of African Americans was strictly enforced in the absence of any written policy—in theory, any owner could have hired a black player at any time. In 1942, Commissioner Landis actually stressed there was no rule preventing them from doing so: “If [anybody] wants to sign one or 25 Negro players, it is all right with me.” One of the leading owners, Larry MacPhail of the Brooklyn Dodgers, replied: “Judge Landis was not speaking for baseball when he said there was no barrier; there has been an unwritten law tantamount to an agreement between major league clubs on the subject of the racial issue.”13

Of course, much of the blatant racism in baseball can be characterized as “unwritten law.” The status of Cuban players illustrated the hypocrisy: Afro-Cubans would have been labeled “colored” in the America of the 1920s, but because they were foreigners, the major league clubs were willing to hire them—everyone simply pretended not to notice the hue of their skin.¹⁴ And black players did get to play against their white counterparts in exhibition games, which the black teams frequently won.¹⁵ Everybody was aware of the hypocrisy—Charlie Gehringer, the Tigers Hall of Famer, reportedly told Willie Foster, who played for the Chicago American Giants, “If I could paint you white, I could get $150,000 for you right now.” Landis opposed exhibition games by the major league teams, although white players could still join “all-star” teams, which in those days meant invitation teams that would undertake barnstorming tours.¹⁶ Gehringer also remembered playing a number of games against black nines, and he found them highly competitive.¹⁷

Some white players would come and watch Negro League teams. Several New York Giants players, in St. Louis for a game against the Cardinals, attended game 2 of the 1930 pennant series and saw the Detroit Stars’ third baseman, Bobbie Robinson, complete a remarkable triple play to win the game. Afterward, they asked to be introduced to him so they could shake his hand.¹⁸ The composition of the crowd at Detroit Stars games is unknown, but it was said that when the Tigers were out of town many white fans went to watch the Negro League team. For owners, however, this was probably a limited source of income at best. The reality was that the team was highly dependent on the economic well-being of Detroit’s minority population.

The location of the stadium was a drawback for the Detroit Stars. Most black people had no choice but to live in Black Bottom, and the four-mile trek to Hamtramck Stadium was inconvenient at best. Streetcars could get you there for five or six cents—the price was a major political issue in Detroit—and cost was a consideration. Hamtramck was almost entirely Polish, but, around this time, there appears to have been little hostility between African Americans and Poles. Some African Americans lived in Hamtramck and, as we saw, Mayor Tenerowicz was happy to officiate at the opening of the stadium.

In fact, ties between the African American and Polish communities went back some time. According to his obituary in the Detroit Free Press in 1908, Charles Roxborough, a black lawyer, had built his practice representing Poles.19 One of his sons, John, would go on to manage Joe Louis, and the other, Charles Jr., would follow his father’s career in the law. In 1930, Charles Jr. became the first black representative in the Michigan State Senate. But there was always competition for jobs. Hamtramck Stadium was convenient for those African Americans who worked next door at Dodge Main, but Poles wanted the jobs there, too, and might well refuse to work alongside black workers. African Americans were slow to support unionization precisely because the white workers did not see them as equals, and white employers were willing to pay black workers to break strikes.

Roxborough lost his seat to a Polish American from Hamtramck, and was then defeated three times, standing against Polish Americans, including Tenerowicz, in elections for Michigan’s First U.S. Congressional District. Whatever the state of African American–Polish relations in 1930, they would certainly change over the next decade. Tenerowicz was immensely popular in the Polish community and, after a spell in jail in 1931, would go on to win a second term as mayor in 1936, and in 1938 was elected unopposed as representative for Michigan’s First District in Congress, where he served until 1943.²⁰ From this position he would lead the opposition against allocating housing to African Americans at the Sojourner Truth project.

Roesink sold his interest in the Detroit Stars at the end of the 1930 season to Everett Watson, a man well known in the black community from the numbers racket. He had an extravagant reputation, handing out money freely when he had it, but in 1931 the Detroit Stars were not bringing in crowds and the players were struggling to get paid; by the end of the season the team had folded.²¹ The NNL would struggle on for another couple of years, and there was an attempt to build a new team in Detroit to play at Ham-tramck, but it all fizzled out in the Depression. Between 1929 and 1933, attendance at Navin Field had fallen from 869,318 to 320,972. Attendance at the Detroit Stars games was a small fraction of that at Tiger games, and the collapse in attendance was even more devastating.

In 1933 the NNL was re-founded, and after a few precarious years established itself again. By the late 1930s, it incorporated East Coast teams from New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. In 1937, the Negro American League was founded. This league would end up with teams in Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Memphis, and Birmingham. Another attempt was made to start a Detroit team, and once again it would fail. The following ten years were the heyday of Negro League baseball, and between 1942 and 1948 the pennant winners of the two leagues played in the Negro World Series.22 Ironically, it was integration of the major leagues, starting with Jackie Robinson in 1947, that sounded the death knell for the Negro Leagues. Detroit would not integrate until 1957, though plenty of amateur black nines played baseball in the city. Joe Louis started up his own team in the 1930s—the Brown Bombers softball team—and often made cameo appearances. A keen baseball fan, he was regularly seen at Tigers games. In 1936, Louis was approached as a possible owner of a new Detroit team in the resurgent NNL. He liked the idea of owning his own professional team, and had the money to finance it. But his management talked him out of making the purchase, because many of the new teams were associated with money from the rackets, which didn’t sit well with Louis’s clean-cut image.²³ While Detroit no longer had a black professional team, Walter Briggs was willing to rent out his stadium in the late 1930s to touring Negro League teams putting on exhibition games, and black Detroiters flocked to watch them.²⁴

The heyday of black baseball in Detroit was the 1920s, when the Detroit Stars played at Mack Park. This stadium, about four miles east of Black Bottom, was also located in a white residential area. Today the site borders the vast Conner Creek industrial plant of Chrysler, the last car plant entirely located in the city of Detroit. Mack Stadium had been built by John Roesink in 1914. His approach to the sports business was entrepreneurial—he brought a number a Major League Baseball teams to the stadium to play games against his own team, and in 1920 he also founded one of the first pro football teams in Detroit. He was friendly with Frank Navin and several Tigers players, including Cobb, who threw the first pitch at Hamtramck as a favor. Since his main business was on Hastings Street, in the heart of Black Bottom, Roesink was also well connected to many influential black Detroiters.25

Because segregation in baseball was always a “gentleman’s agreement,” never written into the rules, deciding if a particular individual was “colored” could pose a problem—and the decision did frequently hang on a player’s ability. There were clearly instances of African American players appearing in the minor leagues in the nineteenth century. But by the 1890s the policy of segregation was more actively pursued as the Jim Crow “separate but equal” philosophy took hold.²⁶ As a result, all-colored teams started to appear and play games against each other. One of the most successful of these in the first two decades of the twentieth century was the Chicago American Giants run by Rube Foster, which barnstormed the country. In 1920, Foster created more stable competition by founding the NNL. Foster knew Detroit well, and arranged for John “Tenny” Blount to run the Detroit franchise, which he arranged to play at Mack Park.²⁷

The league was a success, and the rival Eastern Colored League was founded in 1923. The Negro World Series was inaugurated the year after, played between the champions of each league. In January 1927 the two leagues held a meeting at the Detroit YMCA to discuss policy issues, and Mayor John Smith addressed the delegations, saying how proud he had been in earlier years to throw the inaugural pitch for the Detroit Stars at the beginning of the NNL season. He also said rather pointedly that “there is no scandal in colored baseball, the record is clean.” No doubt he had in mind the “Black Sox” gambling scandal that had almost brought down the whites-only major leagues in 1919.²⁸

In purely baseball terms, the Detroit Stars were never dominant in the league, but neither were they doormats. As a business, the franchise was successful during the Roaring Twenties. Coleman Young, the future mayor, came to Detroit as a five-year-old in 1923, and remembered growing up in Black Bottom in this era: “We did particularly well during Prohibition, which can be said for all of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. I never saw such prosperity in the black community—hell, in the city—as there was then. The money was practically jumping from pocket to pocket in those days. If you weren’t making any, you either weren’t trying or were inhibited by an unusual code of lawfulness.”29 Bootlegging, gambling and vice recycled the money coming out of the car factories. Almost anyone could get work, and as people flooded into the city willy-nilly, the patterns of segregation that later became established had not yet been laid down. Young could remember growing up surrounded by families with ethnic roots in Italy, Germany, and Syria, and the smell of rye bread emanating from the Jewish bakery.

More important than baseball in the 1920s was the emerging black music scene. Blues, boogie-woogie, and jazz were all to be found in Paradise Valley during this era, and although less well known today, famous artists such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Rufus Perryman, and Maceo Merriweather all played in Detroit. They laid the foundations for artists who would become Detroit regulars in the 1940s such as Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, and John Lee Hooker. These artists served the growing black population, while white audiences proved less fastidious about black entertainers in the music industry than in the sports industry.

Black political opposition to discrimination and segregation was also starting to emerge in Detroit in 1930. In that year, a little known preacher called Wallace Fard Muhammad turned up in Detroit and on July 4 founded the Nation of Islam. Its purpose, he said, was to “teach the downtrodden and defenseless Black people a thorough Knowledge of God and of themselves, and to put them on the road to Self-Independence with a superior culture and higher civilization than they had previously experienced.” Where Fard was from or where he went is shrouded in mystery. He used many aliases, including “Ford.”³⁰ Under his disciple, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam would go on to be a major political force in 1960s America.³¹ At the same time, about ninety miles west a young boy called Malcolm Little was growing up in Lansing, the state capital of Michigan. The following year his father would die in a streetcar accident, which the family believed was the work of the Black Legion. Malcolm and his family would move east, and when he joined the gangs in New York in the 1940s he was nicknamed “Detroit Red.” In later years he took the name Malcolm X.

The end of Mack Park came on Sunday July 7, 1929. The previous day’s game had been canceled and the ground was still waterlogged. The ground staff followed the usual practice of covering the field in gasoline, which they would set alight in order to clear the water. However, a fire suddenly burst out in the stand where fans were waiting. No one was killed, but about 220 people were treated for burns, many of them serious. While a subsequent investigation did not find evidence of negligence, quite a few people believed that Roesink had stored tanks of gasoline under the stand, and that it was these that had caused the fire. While Roesink compensated the players, he did nothing for the injured and his reputation among his patrons was severely tarnished. Despite building a new park and having a winning team, attendance stagnated in the following season. Some journalists claimed that this was attributable as much to boycotts as it was to the incipient economic crisis.32

After the Detroit Stars folded, Turkey Stearnes went on to play for the Chicago American Giants and then the Kansas City Monarchs, finally retiring from baseball in 1940. He did work for Walter Briggs, which involved not playing ball in his stadium but spraying cars in his car body works, jokingly referred to as the “Briggs slaughterhouse.”³³ Stearnes was a quiet man. He didn’t drink, womanize, or gamble. He was intense, with a habit of talking to himself in angry tones when he struck out or misfielded, an idiosyncrasy that many found disconcerting. Yet the great players of the Negro Leagues remembered him as one of the very best.

After integration, the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown started to admit Negro League players, not an easy task given the incomplete statistical record. Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, so called because he played both pitcher and catcher, played with and against Stearnes. Himself one of the great players and ambassadors for Negro League achievements in later years, he said of Stearnes: “There were a lot of great players came through Detroit with the Stars. I guess the names don’t mean much now. Seems to me, a man can play ball that good, he ought to be remembered.”³⁴ Thanks mainly to efforts of his widow, Nettie Mae, Norman “Turkey Stearnes” was inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000, more than two decades after he passed away.

Miraculously the Hamtramck Stadium has survived. For years it stood unused, the iron frame of the grandstand slowly rusting away. The site is next to Keyworth Stadium, the WPA edifice opened by President Roosevelt in 1936 and now renovated as the home of Detroit City FC. The team owners have worked with the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium and city authorities to develop a plan for the old ballpark, and money has been raised to bring this special location back to life.