8

Segregation and the Negro Leagues (1896 to 1949)

in 1896 the supreme court upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” and by the early twentieth century, African Americans began moving north in search of jobs and economic opportunity, and to escape racial oppression and violence. The movement of 1.6 million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between 1910 and 1930, known as the Great Migration, established black communities in northern cities like Chicago and Detroit and in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Black northerners and white northerners lived in separate neighborhoods and worked in different occupations, with black workers making less than their white counterparts, and their children attended separate schools. Despite some economic gains, for the most part African Americans lived on the margins of northern society. This oppression prompted black leaders to offer different visions for the future. Booker T. Washington accepted segregation as a temporary accommodation in exchange for white support for black efforts in education, social uplift, and economic progress. Others refused such a passive stance. W.E.B. Du Bois demanded the restoration of voting rights for black citizens, an end to segregation, and the removal of discriminatory barriers to African Americans. In 1909 he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but its progress was slow. Following World War I, as racial problems seemed to worsen, Marcus Garvey called on African Americans to give up their hopes for integration and instead create an independent black nation in Africa. None of these competing African American movements, however, seemed to overcome segregation. As a result, black Americans responded with their own separate but unequal social institutions, including black churches, black fraternities, black political organizations, black schools and universities, and even a black film industry that produced race movies—movies made by black filmmakers and actors for an African American audience. A new black middle class of ministers, professionals, and businessmen served the needs of the community. African Americans established complex societies that contained a wide range of people, including workers, businessmen, professionals, intellectuals, artists, and entertainers. In the North, two distinct styles of black music—blues and ragtime—synthesized into jazz, a new musical genre that became popular among whites as well. And the Harlem Renaissance, a black literary and artistic revival paralleling the development of jazz music in northern cities, emerged in the 1920s. Embedded in this cultural ferment, black baseball established its own separate but unequal—and oftentimes thriving—organization that aimed, ultimately, to show whites that integration of the major leagues was morally necessary and pragmatically profitable.

Prior to a game against the Baltimore Elite Giants at Yankee Stadium in July 1942, a beautiful woman ordered Willie Wells, the player-manager of the Negro National League’s Newark Eagles, to have his players watch her in the stands for instructions when they came to bat. She would pass along signs to the Eagles batters based on the way she crossed her legs. When Wells stepped to the plate with a runner on first, however, he did not understand the signal. He could not tell if the woman was calling for a bunt or the hit-and-run play. While Wells was still trying to figure out the sign, Baltimore pitcher Bill Byrd began his windup. Before Wells knew what happened, Byrd’s pitch hit him in the head, knocking him unconscious. Wells returned to the lineup two days later, but only after borrowing a hardhat from a Jersey City construction site. The next time he came to bat, Wells wore the safety gear on his head—possibly the first time a player wore a batting helmet in a baseball game.

The woman was Effa Manley, the co-owner of the Newark Eagles. Her husband, Camden, New Jersey numbers king Abe Manley, started the team in 1935 as a vehicle for laundering the money he made from his gambling racket. When Abe married Effa later that same year, she became the co-owner of the Eagles. But while Abe concentrated on running numbers, Effa took control of the team. She signed the team’s players, scheduled the team’s games, and arranged the team’s travel accommodations. She often drew up the starting lineup and, as the above anecdote indicates, she even tried to orchestrate strategy. Effa Manley also served as the Negro National League’s treasurer. She became heavily active in the early civil rights movement of the 1930s and 1940s. In the thirties she served as the treasurer of the New Jersey NAACP, and she unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to adopt the Costigan-Wagner Act, an antilynching bill. She had more success with the “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Work” boycott, which, in 1935, forced Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem to hire black employees.

Manley lived in a black world. But although she was raised by an African American stepfather and married to a black gangster, she was white. Most people at the time, however, assumed that she was a light-skinned African American. In the first half of the twentieth century, a sharp racial divide existed in America; one could not move freely between a black world and a white world.

As discussed in chapter 3, African American ballplayers, like black society at large, sought to find feasible alternatives to integration. Forced out of white baseball in the late nineteenth century, black athletes—like African Americans in other fields—responded by establishing their own organizations. As early as the 1880s, amateur African American teams like the Philadelphia Orions, the St. Louis Black Stockings, and the Baltimore Athletics began to play baseball. The first professional African American team, the Cuban Giants, played at a resort on Long Island in 1885. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, other professional black teams sprang up, including the Chicago Leland Giants in 1901, the Homestead Grays from the Pittsburgh area in 1912, and the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1916.

In the 1890s an African American baseball team called the Waco Yellow Jackets passed through the tiny town of Calvert, Texas. There, the pitching of an eighth-grade student named Andrew Foster impressed the professional ballplayers. When the Yellow Jackets left town, Foster went with them. Foster soon pitched for some of the premier black teams in America, including the Cuban X-Giants, the Philadelphia Giants, and the Chicago Leland Giants. He earned the nickname “Rube” when he defeated Rube Waddell of the Philadelphia Athletics in an exhibition game in 1903. As the player-manager of the Leland Giants, Foster became disillusioned with the low pay he and his teammates received when playing against white teams. He was determined to run his own team, and in 1910 he and his white business partner, John Schorling, the son-in-law of Charles Comiskey, established a team called the Chicago American Giants. Schorling arranged for the American Giants to use South Side Park, the stadium abandoned by the White Sox when Comiskey Park opened the previous year.

As the operator of a baseball team, Foster discovered the same thing William Hulbert learned while running the Chicago White Stockings in the 1870s—it is hard to make a profit in baseball with a team that plays an irregular schedule. Like Hulbert before him, Foster realized that the key to success hinged on playing in a stable league. In 1920 Foster set up the Negro National League, a circuit of eight black teams based in the Midwest. To ensure balanced competition among member clubs, Foster arranged several trades between various teams to spread the talent around. To protect the club owners, Foster imposed a reserve clause, although it proved to be weak and ineffective.

Pleased with the success of the Negro National League, Foster encouraged African American teams on the East Coast to organize their own league, and the Eastern Colored League began play with six teams in 1923. Starting in 1924, the pennant winner of the Negro National League met the pennant winner of the Eastern Colored League in the Negro League World Series. Although the Negro League World Series would be played until 1927, it never became as popular as its promoters had hoped. Few African American fans had the resources to attend, or even follow, such a long series.

In the late twenties, the Negro leagues encountered a series of challenges. Foster stepped down from running the Negro National League after he suffered a mental breakdown in 1926. The league continued in a rudderless manner without his leadership. In the middle of the 1928 season, when a dispute over players’ contracts broke out between clubs, the Eastern Colored League collapsed. Three years later, battered by financial losses caused by the Great Depression, the Negro National League went out of business. Many African American leaders, however, recognized the importance of baseball to black communities. To many black residents of northern cities, Negro league teams were a source of pride, providing African American communities a sense of identity and unity. In 1932 the vacuum left by the dissolution of the Negro National League was filled by two other Negro leagues: a minor black league in the South called the Negro Southern League, which in 1932 claimed major Negro league status, and a new league established by Homestead Grays owner Cumberland Posey called the East-West League. The East-West League stretched from Detroit to the East Coast, while the Negro Southern League extended from Louisiana to as far north as Chicago and Cleveland. Both circuits lasted only one year as major Negro leagues.

In 1933 a Pittsburgh businessman named Gus Greenlee revived the Negro National League. Greenlee owned the Crawford Bar & Grille, a nightclub on Crawford Avenue in Pittsburgh that attracted the biggest jazz stars of the time, including Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and Count Basie. Most of the money Greenlee earned, however, came from running gambling operations and selling bootleg whiskey. In the black community, there was no stigma to Greenlee’s profession; bookmakers and bootleggers were viewed as leaders. Numbers runners were especially respected and admired, as they offered an opportunity for a quick windfall for struggling members of the community. Gambling and bootlegging were two of the very limited opportunities open to industrious and ambitious African American men. Like Abe Manley, Greenlee established a Negro league baseball team to launder his income, and like Rube Foster, Greenlee recognized that his baseball team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, would be more profitable if it played in an organized league.

In 1933 Greenlee also organized the East-West All-Star Game, an annual event that would be played at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. The best players on Negro league teams in the East would play the best players on Negro league teams in the Midwest. Players were selected by fan voting conducted by the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, African American newspapers with nationwide readership. The East-West All-Star Game quickly became the most important event on the Negro leagues’ calendar. Between 1933 and 1949, the game averaged more than thirty-five thousand fans, often drawing a larger crowd than Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. To meet the demand for transportation, railroads added extra cars to take fans from the Deep South to Chicago to attend the game.

In 1937 J. L. Wilkinson, the white owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, organized a rival Negro league. Wilkinson had first entered baseball in 1912, when he formed the All-Nations team, an independent club that included African American, Native American, Mexican, and Japanese ballplayers on its roster. In 1920 Foster invited Wilkinson to sponsor a team in the original Negro National League, so Wilkinson created the Kansas City Monarchs, a team that would last until 1965. After the original Negro National League collapsed during the 1931 season, the Monarchs struggled to remain solvent. Too far from most of the clubs in the new Negro National League, Wilkinson’s team could not realistically join Greenlee’s organization. Instead Wilkinson created a new circuit, based in the Midwest, called the Negro American League. With a second Negro league, the Negro League World Series was revived in 1942, but the same challenges encountered by the original Negro League World Series of the 1920s prevented the new championship series from surpassing the East-West All-Star Game in popularity.

In the twenties and thirties, the Negro leagues served as the center of black communities in northern cities. African American ballplayers, like black musicians and the stars of race movies, were celebrities whom the entire community admired. The Negro leagues represented the only real opportunity for black athletes to earn a living playing a sport. With the exception of boxing, which boasted a few black prizefighters, all other professional sports were closed to black athletes. Negro league baseball teams provided jobs for perhaps two hundred black baseball players, with about another two hundred jobs for African American athletes on independent teams. During the Great Depression, players in the Negro leagues could earn a decent living. Many players made around $400 a month, and even the least skilled players on the poorest teams in the Negro leagues earned a living wage. The impoverished Birmingham Black Barons paid a minimum salary of $60 a month, about what the average white laborer made during the Depression. And some Negro league stars did very well; Kansas City Monarchs pitcher Satchel Paige made $37,000 in 1942, four times the average white major leaguer’s salary.

Black ballplayers earned their pay. The Negro league season was long and hard. The length of the schedule varied, as teams played between sixty and eighty league games in each season, but Negro league teams played many more games than that. In order to bring in enough revenue to pay decent salaries, Negro league teams barnstormed, traveling from town to town playing nonleague exhibition games. Teams often played two—and sometimes three—games a day. Negro league teams scheduled nonleague games against other Negro league teams, independent black teams, and teams of white professional players. Baseball researchers have determined that Negro league teams won 60 percent of the games played against white major league opposition. Following a drubbing by a team of Negro leaguers in Puerto Rico in 1936, the Cincinnati Reds vowed to no longer schedule exhibition games against black teams. When the weather became colder, Negro league teams toured the South and played there. In the winter, they often traveled to Mexico, Cuba, or Venezuela to continue playing.

Sporting goods dealers welcomed the business from the Negro leagues. For the Spalding Company, providing equipment to black ballplayers fit into the business model developed by Albert Spalding during his world tour, in which he tried to increase sales of his product by bringing baseball to more people. Sometimes major league teams worked with black teams. The Washington Senators often ordered bats for the Washington Grays, passing along their major league discount to the Negro league team. At the end of every season, the New York Yankees sold their used uniforms to the New York Black Yankees, a transaction that made a little extra money for the major league club while providing inexpensive, quality major league uniforms for the Negro league team. When possible, Negro league teams rented major league stadiums, using them when the major league tenants were out of town. Playing in major league stadiums gave black teams a quality facility and major league teams an additional source of revenue. A few Negro league teams had their own stadiums. Gus Greenlee built Greenlee Stadium in Pittsburgh, the only black-built stadium in the Negro leagues, to house his fabulous Crawfords, perhaps the best Negro league team of all time. In 1939 the New York Cubans played their home games on a baseball diamond under the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan. Called the 59th Street Sandlot, the ballpark was technically baseball’s first covered stadium. It was not glamorous like modern indoor stadiums, however, as grass could not grow on parts of the field without exposure to direct sunlight, so the infield was made up of dirt and cinders.

When playing in northern cities, Negro league teams stayed in the best hotels in black neighborhoods, just a notch below the best hotels in town. When traveling through the South or the hinterlands, however, African American ballplayers stayed in black-only hotels or boarding houses. If no lodging was available, they sometimes slept on the team bus or camped outside it. In the twenties, wealthier Negro league teams traveled by train. The Chicago American Giants had a Pullman sleeping car, a very luxurious way to travel at the time. Negro league baseball teams traveling by train had a significant impact on African Americans because the railroads were the largest employers of black workers, especially porters who carried luggage for railroad passengers. For a black porter who spent his day carrying the bags of countless white passengers, handling the luggage of an African American man traveling in luxury became a point of pride. In the 1930s, buses replaced rail travel. The buses were not as comfortable as the train, but because they were not tied to the rail line or the railroad schedule, they offered more flexibility for scheduling. A few wealthy clubs purchased new, modern buses. Gus Greenlee bought a bus for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in the 1930s, and in 1946 Effa Manley spent $15,000 on an air-conditioned Flxible Clipper bus for the Newark Eagles.

A multimillion-dollar industry, the Negro leagues represented one of the largest African American businesses in America during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the owners of Negro league teams were black businessmen. Some, like Gus Greenlee, Abe Manley, and New York Cubans owner Alessandro Pompez, were bootleggers, racketeers, or number runners. Few other African American men could afford to own a baseball team. The Negro leagues also boasted two prominent white owners: J. L. Wilkinson and Effa Manley.

The style of play in the Negro leagues differed from that in the white leagues. Negro league teams did not rely on the long ball or the big inning, instead playing a scrappy game that emphasized stolen bases. With the arrival of Babe Ruth’s home run, the stolen base became a lost art in the major leagues in the twenties and thirties. Former Negro lea-guers reintroduced the stolen base when they entered the major leagues in the late forties and 1950s.

Many Negro league stars are recognizable to baseball fans today. James Thomas Bell, whose thirty-year career included stints with seven Negro league teams, was one of the fastest players in the game. Cool Papa Bell, as he was called, could circle the bases in twelve seconds. According to a popular legend, Bell was so fast that he could turn out the light and be in bed, under the covers, before it got dark. There was some truth behind the legend. According to his roommate Satchel Paige, one day Bell noticed that the faulty wiring in the cheap black-only hotel where the Kansas City Monarchs were staying created a delay when the light switch was flipped. He turned to Paige and demonstrated that he could live up to his reputation.

The greatest slugger of the Negro leagues was probably catcher Josh Gibson of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays. Although statistics from Negro league games are incomplete, by some estimates—counting nonleague exhibition games and games played during barnstorming tours—Gibson may have hit eight hundred or more home runs in his lifetime. The same estimates have him hitting as many as eighty home runs in a single season. Negro league legend states that Gibson is the only person to hit a fair ball completely out of Yankee Stadium, a feat he reputedly accomplished twice, though historians have not been able to verify those colossal hits. Sadly, doctors diagnosed Gibson with a brain tumor in 1943, and although he continued to play baseball, over the next three years Gibson complained of terrible headaches and checked into and out of hospitals. He died in January 1947, just three months before Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Pitcher Satchel Paige played twenty-two years in the Negro Leagues, starting in 1927. Perhaps the greatest pitcher of all time, he was also a showman. More than once he intentionally walked the bases full and then ordered the outfielders to sit down before striking out the next three batters. Paige was also a civil rights pioneer; while playing in the Negro leagues, Paige refused to pitch in towns where he could not get a meal or a place to sleep. After the collapse of baseball’s color barrier, Paige pitched two seasons for the Cleveland Indians, contending for the 1948 American League Rookie of the Year Award at age forty-two. Starting in 1951, he pitched three seasons for the St. Louis Browns. Paige seemed ageless. Although his birth certificate confirms that he was born in 1906, rumors circulated that he was older. After hiring a private detective to dig into Paige’s background, Indians owner Bill Veeck announced that Paige could not have been born in the twentieth century. In 1965, at age fifty-nine, Paige came out of retirement to pitch a game for the Kansas City Athletics.

Few people realized it at the time, but the arrival of Jackie Robinson on the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 put the nail in the coffin of the Negro leagues. Not only did the Negro leagues lose their stars, but they also started to lose their fans as African Americans began to attend major league games. Railroads in the Deep South added extra cars to their trains in order to take black fans north to see the Dodgers play in Cincinnati or St. Louis. Unable to compete with the integrated Dodgers or Giants across the Hudson River, in 1949 Effa Manley moved the Newark Eagles to Houston, Texas, nearly eight hundred miles from St. Louis, the nearest major league competition. But even that was a stopgap measure. In 1949 the Negro National League went out of business. The Negro American League managed to hang on for another dozen years, but for the last decade of its life it no longer offered a quality product. For many black ballplayers, integration meant an end to their baseball careers. The major league teams integrated slowly, only adding the biggest Negro league stars to their rosters, and when the Negro leagues went out of business, most black ballplayers no longer had an employer. Rarely compensated for their players who joined white teams, the owners of Negro league teams also lost money. As black fans switched allegiance to major league teams, Negro league franchises became worthless. Still, African Americans took solace in the fact that they had integrated Major League Baseball, in part because the stellar play in the Negro leagues proved blacks could compete on an equal level with whites.

Although the records are incomplete, counting non-league exhibition games and games played during barnstorming tours Negro League slugger Josh Gibson may have hit as many as 800 home runs. Sadly, Gibson died from a stroke at age 35 in January 1947, three months before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

Twenty years after the integration of baseball, a growing movement emerged to remember Negro league players before they passed into obscurity. Starting in 1971, the National Baseball Hall of Fame began considering Negro league players for induction. Since then, nearly three dozen individuals associated with the Negro leagues—including Satchel Paige in 1971, Josh Gibson in 1972, Cool Papa Bell in 1974, and Effa Manley in 2006—have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. In 1990 the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, an institution dedicated to preserving the memory of the Negro leagues, opened in Kansas City.