In 1999, more than fifty years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, the New York Times ran a story on declining black participation in organized baseball. The piece, “Out of the Ball Park: For Black Americans, Baseball Loses Its Luster,” reported on young black men living in the shadow of New York City’s Yankee Stadium (on the very land once occupied by the Polo Grounds) who did not play, or even watch, the supposedly “national pastime.” The article highlighted an obvious historical irony: baseball, which played the most important role of any sport in the civil rights struggle, had (and has) become increasingly devoid of African American participation.1 At the start of the 2012 season, black players made up just 8.05 percent of all Major Leaguers, the lowest percentage since integration.2 Ricky Clemons, the vice president of public relations for the National League, points to a barrier to black baseball in urban areas that harkens back to Reconstruction: “It takes a lot of equipment and a lot of space.”3
But the racial changes affecting modern baseball are, of course, very different from those at the root of baseball’s segregation during Reconstruction. Opportunity exists for black ballplayers and fans to participate in twenty-first-century baseball. Thus, the choices made by many black men to play and watch other sports are truly voluntary. In contrast, during the Reconstruction era—in the span of little more than one decade—baseball’s first generation of modern ballplayers created a game that fostered white exclusivity. Black choice and opportunity steadily declined. The patterns of segregation set in the 1860s and ’70s laid down the tracks for the subsequent eighty years of baseball history.
What followed Reconstruction-era baseball should not surprise us—in light of the baseball patterns revealed in this study and due to what we know about the Jim Crow era. Black baseball did not go away. Talented black teams proved that they could compete with all comers. A few African Americans played in baseball’s Major Leagues. But the gulf between black and white players and clubs widened. Contact continued to occur, but always with the firm understanding that segregation reigned supreme. Interaction did not necessarily breed equality, just as it had not during the 1860s. Examples abound demonstrating this dichotomous state of contact and cooperation coinciding with constant reminders of the differences between black and white ballplayers. Two case studies deserve particular mention: the Cuban Giants and the Negro Leagues.
Both the Cuban Giants and the Negro Leagues hinted at a widespread acquiescence to baseball’s firmly segregated culture. That is not to say—to be clear—that black ballplayers accepted inequality during Reconstruction or after. They did not. But the realities of baseball between 1876 and 1947 made investing in a parallel black-only baseball community a more fruitful day-to-day experience than pushing for inclusion in organized professional white baseball. As the National League flourished while denying entry to African Americans, black baseball players carved out new avenues of success. The Cuban Giants, often called black baseball’s first professional team, organized in 1885. The club’s name, particularly the Cuban part, was another in a long line of purposeful baseball monikers. In this case it was purposely deceptive. The players did not hail from Cuba, although they occasionally “chattered” in a Spanish-like gibberish to please the crowds, but rather the club’s leaders used the designation as a means of obfuscating the race line.4 The club traveled widely, won frequently, and mattered—at least in terms of baseball’s National League—only tangentially.
The Cuban Giants continued the trend of the Pythians and Alert and Mutual Clubs, probing for opportunities and making the best of segregated realities. Some cracks, however, developed in the wall of near-universal exclusion of black players from white club rosters during the end of the nineteenth century. Moses Fleetwood Walker, a graduate of Oberlin College, played in baseball’s “other” major league, the American Association, in 1884.5 He was not alone. Weldy Walker (Fleetwood’s brother) also played several games for the Toledo club in the the same season. Dozens of other black players, including Bud Fowler, Frank Grant, and George Stovey, played in the Minor Leagues. Only their skin color kept them from moving up. As Fowler stated, “My skin is against me. If I had not been quite so black, I might have caught on as a Spaniard or something of that kind. The race prejudice is so strong that my black skin barred me.”6
As had been the case during the Reconstruction years, hostility against black ballplayers increased as they traveled to the South. In Walker’s case Richmond’s baseball community provided the greatest opposition. In 1884 Walker had to be held out of the lineup in Richmond upon receiving word that a riot would break out if he played.7 Such opposition to integrated events was the rule in Richmond. The city’s leaders opposed a possible visit from the Cuban Giants in 1889 based on the mere possibility that the club might play an exhibition against a white club. The New York Age reported, “A number of the citizens of Richmond requested Mr. R. H. Leadley to cancel the game [between the Cuban Giants and the Detroit Base Ball Club], as they do not want colored and white clubs to play there against each other.”8 Eventually, revealing a departure from men such as Octavius Catto, Walker called for blacks to leave the United States and establish a “Liberia” in Africa.9
By the 1890s the few black players had been mostly removed from all levels of white professional baseball. The Sporting Life reported in 1891 on the public backlash that had occurred when the International League (a well-established professional league) had allowed a handful of black players in its midst:
Probably in no other business in America is the color line so finely drawn as in base ball. An African who attempts to put on a uniform and go in among a lot of white players is taking his life in his hands. . . . [T]he latter team [Buffalo] had an African named Grant playing second base. . . . “Well, boys what’ll we do to him? Put him out of the game,” in a chorus. . . . Crane was going like the wind. He ducked his head after measuring the distance and caught Grant squarely in the pit of the stomach with his shoulder. The son of Ham went up in the air as if he had been in a threshing machine. They took him home on a stretcher, and he didn’t recover for three weeks. . . . “[T]here were no more darkies in the League after that.”10
Thus, by 1898, white baseball leaders had added further nuance to the game’s segregation, determining that even a smattering of black men mixed into white rosters, at the minor league level, would not be allowed.
In the wake of this near-total exclusion by whites, black ballplayers once again invested in their own baseball organizations. The Negro Leagues, which persisted from 1920 until the 1950s, were a notable instance of black autonomy.11 Building on the economic foundations established by nineteenth-century black ballplayers, the franchises of the Negro Leagues became some of the largest black-owned businesses in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.12 But what has been missing from the increased historical discussion of the Negro Leagues is an acknowledgment that they too were a continuation of patterns set during the Reconstruction era. The Negro Leagues formed due to white exclusion and from the commitment of black men to continue playing baseball in the face of such opposition.
The Negro Leagues were not second rate, just as the Pythians were not during the 1860s in Philadelphia. As the ninety-four-year-old Negro Leagues legend Buck O’Neil resolutely told a class of elementary students who had listened to his presentation on black baseball, “I can see the way you look. Oh Yeah. You listened to that and you think that the Negro Leagues was inferior. The Negro Leagues was not inferior.”13 Although most Negro Leaguers desired the opportunity to join the white Major Leagues, the black-led clubs mattered to the players on their rosters and to the communities in which they competed.
The Mechanics of Segregation
This study overlooked many compelling anecdotes and multitudes of always tempting baseball statistics in order to focus on the mechanics of segregation. The patterns that emerged from this scope are informative. White leaders such as Arthur Gorman, Nicholas Young, and Hicks Hayhurst created organizational structures that made black entry into baseball’s highest levels increasingly difficult. Reconciliation and dreams of a national game drove these early decisions. Organizational structures made more formalized segregation possible. It was at the Pennsylvania Association of Amateur Base Ball Players, after all, that white baseball rejected Raymond Burr and the Philadelphia Pythians. “With no chance for anything but being black balled,” Burr reported to his club, “your delegate withdrew his application.”14 Then at the 1867 National Association of Base Ball Players convention, the nominating committee issued its preemptive declaration: “The report of the Nominating Committee in which they decided not to admit clubs with colored delegates, was adopted.”15 The measure sacrificed black civil rights in pursuit of sectional reconciliation. The New York State Base Ball Association and Chicago baseball community followed suit in 1870. The New Yorkers claimed that race was simply too controversial: “The motion of one of our delegates [the Brooklyn Star Club] to the late New York State Convention of Base Ball Players in regard to the admission of colored clubs to the State Association, involving, as it does a question of political nature, the introduction of which, in this club, cannot fail to prove prejudicial to that harmony which is so essential to our success as an organization, does not meet with our sanction or approval.”16 Generally speaking, the more organized baseball became, the more thoroughly white baseball leaders were able to enforce segregation rules.
Oftentimes, questions of race were addressed circumspectly. In Richmond segregation resulted from the efforts of Alexander Babcock, who helped make baseball into a white Southern game. Club names such as the Confederate, Dixie, and Secesh communicated white exclusivity without ever having to mention race. The close identification of baseball with white Southern ideals and sectionalist rhetoric made baseball a racially divisive game. Press accounts associating black players and games with unrestrained violence served the same cause. Richmond was not alone in using baseball as a tool to promote white Southern ideals. New Orleans, among others, had a robust baseball community too, with clubs similarly named after Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heroes.17
This study attempts to balance national trends with both regional and local nuances. After the Reconstruction era the baseball fortunes of Philadelphia, Richmond, and Washington DC diverged, tellingly. In Philadelphia black baseball remained vibrant. Sol White, the first black historian of black baseball, organized the Philadelphia Giants in 1902.18 The Giants won informal black baseball championships (fair scheduling and league play still remained elusive) and had a loyal following in Philadelphia’s black community.19
In 1923 the Hilldale Club, a black team located in nearby Darby, succeeded in acquiring what the Pythians and most other black clubs desperately wanted: its own field. The park was humble—the wooden stands held about 5,000 spectators. A huge tree overhanging the center-field fence served as its most defining feature and was, according to ground rules, in play.20 The historian, however, must consider the pride (if a lack of exact precision) evident in the recountings of Hilldale players about their own field: “The dirt—I don’t know what it was, but it shone something like silver. . . . A ball would very seldom take a bad hop unless someone dug a hole with his spikes. You could just smooth it over and you wouldn’t have any trouble.”21 Ownership of a field did not solve all financial problems. The Hilldale Club folded in 1932. The final straw had been a weekend series attended by only 295 paying fans.22
In Philadelphia’s white baseball community, the distinct dichotomy between soft support for racial progress and commitment to actual change remained evident into the twentieth century. The news of Jackie Robinson’s call-up to the Major Leagues prompted a call from the Philadelphia Phillies to Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, warning him “not to bring that nigger here.” Additionally, the Philadelphia Phillies, every bit the representative of the “Up South” city, were the last of the National League clubs to integrate (1957) and maintained segregated spring-training facilities until 1962.23
Washington DC became home to the Homestead Grays, “the greatest baseball dynasty that most people have never heard of,” in 1937.24 During the club’s tenure in DC (1937–48), the Washington Homestead Grays won nine straight Negro National League pennants (some Negro League experts contend it was eight out of nine) and two consecutive Colored World Series.25 Griffith Stadium, at Seventh Street and Florida Avenue NW, served as the District’s primary baseball site from 1891 to 1961—for both black and white clubs.26 Although white owned, the stadium sat in one of Washington DC’s most vibrant black neighborhoods. Black ball clubs frequently leased the venue, drawing capacity crowds of more than 27,000 for games featuring Josh Gibson and the Grays. Only when white clubs played did the stadium have segregated seating.
The success of the Homestead Grays made the record of Washington’s top white club, the Senators, even more embarrassing. After winning the World Series in 1924 behind the pitching of Walter Johnson, the Senators had winning seasons in only two of its final twenty-five seasons in the District.27 Clark Griffith, however, could not bend to sign black players, even those already playing in his own stadium, who might have helped the Major Leagues’ most “Southern” town field a winner.28 In what might be classified as a fitting outcome for the many black ballplayers who had struggled for baseball space in the District, Howard University—a product of the Freedmen’s Bureau—purchased the site of Griffith Stadium in 1975 and built a hospital on the grounds.
Richmond’s black ballplayers, in contrast to Philadelphia’s and Washington’s, never fielded a club in the Negro Leagues. The city did not have much success in white baseball, either. Richmond had only a brief “cup of coffee” in the big leagues. Richmond’s opportunity to play in the American Association came when Washington dropped out midway through the 1884 season. Thus, the Richmond Virginians played at baseball’s highest level from August to October 1884, the same year that Moses Fleetwood Walker played in the association. The Richmond club played forty-six games, winning twelve, losing thirty, and failing, apparently, to finish four games. The club dropped back into the Minor Leagues for good in 1885.29 When Moses Fleetwood Walker’s Toledo Blue Stockings planned to visit Richmond in 1884, a group of Richmonders threatened “much bloodshed” if Walker took the field. Walker, when in Richmond, stayed on the bench.30
Beyond outright racism baseball in Richmond continued to be linked to the memory of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause. When it came time to finally unveil the city’s Robert E. Lee statue in 1889, for example, tens of thousands of Richmonders marched to the ceremony—arriving at the city’s main baseball grounds where the statue had been placed.31 Racial integration in baseball finally came to Richmond in 1953, six years after Jackie Robinson made his debut. Whit Graves, a black ballplayer from Richmond, joined the Richmond Colts—the city’s Piedmont League team.32 Integration came to Richmond’s top club the same year the Washington Senators signed their first black ballplayer and three years before the Philadelphia Phillies placed a black man on their roster.
Reconstruction and Segregation
Part of the intrigue of the Reconstruction era, at least for this historian, is the idea that something transformative might have happened. Following the Civil War, constitutional amendments might have protected the civil liberties of newly freed slaves. Judicial decisions might have built a lattice for racial progress. Economic and land policies might have been enacted to couple legal and political freedoms to practical, day-to-day equality. But these transformations did not happen. Windows of opportunity closed. Transformative measures became problematic compromises.
The same story of opportunities come and gone makes the history of baseball’s segregation during the Reconstruction era a compelling one. Thomas Fitzgerald, the radical baseball leader from Philadelphia, might have been Branch Rickey eighty years earlier. Instead, the white baseball community stripped Fitzgerald of his governing roles. Similarly, Octavius Catto had the makings of a nineteenth-century Jackie Robinson. Articulate, educated, and a fine ballplayer, Catto became a martyr instead of a trailblazer. His death, and the connection of black baseball to violence more broadly, inhibited the growth of black baseball. And then more widely, the white baseball community’s obsession with creating a “national game” might have been used to prompt Southerners to reconstruct their ideas about race. Instead, white Southerners won baseball’s Reconstruction peace. Civil rights lost out, and then Southerners largely withdrew from the national baseball community anyhow. And so the Reconstruction era became the period of baseball’s segregation. Tragically, the norms of segregation in baseball were put in place over the course of one decade. But these quick-planted roots stuck. Not until Jackie Robinson in 1947 would the failings of the post–Civil War generation of ballplayers in terms of racial equality begin to be undone.