Baseball is a game uniquely defined by personal experience. For many, the game has been a vehicle for lifelong friendships forged and tested on gravel diamonds scratched out in vacant lots. The dreams of a lifetime are played out to conclusion, then replayed with different result in a game that renews itself with each sunrise. Escape and release, a cold confrontation of life, high achievement vicariously realized and plain simple fun. These are among the myriad definitions placed upon the national pastime.
While box scores, standings and statistics fill the literature of baseball, it is the fans that fill the grandstands who give life to the game and generate its history. The story of baseball is nothing less than the story of the American people, a story that now transcends issues of race and creed. But it was not always so.
In a racially segregated America that dictated a separate game for white and black fans, there necessarily developed two distinct baseball cultures. Almost fifty years removed from our view, the color, flavor and meaning of pre-integration Negro baseball can now only be evidenced through the eyes of those fans who now define it in their recollections and reminiscences.
With the passage of time memories dim, contort and transform. Minds that once quickly recalled and recounted with exactness now, in advanced years, find dates, places and events mixed together into a constantly changing collage of images and emotions. Happily, the truth of Negro baseball’s story is not to be found in a collection of facts, but in the composite of images and emotions that have transcended the years since the segregated game disappeared. The fans whose recollections are presented in the following pages provide us a window into the past—a window through which the truth passes far more easily than through record books.
Rural Georgia, 1922
Nowhere in the South is the summer heat hotter than in the picking fields surrounding Americus, Georgia. But, the daunting heat and heavy summer air did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of rural residents for athletic recreation. A few miles outside Americus along the state highway to Columbus a small settlement of black agricultural workers and their families found baseball the perfect diversion from their summer labors.
“I was ten years old in 1922,” recalls Luther Mayweather. “That was the year we settled outside Americus. My father took a job with a farmer, tending to the crops and animals, doing general farm work. That’s what all the men did. There were a number of board houses scattered around the farm and on the other farms in the area. The colored workers lived right there where they worked.”
“In the summertime us kids would help with some of the work on the farm, but mainly my chores were around the house helping my mother. Chores never was my long suit when I was a kid,” Luther admits. “Mostly, I was just wanting to get done and get on outside to play.”
Baseball was mostly what we would play in the summer,” Luther continues. “You don’t have to get up a bunch of equipment to play baseball. Just a ball and something to hit it with was about all you needed. There was a few times that we had a real baseball, but most of the time we used balls that one of our mothers made up for us. My mother would sew up some cardboard wrapped up with twine, cover it with a little patch of leather or maybe cloth. Those balls weren’t real hard, you know, so you really didn’t need a glove to catch them.”
“The land down there was pretty flat, so we could draw out a baseball field most anywhere. We would throw down old boards for bases, and I remember for a while we used an old drum head for home base,” Luther recalls with amusement. “Somebody had a baseball bat, and everybody used it. It was too big for some of the little kids, so they would choke up on it, you know.”
“We didn’t get any newspapers, and we didn’t have a radio. So, we didn’t know too much about what was going on outside the little settlement. We would go up to Americus, maybe once a month, and sometimes there would be some big thing happening like a revival meeting or a carnival that would pass through there. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a professional ball player until this big minstrel show came through Americus carrying a baseball team with them. That’s the first time I ever saw a real baseball game.”
Luther’s memories of the minstrel show baseball game are vivid. “There was this small store about a mile from our house. That’s where my father would buy what we needed between trips to Americus. The store was sort of a meeting place for everybody who lived around there. I found out about the minstrel show coming to town from a poster that was put up down at the store. I can still remember how excited all us kids were about it. The poster said there were going to be musicians, comedians, magic acts, snake dancers – just about everything. And, on top of that, there was to be a baseball game. Who wouldn’t be excited about all that!”
“I don’t know what I thought the baseball game was going to be. But, I know I wasn’t expecting what I saw. They played the baseball game as a separate part of the minstrel show. You had to buy a special ticket just for the baseball game. Me and my two little brothers bought tickets early in the morning even though the game wasn’t going to be played until around 2:00 o’clock. Finally, about thirty minutes before the game was supposed to start this man with a bullhorn announced that people who had tickets to the baseball game should start gathering over around the baseball field. When my brothers and I got over there the players were already on the field getting ready. I had no idea what I was looking at. I had never seen anything like it before!”
“The players all had on uniforms. Real baseball uniforms. Of course, I know what a baseball uniform was and what it was supposed to look like. I’d seen pictures, but I hadn’t ever seen anyone wearing one before. They were the best looking things I had ever seen. They had the name of the team sewn onto the front of the shirt. I don’t remember what the name of the team was now. All I can remember is how much I liked those uniforms and how much I wanted to own one.”
“Watching those players get ready for the game was something else, too. The way they could throw the ball and catch it. I had never seen anybody who could play that good,” Luther still seems incredulous thinking back.
My father caught up with us just before the game started. He started telling us about professional baseball teams, how they went all over the country playing games. I could hardly believe that a man could make a living without working, just playing baseball. But, it was easy to understand why people would pay money to see this team play. They were so good!”
“I came away from that day wanting to be a professional baseball man. I wanted to go all over the country, seeing all the sights and doing all the things I thought there was to do in the big cities like Atlanta and Chicago. I wanted to play baseball and get paid for it. I just all seemed like something that would be too good to be true.”
“When I was seventeen years old I left home with my uncle, headed for Atlanta. By then I wasn’t thinking about playing any baseball. I had seen several professional games played in Americus and one over in Macon. I wasn’t good enough to be a professional. I went up to Atlanta to find some work, and I found some. I got a job with a lumber yard and stayed there a few years before things got too tough during the depression. After that, I worked for the same shipping company all over the South, first in Atlanta, then Little Rock and Birmingham all the way up through the World War.”
“I went to a lot of baseball games during those years. I saw all the teams, white and black. I was always jealous of those ballplayers. Jealous of their life, their traveling around. Oh, I kow they didn’t have it so good as it seemed to me. But, it was one of those things you make up a fantasy about. They come into town, play a game or two, then take off again for some other place I had never been to,” Luther pauses thoughtfully.
“You want to know what baseball meant to me when I was young? It meant getting away from Americus, lumber yards and shipping companies. After a team would come to town then set out on the road again, I would think about where they were going and what it would be like to be in those places playing baseball. I went all over the place in my mind. I guess seeing that first baseball game woke me up to there being a whole world outside South Georgia.”
Montgomery, Alabama – 1938
“The Pittsburgh Courier was always available down at the drug store. The druggist would have a few dozen copies of it sent down every week and put it out for sale there in the store,” recalls Rowland Porter. I worked just up the street from the drug store at a gas station. The papers came in on Wednesday morning, I believe, and I would pick one up at my lunch hour.”
“There were a couple of big shade trees out back behind the gas station where I ate my lunch. I’d sit down back there with whatever I was eating and turn to the Courier sports page. The Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords were the big national teams at the time, and they were both from Pittsburgh. So, I could keep up with them all through the summer.”
Man, I could read those articles about the big games in Yankee Stadium and in Chicago, and play every game over in my mind – just like I was watching it on television! I didn’t care nothing about the major league baseball. I never even thought about the Negro teams getting into those leagues. The Homestead Grays were my team, and I didn’t care what league they played in.”
“Twice I went over to Atlanta on the bus to see the Grays play. I had an aunt that lived there, so that gave me an excuse to go. And, once in a while, usually in the early spring, the Grays would come to Montgomery. I never missed one of those games, and I would still be going to see them play today if they were around,” Porter says emphatically.
“The white man who owned the gasoline station was always wanting to talk baseball with me. He was a St. Louis Cardinals fan. He’d be talking about Dizzy Dean, and I would be talking about Satchel Paige. He’s start in about Joe Medwick, and I’d come back with Buck Leonard. He’d always say to me, ‘Do you really think those colored players are as good as the major leaguers?’, and I’d tell him they were not only as good, they were better!”
“It was all about bragging, you know. Getting one up on the other guy. My boss was a nice man. Sure, we were talking about black players vs. white players, but it was all in good fun. I t wasn’t a racial thing between us. It was just two baseball fans, each hoping his favorite team and player would outdo the other guy’s favorites.”
“I remember one year, I guess it was 1937 or 1938, we made a bet at the start of the season. I bet him that Josh Gibson would hit more homeruns in the month of May than Joe Medwick, his favorite player. We’d look up games in the Courier and add up Josh’s homeruns. Then we’d look up Medwick’s homers in the white newspaper and compare the two. I won. He wanted to go double or nothing for the month of June. I won again. Then he got mad and said the bet wasn’t fair because the Grays were playing against teams that weren’t regular league teams and the pitching wasn’t so good. That’s why, he said, Gibson hit all those homeruns. I told him that all black pitchers were better than white pitchers, and the argument was really on then!”
“Finally, he said that if all black pitchers were better than white pitchers then I must be a better pitcher than he was. I agreed with that, and he challenged me to a contest to settle the matter.”
There was this white boy named Milhouse who was working for the phone company. He’d come by the station at least two or three times a week to gas up his truck. He had been a star hitter for the local high school, and they said he would have been a pro if he could have run a little faster. Anyway, we decided to settle our dispute by each of us pitching twenty pitches to Milhouse. Whoever got the most strikes past him would be the winner. So, the next time Milhouse came into the station we told him about our bet, and he said he would be glad to help us settle the issue.”
Settling back easy in his chair, Porter relates the course of the contest with obvious delight. “Now, I was about thirty years old, and my boss was a year or two older. We were both in pretty good shape from working hard, but neither of us had played any ball since we got out of school. So, you might think that we would be a pretty good matchup.”
“Well, after we closed up the station that afternoon we waited on Milhouse to show up. About six o’clock or so here he came rumbling up in his truck. He had stopped by his house and picked up a bat, ball and his glove. We went out back behind the station, and the contest was on!”
“My boss was going to pitch first. He said he ought to pitch first because Milhouse couldn’t hit anything he was gonna throw, so it wouldn’t take too long for him to finish his throws! Well, he was right. He was finished pretty quick, and so was Milhouse. The first pitch was thrown as hard as he could throw it – right at the batter. Milhouse tried to jump out of the way, but the ball was coming too fast! It hit him right on that bone that sticks out on your wrist. He was hopping all around and cussing pretty good too. That was the end of it. I was declared the winner!”
“Baseball has given me more entertainment than anything in my life. And, for the most part, it has been free! But, back then it was also something that I had in common with the man I worked for. I could talk about baseball with all the customers who came in the gas station. It was something that we all had in common, and it just made the work day pass by a lot quicker. Maybe that’s why they call it the national pastime.
Atlanta, Georgia 1943
Lee Franklin spent WWII in Atlanta’s freight yards and at the local ballpark. An avid fan of the Atlanta Black Crackers and baseball in general, Lee vividly recalls wartime night games at Ponce de Leon Park.
“In 1943, you know, there was a little war going on. First there was a depression, then there was a war. The war was a terrible thing, of course, with so many boys not coming home. But, for those of us who were still here in the states thing were actually a little better than they had been for a number of years. For one thing, almost everybody had a job. All the factories were busy putting out the things that were needed for the war effort, so it was a lot easier to make a living than it had been during the depression.”
“I was a little older than the average boy who was drafted, but I’m sure I would have been drafted into the Army if I hadn’t been married with two young children. And, I also had to take care of my father who was in poor health and lived with us. I was working at the railroad yards loading freight cars, and let me tell you there was a lot of freight to be loaded, unloaded and loaded again in Atlanta in 1943. It seemed like everything that was going overseas for the military was coming through our railroad yard first!”
“Working in that railroad yard was about the hardest job I ever had. I was living in a place about three miles from the railroad yards, and there was many a day during the summer when I really thought about just staying at the yard and sleeping in a boxcar instead of making that walk home. But, there was almost always one evening during the week when that walk was a whole lot shorter – the night there was a baseball game scheduled. Whenever the Black Crackers were playing a night game there was a reason to quicken up your step a little bit.”
“We usually knocked off work about 6:00 in the evening. The night ballgames would start about 7:30 or 8:00 o’clock. That gave me just about time to get home, eat a little supper and start out for the ballpark. I was a family man, you understand. I didn’t go out every night of the week or anything like that. But, that one night a week, I was set on seeing a ballgame.”
“The old Ponce de Leon Park was over on the east side of town, not too far from downtown. It was a big field. I don’t mean that the grandstand was huge or anything. I mean that the field itself was big. It wasn’t easy to hit a homerun in that place. That old park could get awfully hot, too. Being out in the open air you would think that you could cool down after the sun went down. But, for some reason, that place stayed hot all night long.”
When the Black Crackers or any of the other colored teams were in town for a game the colored fans would start showing up real early – a lot earlier than the white fans. That was one thing I noticed. The colored fans wanted to see everything starting with the batting practice. I could never get there that early, so I had to settle for the best seat I could find in the general admission section. I didn’t have the money for any reserved seats.”
“The other thing that was different than at the white games was the arguing! Man, there was always a lot of arguing going on. I don’t mean people getting mad or fighting or anything, but a lot of friendly arguments about the players, the game, the umpires, the rules – arguments about anything that had to do with the baseball game. People got very excited even when the game didn’t mean anything much as far as a championship. The colored fans treated every game like it was the World Series.”
“The Black Crackers were in the old Southern Negro League with the teams from Montgomery, Nashville, Chattanooga, New Orleans and other Southern cities. But, when the Black Crackers weren’t in town other colored teams from the North would come down and play games. Just about every colored baseball team from the best down to the worst came through Atlanta quite a bit to play exhibition games. So, I got to see just about all the great stars in colored baseball. All except Josh Gibson.”
“Everybody was a Josh Gibson fan. Whenever you picked up a colored newspaper and turned to the sports page there would always be something about Josh Gibson hitting another homerun. Everybody, including me, wanted to see him play. But, I missed the chance. The only time I remember him coming to town with his team Gibson was sick or something. For some reason he didn’t play in that game, and I never got to see him. But, I did see Satchel Paige pitch, probably two dozen times. And, I’ve got to tell you, Satchel lived up to his reputation.”
“One night Satchel was pitching in Ponce de Leon Park against the Birmingham Black Barons. He was with the Kansas City team at that time. Usually, the Atlanta fans would be rooting for the Black Barons against a Northern team, but when Satchel was pitching everybody wanted to see him strike people out. This particular game was at night with the flood lights on. Now, those floodlights always attracted a million bugs. You could look up there and, sometimes, not be able to pick out the light bulbs with your eyes because of all the bugs swarming around up there. Well, for some reason, the bugs weren’t flocking around the flood lights on that night. They were all down on the infield. There were so many of them that it was really hard to see what was going on out on the field.”
“Well, the outfielders were having as much trouble seeing the batters as we were having in the grandstand. Satchel wound up to pitch and threw a strike to the batting who swung and missed for the last out in the inning. But, the outfielders couldn’t see it. Just as Satchel threw that ball there was a loud smack coming from somewhere up above me. I don’t know what made the sound, but it sounded just like a bat hitting the ball. Since the outfielders couldn’t see the pitch very well they heard the smack and though the ball had been hit pretty hard. Both the left fielder and center fielder were scrambling around all over the outfield, looking up in the air and all over the ground, trying to find where the ball was hit. They were in a panic! Finally, they noticed that all the infielders had gone off the field into the dugout. So, they figured that the batter had been put out by somebody!”
“A lot of white people came to those night games, and that was a funny thing to me. I had moved up to Atlanta from Savannah, Georgia just before the war. When there was a colored baseball game there you would almost never see a white fan at the ballgame. There wouldn’t hardly even be any white policemen at a game in Savannah. But, in Atlanta there were almost a lot of white fans. What I always thought was funny, though, was the way the white people at the ballpark had no problem with buying a beer, hot dog or peanuts from one of the black vendors while they were sitting along side the black fans. But, outside the ballpark there wasn’t a cafe in the city of Atlanta where a white person would sit down and eat with a colored person in the place. It was like the ballpark was something entirely different.”
“What was it like to be a colored baseball fan back then? Well, you worked real hard all week, then on the weekends you still had to work hard around the house tending to all the things that had come up at home during the week. That night ballgame was something to look forward to. It was something that kept you going all the time between games. All the guys would talk all week about the teams that were coming to town. We’d make some small bets on who was going to win the games, and we’d try to know more than the other guys about who was doing good and who wasn’t. It was a way to forget about how hard you were working and that there was a war going on. From the minute you left the house on the way to one of those ballgames until you woke up the next morning and had to go to work it was like you were a kid with no responsibilities at all. It was just like everything was ok in the whole world.”
“As far as being a baseball fan, I don’t think it was any different being a colored fan than it was being a white fan. Sure, when a white fan would pick out a favorite player to follow he was always hoping that his player would get called up to the major league team, and that was not possible for a black player. But, when we went to see the Black Crackers, the Black Barons or one of those big colored clubs play we figured we were watching major league players already! I didn’t even have a favorite player, I don’t guess. I just had a favorite place to go one night a week.
Memphis, Tennessee 1947
In 1939 Joseph Clark graduated from college and began his career as a high school teacher in the segregated school system of Tennessee. Unlike many of his professional colleagues, joseph was optimistic avout the prospects for social change and the integration of black and white societies. “Black kids were just like white kids. They would tell you that they wanted to be President of the United States when they grew up. They would tell you they wanted to play baseball in the major leagues.They didn’t know that being colored was against the rules for presidential candidates or major league baseball players, and I sure didn’t tell them,” Joseph declares. “I told them that they could accomplish anything, be whatever they wanted to be, if they worked at it. And, I believed it. I believed that integration would come in my lifetime, and I believed that it would come in time for my students to have the benefit of it. And, for some reason, I believed that it was going to start with the integration of professional sports.”
“I was a baseball fan,” Joseph continues. “I followed both the major league teams, mainly the New York Yankees, and the professional colored teams. I knew Satchel Paige was as good as any major league pitcher. I knew that the Kansas City Monarchs or the Baltimore Elite Giants could compete with any major league team, and I thought that someday these teams would be invited into the major leagues. That’s how I thought it would happen. I thought that one of the major leagues would invite a colored team to join their league. I didn’t really think about it starting with one team signing one Negro. When the news broke that Jackie Robinson was going to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers I was really surprised. I didn’t think it was going to happen that way. And, it worried me.”
“Why did it worry me? There were a lot of reasons. First, I didn’t really know who Jackie Robinson was. I knew he was a football star at UCLA. I knew he had played with the Monarchs. But, he wasn’t one of the big name black players. He wasn’t a Josh Gibson or Satchel Paige or Buck Leonard. I didn’t know if he was really a major league prospect or not. Secondly, I worried that maybe the Dodgers were selecting Robinson because they knew he would not make the big league team. Maybe they wanted him to fail to show that the black players really weren’t major league caliber.”
“Well, as it turned out, I had no reason to be concerned. Robinson was a success, a great success. And, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Campanella, and so many others followed. Today, there is no discrimination as far as playing in the major leagues in concerned. Little black boys can realistically dream of becoming big league players. Okay, there hasn’t been a black president yet, but there will be someday. I know there will be. And, I know that baseball made that possible, too.”
The End Of The Line
Black America was in a state of euphoria. Jackie Robinson personified the hope of an entire culture, an entire race. The appearance of Jackie Robinson in a Brooklyn dodger uniform was, in its pure essence, not about baseball. It was about racial pride, civil rights, justice, dreams and aspirations. But, there remained a price to be paid, a compromise to be reached.
In exchange for the integration of the major leagues and the many beneficial changes that flowed from this event, black America was required to barter away a truly black institution. The price for integration of the major leagues was placed squarely on the head of organized Negro baseball. It may not be overly dramatic to say that the Negro National and American Leagues were sacrificed on the cross for the sins of white baseball.
Of course, black team owners suffered tremendous financial losses as the stars and drawing cards were siphoned away by major league teams. Certainly, players, coaches and administrative personnel were displaced from professional baseball as financial difficulties followed declining attendance at Negro League games. Regrettable, but reasonable sacrifices in light of the benefits of integration.
More significant was the utter destruction of a major black-owned enterprise—a commercial institution that spawned, perpetuated and elevated Negro baseball to the status of a cultural icon. The Negro National and American leagues were testimony not only to the entrepreneurial spirit and dogged determination of black businessmen, but to the black community to perservere in the business of cultural development in an atmosphere of repression and discrimination.
Amidst the ruins of the Negro American League only a few teams remained standing by the early 1950s. By the mid-1950s only the Kansas City Monarchs, Memphis Red Sox, Birmingham Black Barons and Detroit Stars remained. The Indianapolis Clowns returned to the clowning style that had given the team birth back in the 1930s, abandoning serious baseball for the few dollars yet to be squeezed from their vaudeville routines. Negro baseball had come full cycle from its loosely organized, financially troubled beginnings, through the building years of Rube Foster’s reign, the high-flying adolescence of Gus Greenlee’s Negro National League, to a mature, stable and profitable adulthood through the 1940s. By the mid 1950s the Negro American League was nothing more than a struggling sideshow on the periphery of legitimate baseball.
“It wouldn’t even make enough money to cover the cost of the game balls. That’s what Negro baseball had come to by the mid-fifties. I owned the Birmingham Black Barons then, and I am here to tell you that it was a sad thing,” recalls “Sue” Bridgefort, owner of the Black Barons 1952-1955. “I finally just had to put the thing down and walk away from it. I remember the last game the team played when I was the owner. The total gate receipts didn’t come up to enough to cover what I had spent buying the balls for the game. I announced that I was through with baseball. The first baseman said he would like to keep the team going, so I sold it to him for next to nothing. Maybe he gave me a little something for it, I can’t even recall. I got in the car and went home. It was so bad that I don’t like to think about it even now.”
“People thought we were rich. Thought we were gambling men, big time operators. Shoot. There was no way you could make any money with a Negro baseball team. Any money you had to start with or made some other way, well, the team just sucked it all away from you.”
“The Black Barons actually continued to play for a few years after I sold the team. I don’t to this day know how they could keep on or why they wanted to.”
Nashville, Tennessee 1958
Jimmy Thornton recalls attending a Black Barons game in 1958, three years before the Negro American League closed its doors for good.
“I went to see the Black Barons play a game against the Kansas City Monarchs up in Nashville at Sulphur Dell. To tell you the truth, I went to see Satchel Paige, and I was disappointed. I had not been to a Negro baseball game since back in the 1940s when I was in the service. I used to see some games in D.C. at Griffith Stadium. I always associated Satchel Paige with the Monarchs, and I thought he might still be with the team when they came to Nashville in ’58. He wasn’t there.”
“There were, maybe, two hundred people at the game that night, and the whole thing wa just depressing to me. When I saw the games at Griffith Stadium there were big crowds, black and white. Enthusiastic, screaming fans who cheered on the Negro stars. I am white, as you can see, but that didn’t make the games any less exciting for me. Great baseball players are great baseball players, whatever their color. And, the teams, I watched at Griffith Stadium were great baseball teams.”
“I remember Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson. I remember Satchel Paige. I remember the concession barkers and their jokes and banter. There was an atmosphere of excitement like at a circus. People were buying programs and pennants. They were buying hot dogs and peanuts and screaming and yelling. There was none of that in 1958.”
“I wondered why these teams even bothered to play. They couldn’t have been making any money and, frankly, they weren’t very good ball players. I didn’t even stay through the whole game, just the first four or five innings. I’d be surprised if they even finished the game. I can’t believe that anybody stayed to watch the whole thing, so they probably just quit in the seventh inning or so after the last fan went home.”
The Finale
The fans walked out on the Negro American League for the last time in 1961, but they had risen from their seats and begun their walk up the steps to the exit aisles the day Jackie Robinson emerged from the Brooklyn Dodger dugout in the spring of 1947.
Today the fans are slowly returning. The stands are starting to fill once again in the imaginations of modern fans who are hearing for the first time of the exploits of baseball’s forgotten heroes. Grandstands filled with excited, cheering fans can be seen yet again in the eyes of aging players asked for the first time in half a century to take the field again through the telling of their stories. And, in the telling, baseball finds yet another piece of its complex personality, another entry in its ever expanding dictionary.
