Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League

by Martha Ackmann

  †The Peet Brothers company later became Colgate Palmolive.

  *Howard “Sonny” Morgan (1936–1976) was a jazz percussionist with an interest in West African and Caribbean music. Morgan led his own band in Philadelphia from 1953 to 1960, then worked with musicians including Willie Bobo and Max Roach. He also arranged music for dance groups, including Geoffrey Holder’s Negro Ensemble Company, was a side musician for Count Basie and others, and performed on the 1969 soundtrack for the film Slaves.

  *Like New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, the Memphis Cotton Carnival was both a social and a civic celebration. In the early 1930s, city leaders thought a celebration might bring pride and revive the sagging city and organized the first event. White krewes paraded on floats, many of which were pulled by black men. After a young black bystander asked his parents “why all the Negroes were horses,” black community leaders organized their own separate event, the Cotton Makers’ Jubilee. The two events briefly merged in the 1980s. Today the celebration suffers from a declining reputation.

  *In 1995, Sarasota High School awarded O’Neil an honorary high school diploma.

  *In 1954 the following black players appeared on major league rosters: Brooklyn Dodgers Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Junior Gilliam, Sandy Amoros, Joe Black; Milwaukee Braves Bill Bruton, Henry Aaron, Jim Pendleton, Charley White; New York Giants Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Ruben Gomez, Henry Thompson; Chicago Cubs Ernie Banks, Gene Baker, Luis Marquez; Cincinnati Reds Nino Escalera, Charlie Harmon; Pittsburgh Pirates Curtis Roberts, (Luis Marquez, traded midseason), Sam Jethoe; St. Louis Cardinals Tom Alston, Bill Greason, Brooks Lawrence; Cleveland Indians Larry Doby, Al Smith, Luke Easter, Dave Hoskins, Jose Santiago, Dave Pope; Chicago White Sox Minnie Minoso, Bob Boyd; Philadelphia Athletics Bob Trice, Joe Taylor, Vic Power; Baltimore Orioles Jose Heard; and Washington Senators Carlos Paula. Teams without black players included the Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox (Kansas City Call, May 21, 1954; Larry Lester e-mail to author, September 3, 2009).

  *Bob Gibson went on to become a powerful right-handed pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. During his sixteen-year career he posted 251 wins against 174 losses. His ERA was 2.91 and he threw 3,117 strikeouts. Bob Gibson was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1981.

  *Connie Morgan hit .178 in league games with seven singles, a double, and one RBI in forty-five at bats. She stole one base, walked seven times, and had eight strikeouts (Alan Pollock with James A. Riley, editor, Barnstorming to Heaven: Syd Pollock and His Great Black Teams, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, 258).

  Happiest Day of My Life

  After you get on first base it takes a lot of

  cooperation and understanding on the part of

  your teammates to get you all the way home.

  That goes for baseball or the everyday business

  of living in a democracy.

  —JACKIE ROBINSON1

  Bunny Downs could not stop thinking about baseball. Even though he’d told Syd Pollock he was finished with the Negro League, he kept dreaming about making plays and scoring runs. Downs’s wife said that when he was sleeping, Bunny’s legs would kick and pump as if he were still running the bases. “Throw the ball!” he would shout.2 To many fans, black baseball seemed to exist only in dreams. In 1955, the Kansas City Monarchs had their worst financial year in the team’s history, and Tom Baird was trimming everything, including meal money. Now, instead of buying a roadside dinner of crackers, sardines, an onion, and a can of beans, a player had to forgo one “side dish.” By the end of the season, Baird could no longer make the numbers work and sold the team to Ted Rasberry of the Detroit Stars. The storied franchise that had won seventeen pennants and two World Series and sent twenty-one players to the majors relocated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and left Kansas City forever.*

  Pollock had seen it coming. “It’s sad,” he said. “The Monarchs and the Birmingham Black Barons miss dates because they can’t afford bus repairs or don’t have enough players after a non-payday. Used to be a bus league. Now it’s a broken-down-on-the-side-of-the-road bus league.”3 Near the end of the 1955 season, Pollock suffered a heart attack, and several months later he moved his family and the Clowns operation to Hollywood, Florida. Even Jackie Robinson was beginning to feel the time had come to move on. He confessed to being “fed up.” His batting average was down, he was sitting on the bench, and he was sick of battling the front office, the press, and his aging body.4

  Toni made up her mind to stay in Oakland and not return to the Monarchs. Her husband was nearing seventy, and she thought he needed her care. “He helped me,” she said. “Now, it’s my turn to help him.”5 In truth, she had no other choice. The majors continued their ban on women players. The Negro League was dying, and even the segregated All-American Girls Professional Baseball League had folded. After two decades of fighting with others to let her play, Toni now faced a battle with herself. She had to find a way to let go of baseball and let it not ache so much. “Not playing baseball,” she said, “hurt so damn bad I almost had a heart attack.”6

  As much as the demise of Negro League baseball unsettled athletes, it also affected others connected to the sport such as grounds crews, ticket sellers, ushers, public address announcers, maids—even clubhouse boys. Blacks who found employment with teams such as the Monarchs or the Clowns were not apt to be hired by the major leagues. Ernest Withers was a photographer based in Memphis who sold his baseball photographs to the Chicago Defender and other newspapers. He shot the last picture of Josh Gibson in 1946, covered Toni in her days with the Clowns, caught Connie Morgan with Willie Gaines and Bebop before a game at Martin’s Stadium, and chronicled scores of players from Paige to Mays. Withers knew that black weeklies did not want “Sunday-to-Sunday pictures of ballgames,” so he tried to capture a more evocative, almost historical perspective of the game—“what black baseball looked like.”7 When the market for Negro League baseball photographs dried up in 1955, Withers took on other assignments, such as a September court trial in Sumner, Mississippi.* A young black boy from Chicago had been murdered that summer after he reportedly whistled at a white woman. His lynched body was brutalized so savagely that the funeral operator sealed the casket. Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, thought differently. “I want the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said, and ordered the casket open. When photographs of Till’s mutilated body circulated through the black press, the public was horrified. Withers was the only photographer covering the trial. He seized a dramatic shot of Emmett’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, pointing from the witness stand at the killers.† When Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, Withers gathered all his trial photographs and published them.

  Over years of finding the right angle, developing prints in his family’s bathtub and drying them in the oven, Ernest Withers had captured images many Americans did not want to see. The individual photographs were extraordinary, but the accumulation of the shots conveyed meaning as well. If one lined up all of Withers’s photographs—from the faces of Negro League players to that Mississippi courtroom—a relationship emerged. The passion and dignity of black baseball players seemed to make way for the resolve of Mose Wright. It was as if seemingly nonpolitical acts—blacks wanting to be taken seriously as ballplayers—helped create a broader canvas for subversion. Some years later, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that images of the early Civil Rights movement—such as the ones Ernest Withers recorded—revealed a profound social inequity that had been unobserved in dominant American culture. They exposed injustice, Reverend King said, “imprisoned in a luminous glare.”8 Ninety-five days after Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white patron. Her action ushered in the Montgomery bus boycott led by Reverend King, the newly elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. “When that white driver stepped back toward us,” Parks said, “when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out o
f our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”9

  The wave of mounting purposefulness that fueled Rosa Parks and later the Little Rock Nine and the black college students integrating Woolworth’s lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, did not embolden Toni Stone. Without baseball, she lost sight of her dream and watched from the sidelines as the Negro League community vanished—a community that had both thwarted and sustained her. Had she found the words to articulate how her struggle to play professional baseball was connected to the growing civil disobedience around her, she might have found a purpose. But she let her vision slip and could only see a dead-end street, while others such as Parks and King were imaging a new world. Even though her mother, sister, and niece had moved permanently to Oakland, Toni felt alone. Blanche was busy finding a job as a nurse. Her mother, amicably separated from Boykin Stone, started investing in Bay Area real estate. Aurelious Alberga took Toni’s niece, Maria, under his wing. Ever the dapper gentleman, “Uncle Pescia” knew just the right place for Maria to find a better cut of school uniforms and proudly escorted her across the bridge to San Francisco to supervise a proper wardrobe. The Isabelle Street house became the Stone family headquarters, but more often than not Toni would not be found laughing and making plans with her family. She would retreat to the basement amid the stored antique furniture, yard tools, and boxes of baseball mementoes. It was as if rereading the old Chicago Defender newspaper clippings was the only way Toni could remember who she had been. “Just don’t forget who you are,” Toni would say to herself, her voice cracking. “Don’t forget, Toni, who you are.”10

  In moments of weakness, she thought a bottle of Jack Daniels helped. Sometimes she could be persuaded to join her sister Bunny in showing Maria the sights. Once she took the teenager to the Fillmore, where Toni had begun her climb in professional baseball. Maria sat at the Texas Playhouse and rubbed her hands across the bar with its shiny veneer of embedded silver dollars. No one in the Fillmore or at Jack’s Tavern remembered Toni anymore. The reaction was even worse after the Giants moved to San Francisco. Toni would mention to sandlot baseball players that she had played with Willie Mays, and the athletes looked at her as if she were crazy. These rebuffs made Toni short-tempered, often morose. When Alberga saw the cloud descending, he took the dog for a walk and simply got out of her way.

  Maria observed that when others forgot or had never heard of her aunt’s accomplishments, Toni almost ceased to exist. It was as if the authentic Toni disappeared under a carapace of disappointment. Some thought Toni was like the dining room table that she obsessively covered. The table was a family joke. It was a beautiful piece of mahogany furniture, probably shipped from one of the family homes in Saint Paul. But Toni insisted that the table be covered, first with a pad, then plastic sheeting, a lace tablecloth, and a final surface of placemats. The “thing kept growing and growing,” Maria recalled. No one could remember what the mahogany looked like. Trying to insulate herself from pain may have been one of the reasons Toni talked so frequently with the priests and nuns at Oakland’s St. Francis de Sales church. She had turned to the Catholic church as a girl when she wanted to run away from home and again when she was stranded in San Francisco without a job or a place to stay. Just as she had with Father Keefe in Saint Paul, Toni unburdened herself to clergy at St. Francis de Sales and asked why life was so difficult. Sitting in the Oakland church seeking answers may have spun Toni back to Milwaukee and a game with the Clowns. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Miss Toni Stone,” the announcer would proclaim as Toni ran out on the field to applause. The routine was always the same: she would play a few innings and then be pulled from the lineup. The frustration of sitting on the bench overwhelmed Toni that day in Milwaukee and she left—simply walked out of the stadium by herself. As she often did, Toni went looking for a church and found one nearby. Her memory of the moment clouded over the years, but she later said she entered the sanctuary, sat down in a pew, and “cried and cried” until her shoulders shook. “’Do I need to play harder?’” she asked God. “Do I need to pray harder?”11 She never heard an answer.

  Desolation either devours or it subsides, and Toni was fortunate to slowly rediscover pieces of herself. The nuns and priests at St. Francis found the same answer for Toni that Father Keefe had offered her nearly thirty years before. By the 1960s, Toni returned to baseball: she began coaching a neighborhood baseball team for teenage boys—the Isabella Hard Heads—and gathered donated equipment from area Catholic churches. She also started playing men’s recreational ball and tagged around some lesbian teams that began cropping up in the Bay Area. “I kept active so I wouldn’t lose my mind,” she said, and continued to play recreational ball for the next twenty years.12 To get out of the house and earn pocket change, Toni worked in local hospitals, provided home health care, and rode her bike everywhere around Oakland. People called her by her old Saint Paul name, “Miss Tomboy Stone,” either forgetting or ignoring her baseball moniker and her married name. She made friends, and neighbors offered to cook holiday meals for her since Toni never developed culinary skills beyond sardines and crackers. She insisted, however, on paying for the cooked dinners, adamant that no one should be exploited for their work. Few realized how sorely earned her principle was.13

  Satchel Paige once remarked that “we don’t stop playing baseball because we get old. We get old because we stop playing baseball.”14 Coaching the Isabella Hard Heads and playing neighborhood ball sustained Toni for many years after the Negro League. In 1966, support of another sort came from a surprising voice. That year Ted Williams was inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Red Sox slugger took the occasion to chide major league baseball for overlooking great black players. “The other day Willie Mays hit his 522nd home run. He has gone past me and is pushing ahead, and all I can say to him is, Go get them, Willie,” Williams said. “Inside this building are plaques to baseball men of all generations, and I’m privileged to join them…. And I hope someday, the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the Negro players that are not here only because they were not given a chance.”15 Five years later—after Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and a ten-member committee surveyed the Negro Leagues’ top players—Satchel Paige was inducted into the Hall of Fame. The occasion addressed years of neglect, but Paige was not sanguine, saying his selection turned “a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal.”16 Paige’s comment and the criticism of Ted Williams did, however, translate into increased attention on Negro Leaguers by the Hall and the public at large. Most important, the enormous social changes forged by Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X brought sustained attention to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Countless others—sometimes without their even knowing it—also helped drive forward the goals of the civil rights movement.

  Speaking about unnamed and unrecognized trailblazers, Robert Kennedy observed in 1966, “Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”17 One consequence of the movement’s actions was a rediscovery of African American history—the history that Toni had yearned for when she was a schoolgirl in Saint Paul. In 1970, Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams served as a pivotal early text for baseball fans who had never heard of Rube Foster, John Henry Lloyd, or Buck Leonard. Analyzing baseball both as a sport and as a political entity, Peterson wrote that “Negro baseball was at once heroic and tawdry, a gladsome thing and a blot on America’s conscience.” A work of staggering research, the book only briefly mentions Toni Stone. “The Indianapolis Clowns reached the height of ingenuity in 1953,” he wrote, “when they had a girl named Toni Stone as their second baseman.” Peterson cited the “reported” twelve thousand dollars that Toni earned, her four to six innings of play in most games, and her “credible” .243 batting aver
age.18

  Only the Ball Was White released a wave of renewed interest in the Negro Leagues, just as it also pointed to a way of life that vanished when some tight-knit black communities disintegrated after segregation. Gone were the Sunday mornings when church services let out early so that parishioners could make it to the Monarchs game on time. Gone were the thriving urban centers that featured black-owned nightclubs, restaurants, movie theaters, miles of record stores, dress shops, and five and dimes. Gone were many of the black newspapers that had advocated on behalf of the community. One Monarchs player admitted he had “a bitter sweet feeling because I remember that a lot of people lost their whole way of life. That was another of those ironies, the hardest one,” he said. “Not only did a black business [Negro baseball] die, other black businesses did, too…. The Streets Hotel had to close because it couldn’t compete with the Muehlebach Hotel downtown.”19

  In the 1960s, under the guise of “urban renewal,” black communities from San Francisco to New Orleans to Kansas City were decimated to make way for highways, industry, and gentrification. Toni’s old Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul was one of them. The construction of Interstate 94 tore right through the heart of the community, displacing families, destroying neighborhoods, and literally erasing the word “Rondo” from maps. Residents watched with sadness as bulldozers demolished churches and homes, including one residence near the ballpark where the Stones had lived. Those who stayed around Rondo no longer recognized their streets and lost track of their friends.

  “A lot was lost when the Negro Leagues went belly up,” novelist John Edgar Wideman wrote. The neighborhoods, social life, and identity that disappeared along with segregation made it difficult to remember the character they uniquely offered. Speaking of baseball, Wideman observed that “what was contained in those institutions was not simply a black version of what white people were doing, but the game was played differently.”20 Stealing bases, hitting behind the runner, taking advantage of a bunt—were all trademarks of black baseball. “There’s two kinds of ball,” Toni said. “I learned black ball. You had to think or get killed.”21 Negro League players who moved to the majors also brought showmanship with them—or tried to. When Ernie Banks first reported to the Cubs, he laced up his shoes with the bright yellow laces the Monarchs wore. The Cubs’ clubhouse personnel thought Banks’s laces were too flashy, “did not fit the style of everyone,” and suggested he change. Teammates and fans, however, loved Willie Mays’s wild dashes that sent his cap flying. “When I first came up to the Giants in 1951,” he remembered, “I never lost my cap.” It fit perfectly. After some time with the Giants, Mays began to think about the showmanship of the Negro Leagues and decided he needed a gimmick. “I started wearing a cap that was too big for me,” he confessed. “Every time I ran from first to second and wheeled to my left, that cap would simply fly off just as if I’d been running so fast I’d run out from under it.” The same was true for stealing a base. When Willie called time to retrieve his hat, “the moment’s delay would keep the fans worked up and make the opposing pitcher think a bit more about the spot I’d got him in,” Mays said.22 “Some people call it ‘show business,’” Toni said as if confronting critics. “But I call it plain hard baseball.”23