by John Holway
Soon I was collecting interviews the way other people collect stamps. I traveled to Harlem, to Newark, to Philadelphia and Baltimore. When my article on Gibson came out in the Washington Post, I got a surprise call from an old teammate of his right in my home town of Manassas, Virginia. I journeyed to Chicago, to Pittsburgh and York, Pennsylvania, to Atlanta, Jacksonville, Birmingham, Memphis, and Houston. I flew to Los Angeles, where I found a large fraternity of ex-players.
In terms of time, the journey took me through five decades, from players who had begun their careers in 1914 or before, to men who were still playing baseball in the fifties. They ranged in age from forty-five to over eighty.
Sociologically, I traveled from the worst, most soul-destroying ghettos, where former players ushered me into tenements swarming with roaches, to beautifully landscaped split-levels in the suburbs. (Most of the veterans, I’m happy to say, live comfortably, if modestly, in neat-well-kept neighborhoods.) I interviewed players in dingy Harlem bars, in posh downtown hotels, in hermits’ cabins in the woods, and on the lovely lawn overlooking Glimmerglass Lake at Cooperstown.
Day by day, month by month, miles of stories wound onto my tape reels. In all, I interviewed more than seventy veterans of the old “blackball days.” Some of them have since died. Seeing a new obit in the Sporting News hurts keenly. But in a sense these men have not died. Their voices and their memories are as vibrant on my tapes as when I first met them.
The tape recorder has revolutionized historical writing. Here is history come alive. The language is direct. Sentences are declarative and short. Adjectives are few. Similes abound. Humor is droll. The language is gentlemanly, in contrast to much modern-day sports reporting. No expletives were deleted, because few if any were used. Many of the stories are confirmed—more drily, to be sure—in the microfilm files of old Negro newspapers (and in some white papers) in the Library of Congress, where I also spent days upon days searching out the record. But the men themselves conjure up the past with a liveliness that no journalist could duplicate. When Ted Williams read Buck Leonard’s interview in the Washington Star, he told Buck, “I knew that was a ballplayer talking, I knew it wasn’t a writer.”
What a pity I didn’t start just five years earlier. I could have met, and preserved the priceless memories of, such legendary old-timers as John Henry ‘Pop’ Lloyd, Raleigh ‘Biz’ Mackey, Mule Suttles, Jud Wilson, Bullet Joe Rogan, Dick Lundy, and many more whose deaths had only recently stilled their tongues.
In 1970 I made a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, some twenty-four years after my first, boyhood visit. But it all seemed different this time. After strolling through the plaques of the gods—Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson—I climbed to the second floor office of Ken Smith, the curator. I told him I could no longer look at the Hall of Fame as I had as a boy because, I said bluntly, “You have only half a Hall of Fame here. It won’t be complete until the great black players before Jackie Robinson are admitted.”
I’m afraid I shocked him. It shocks all devout believers to be told that a fundamental article of faith is built on error. But I had learned what Smith, a long-time New York sportswriter, had not: The blacks were playing probably the most exciting—yes, and very possibly the best—baseball seen in America before 1947. Certainly they beat barnstorming white big leaguers more often than they lost. Between 1886 and 1948 I have uncovered newspaper box scores of 445 games between them. The blacks won 269, lost 172, and tied 4!
From Smith’s office I strolled around the corner to the National Baseball Library, filled with row upon row of books on baseball history, and asked historian Clifford Kachline to see what material he had on black baseball. He led me to a bank of filing cabinets, opened a drawer marked “N” and pulled out one thin manila folder marked “Negro.” Inside were half a dozen random newspaper paragraphs and my own article on Josh Gibson. That was all, except for a scorecard of the old Indianapolis Clowns (Hank Aaron’s first team) illustrated with various comic costumes and poses.
In America’s national baseball library, half the history of baseball was missing!
Even the much heralded Encyclopedia of Baseball, with over 2,000 pages and 100,000 lines, devoted not a single line to the hundreds of black men who were playing—and beating—the best of the white big leaguers. Men like Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Pop Lloyd, Smoky Joe Williams, Cool Papa Bell, and all the rest are simply not there.
Slowly this has changed. Kachline compiled a voluminous biographical file of Negro Leaguers. The Hall of Fame has admitted 11 Negro Leaguers—although many more still remain outside. It has given a corner of the museum to exhibits of the history of black baseball. The Society of American Baseball Research has a lively committee on the Negro Leagues, which is tracking down more interviews and new stats. The Macmillan Encyclopedia, the “complete and official record” of major league baseball, now includes lifetime stats on leading Negro Leaguers. Many books have now been written on the subject, including three more of my own, plus several TV documentaries. And Cooperstown welcomed several dozen black old-timers to a huge reunion in the summer of 1991, although it is still slow to admit them to the pantheon.
The fan who wants to know the full story of baseball in America must go beyond the voluminous but conventional histories and explore the rich and exciting story of black baseball. Fans both black and white, young and old, will gasp, as I did, at their first glance at this as yet largely uncharted moonscape. Yet, like Tranquility Base, it has been there all the time, just waiting to be discovered.
Of course the black vets got no pensions for their long service to the game. A few are still in baseball as scouts, but most were forced to start new careers after their playing days were over and have at last earned comfortable, if modest, retirement.
All are confident that they could have been big-league stars. “You just knew you were better than the major leaguers,” says peppery little Jake Stephens, shortstop on the old Philadelphia Hilldales—“you just knew it. Why, Chick Galloway of the Athletics didn’t have anywhere near the range I had at shortstop. He couldn’t carry my glove.”
Should the black stars have raised black fists and demanded integration? Would such a tactic have worked? Probably not—not given the world of thirty to forty years ago, not with the stern and unbending Kenesaw Mountain Landis in the baseball commissioner’s chair. Instead of speeding integration, they might have set it back by decades. So they bit their lips and waited, and when the door was finally opened, they stepped back like Moses on Pisgah and watched the rookie, Jackie Robinson, walk through, while they remained outside, cheering him on.
Robinson, Roy Campanella, Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron—these and many more learned their baseball from the black stars of the past who had been their coaches. When they reached the majors, they were better prepared than most white rookies who had come up through the minors.
None of the black old-timers show any bitterness, however. But they all would agree with ex-catcher Joe Greene’s quiet statement:
“I still say we did a lot for the game, even if nobody knows about us. They say Jackie Robinson paved the way. He didn’t pave the way. We did.”
Chapter 1
THE MAJOR LEAGUE NOBODY KNOWS
We had eleven out of the top twelve hitters in the National League last year [1969] and four out of the top five in the American. Hell, we’ve always had players of that caliber, only we never got any recognition.
—BILL YANCEY, shortstop New York Black Yankees
IN THE BEGINNING, 1872–99
In 1920 the Paris Academy of Sciences reported that mosaics from the ruins of a Carthaginian nobleman’s home depicted an early baseball game of 2,000 years ago. Whether or not baseball was actually born in Africa (Russia, Mexico, Britain, France, and the American Indians also claim it), it has been played by Afro-Americans for a century or more.
Back in 1872 Bud Fowler, a Negro, broke the color line and became the first man of his race to play in organized ball. Other bla
cks followed, and in 1884 two brothers from Ohio, Welday and Moses Fleetwood Walker, briefly crashed the major leagues with Toledo of the old American Association.
The first organized Negro team we know of was formed in 1885 in Babylon, Long Island, by waiters of Babylon’s Argyle Hotel. They talked gibberish on the field, hoping to pass themselves off as Cubans, and played the best white semipro teams in the area. Most of the Babylon players later turned professional as the Cuban Giants, the first great black team in history. By 1886 they were strong enough to beat the Cincinnati Red Stockings of the National League. A year later they almost beat the champion Detroit Tigers, losing 6–4 in the ninth on an error.
Would the majors open their doors to them? That hope was dashed one April morning in 1887 in Newark, New Jersey. The Chicago White Stockings were scheduled to play Newark of the Eastern League, whose pitching star, thirty-five-game winner George Stovey, was a light-skinned Negro from Canada. Chicago captain Adrian “Cap” Anson, the greatest player of his day, stomped off the field rather than face Stovey. His walk set a pattern that would last for exactly sixty years. One by one the blacks were eased out of organized baseball. The long blackball decades had begun.
THE NEW CENTURY, 1900–1909
In 1902 the great John “Muggsy” McGraw tried to sign a black second baseman for his Baltimore Orioles, who were then in the American League. The man was Charley Grant, whom McGraw tried to pass off as an Indian, “Chief Tokahoma.” The masquerade worked fine until the Orioles reached Chicago for an exhibition, and every black in town turned out to present Tokahoma with an alligator handbag and cheer “our boy Charley Grant” on every ground ball he fielded. White Sox manager Charles Comiskey quickly became suspicious, and it was back to the reservation for Charley.
The “reservation” was the Cuban X-Giants, then based in Philadelphia, and probably the best black team in the country. The X-Giants’ main rivals were the Philadelphia Giants, managed by the first great black organizer, mustachioed Sol White. In 1903, just one month before the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Red Sox played the first modern white World Series, the X-Giants and White’s Phillies had played the century’s first black World Series, won by the X-Giants two games to one.
The next year White enticed Foster to jump to the Phils, who trounced the X-Giants in a September rematch and remained king of the black baseball roost for the next few years. In 1906 the Phillies won 108 and lost only 31, and their white owner, sportswriter Walter Schlichter, sent a letter to the New York papers challenging the winner of the white World Series to meet his club “and thus decide who can play baseball the best, the white or the black American.” Unfortunately, the White Sox, who defeated the Cubs that year, didn’t take him up on it.
In 1907 Foster led a walkout from Schlichter’s team to the Leland Giants of Chicago. He challenged the Cubs to a threegame series in 1909, and though the Cubs won all three, the games were close. The Cubs’ great Mordecai Brown won a squeaker 1–0, and Foster lost a disputed contest when the winning run scored after Rube thought time had been called.
The Lelands voyaged to Cuba, where they found a well-developed baseball establishment only a decade after the end of Spanish rule—as touring white big-league clubs were also finding out. In 1908 the Cincinnati Reds had visited the island for eleven games. The Cubans won seven of them, including a one-hit shutout by young José Mendez. The next year the American League champion Detroit Tigers made the trip, minus Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford but with the rest of the club intact. They could only win four and lose eight—one of their losses a no-hitter by Eusaquio Pedroso. Even the Reach Guide conceded that the tour had been “disastrous.” An all-star club featuring pitchers Addie Joss, Mordecai Brown, Nap Rucker, and Howie Camnitz followed the Tigers and did little better, splitting the four games they played.
The Tigers returned for revenge in 1910, this time with Cobb and Crawford. They won seven and lost four, though Cobb was thrown out every time he tried to steal and three American blacks all outhit him—John Henry Lloyd, Grant Johnson, and Bruce Petway. Ty stomped off the field vowing never to play blacks again. The world champion Philadelphia A’s were next, and their performance was enough to bring a blush to Connie Mack’s cheek. In six games the only victory they could salvage was 2–1 over Pedroso.
In 1911 the Philadelphia Phils tried their luck, winning five and losing four. Then the world champion New York Giants arrived to win nine and lose three, though Pedroso and Mendez combined to whip the great Christy Mathewson 7–4. Thus after four years and sixty-five games on the island, the big leaguers had won thirty-two, lost thirty-two, and tied one.
RAGTIME BALL, 1910–19
Meanwhile, New York was developing into the capital of black baseball in the East. In Harlem the Lincoln Giants, transplanted from Lincoln, Nebraska, boasted two of the best pitchers in black ball history, Cyclone Joe Williams and Cannonball Dick Redding. Williams, since voted the greatest black pitcher of all time, hooked up in many a memorable duel with the best white pitchers of his day, including Grover Alexander, Walter Johnson, and Rube Marquard, and beat all three of them.
Just out of Howard University, Lincolns’ shortstop Frank “Strangler” Forbes—who would go on to play with the New York Rens basketball team—played in many of those battles. “That’s where we made our money,” he says. “I was only getting $115 a month in the regular season. But in October, aw hell, we would clean up in October. They didn’t allow Negroes in the league, but we were very attractive to them in October. Hell, we would practically get more games in October than we could play. I’ll tell you how good we were: We would win 60 percent of our games against the big leaguers. We played the Giants. The Yankees were nothing—we used to call them the Highlanders—hell, they were no competition. We played against the Braves when they had Dick Rudolph, Bill James, Rabbit Maranville. Yeah, we beat ’em—we beat everybody. In 1915 we beat the Phils three out of four ball games. Alexander started three times against us, never got by the fourth inning. Sure.”
Out West several new clubs had been founded: the Indianapolis ABC’s, the St. Louis Giants, and the All Nations, a multiracial team out of Kansas City. And in Chicago Foster had broken with Leland to form his own club, the Chicago American Giants, and challenged the Cubs and White Sox in a head-to-head attendance war. On one Sunday when all three teams were playing at once, the Cubs drew 6,500, the Sox 9,000, and Foster’s American Giants 11,000.
What about a contest on the field as well as at the box office? Booker T. Washington’s paper, the New York Age, clamored for a four-way series among the Giants, Yankees, Lincolns, and Royals for the championship of New York. At least one white paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, took up the cry. “There is some doubt,” it wrote, “if baseball, after all, is the great American game. We play it, to be sure, but the colored people play it so much better that the time is apparently coming when it shall be known as the great African game. . . . It requires some courage to predict that colored baseball, like colored pugilism, is to supersede the white brand, but someone has to think ahead and indicate whither we drift, and we therefore go on record as having said that it will.”
The Giants and Yankees, however, replied only with silence.
But their players continued to meet the blacks in October and split some tidy gate receipts. On one of those autumn afternoons in 1917 Smoky Joe Williams faced the National League champion New York Giants with their entire World Series lineup intact and set them down on a no-hitter with twenty strikeouts! (He lost 1–0 on an error.)
JAZZ DAYS, 1920–29
After World War I the black players returned from their segregated regiments to their segregated teams. In 1920 the “Black Sox” scandal erupted, and several members of the Chicago White Sox were thrown out of baseball for throwing the 1919 World Series. It created a flurry of hope that the big leagues might try to woo the disillusioned fans back by signing some of the most exciting stars of the black leagues. Of course nothing ever came of it.
&n
bsp; Ironically, black baseball was on the threshold of its finest decade.
Rube Foster had called a meeting of several western club owners in Kansas City in February 1920 and proposed a revolutionary idea, a Negro National League. It would cut down on the mutual raiding, he argued, and would replace the hand-to-mouth scheduling with something more dependable, thus assuring the players a regular payday. And so the first black league was born. It included the American Giants, Indianapolis ABC’s, St. Louis Giants, Detroit Stars, and Kansas City Monarchs—the old All Nations team but now all black. Casey Stengel himself had discovered most of the Monarchs playing on the all-black 25th Infantry team on the old Indian outpost of Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
At last a professional black player could enjoy a measure of security. Without Rube Foster’s historic achievement, it is fair to say, black baseball might not have survived for another quarter century, and the nation might never have heard of Jackie Robinson, who at the time of Foster’s meeting was a baby not yet one year old.
Foster’s American Giants were a team of “racehorses” built around speed and bunting. Their specialty: the hit-and-run bunt. The runner broke for second, the batter bunted down the third base line, drawing the third baseman off the bag, and a really speedy runner could make third on the play. If the third baseman was foolish enough to throw to first, some runners could even continue flying around third and score on the play! They ran away with the pennant the first three years.
Meanwhile, the East began signing some of the best stars away from the West. Pop Lloyd, the great shortstop, and Biz Mackey, who later taught Roy Campanella how to catch, made the jump. So did Oscar Charleston, regarded by most authorities as the greatest black player of all time. Now Ed Bolden of the Philadelphia Hilldales was ready to propose an Eastern Colored League, including the Hilldales, Atlantic City Bacharachs, Baltimore Black Sox, New York Lincoln Giants, Brooklyn Royals, and the Harrisburg Giants. The league was formed in 1923, and Bolden’s Hilldales won the first pennant. But the enraged Foster would hear nothing of a World Series.