by John Holway
So instead, Bolden had to content himself with playing white big leaguers that autumn. In seven games against them, Hilldale won six. Out West the American Giants played the Detroit Tigers (still minus Cobb, who was sticking to his vow) and divided them neatly—one win, one loss, one tie. The Detroit Stars, however, did better against the St. Louis Browns, sweeping three games straight.
That was the last time a big-league club could play the blacks while wearing its own uniform. The new commissioner, the hardbitten Carolinian Kenesaw Mountain Landis, perhaps embarrassed by the scores, issued orders against it. Henceforth, the big leaguers would have to call themselves “all-stars” if they wanted to barnstorm.
The Hilldales repeated as Eastern champs in 1924, and at last Foster was ready to make peace. The Kansas City Monarchs had won the pennant in his own league, and Foster magnanimously went to Philadelphia to open the first modern black World Series, meeting Bolden at home plate with a symbolic handshake. It was a spectacular series, going ten games, including one tie, before the Monarchs finally won it. But it was a disappointment at the gate. Only 45,000 fans turned out to see the ten games at one dollar apiece. One valuable Saturday date had to be missed because the Kansas City stadium was hosting a high school football game.
In 1926 tragedy struck in Chicago. Foster suffered a severe mental breakdown and had to be rushed to the state insane asylum.
Down South the Birmingham Black Barons, a team of coal miners, joined the Negro National League in 1927, with their skinny rookie named Leroy “Satchel” Paige. In post-season barnstorming that year, the maverick Homestead Grays, who were not in the league, won three straight from the big leaguers; two of them were shutouts by Joe Williams. The Baltimore Black Sox won five straight from their big-league opponents.
In 1929 Baltimore’s Laymon Yokely beat the big leaguers three more times, giving the blacks a final record for the decade of seventy-four victories and forty-one defeats against major league competition. A week earlier the stock market had crashed. Black baseball didn’t know it yet, but it would be a long, cold decade ahead.
THE BLUES, 1930–39
Nineteen-thirty was a watershed year for black baseball. Rube Foster died in December, raving about one more World Series win. His death closed an era. Just eight months earlier, a new era had been born when J. L. Wilkinson, the white owner of the Monarchs, threw a switch to begin the first modern night game in baseball history, beating Des Moines of the white Western League by a scant few days. Soon afterward he took his lights to Pittsburgh for the first night game there, and a young Samson, nineteen-year-old Josh Gibson, walked into the spotlight and began bashing eye-popping homers over every fence he saw.
There were no black leagues that year; the Depression had killed them. Salaries were suspended and players passed the hat, dividing the receipts among themselves after expenses had been paid. Many of the oldest and proudest clubs were forced to go under.
Nineteen thirty-two was an Olympic year, and in the games at Los Angeles blacks like Eddie Tolan, Ralph Metcalfe, Ed Gordon, and Cornelius Johnson brought home gold medals. In pro football Joe Lillard, a black, signed with the Chicago Cardinals.
Baseball, its attendance badly hurt by the hard times, desperately needed an attraction to bring the fans back. Could Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson do the trick? Sportswriter Westbrook Pegler declared in print that he couldn’t understand why Negroes weren’t playing in the majors. In Washington, old Clark Griffith watched Mule Suttles and Rap Dixon blast some long pokes in Griffith Stadium, agreed that they looked pretty darn good, but merely counseled them to continue to play a high caliber ball. He didn’t suggest that they play for the Senators. Pegler would just have to wait for his answer.
The highlight of 1933—one of the biggest events in all black ball history—was the first East-West, or all-star, game, a showcase for the best black talent and the financial savior of the black teams. Often in the years to come the only profit some teams would make would be their share of the receipts of that one game, which drew 40,000 to 50,000 people to Chicago’s Comiskey Park. The classic may also have been the wedge that finally opened the big leagues to blacks. When the white owners saw all those black fans rushing the turnstiles, integration began to look more attractive.
Gus Greenlee of Pittsburgh gets credit for reviving the Negro National League that same year. It included clubs in both the East and the West, from Baltimore to Chicago.
It was a hand-to-mouth life for the players. Gone were the private Pullman cars of Rube Foster’s day. Now the players bounced across the countryside in buses, napping overnight, then tumbling out to play two and three games a day before wearily getting back into the bus for another long overnight haul. The winter leagues in Cuba and Florida had folded, but some lucky players could still earn money in the off-season playing in California. For the rest it meant finding a job somewhere to pay the bills until April came around again.
The white big leaguers were only a little better off. A young fellow named Bill Veeck watched attendance plummet in the majors and warned that baseball would have to do something drastic or go under. There were dozens of black stars waiting and eager to give attendance a boost. Apparently, however, the crisis hadn’t gotten that drastic yet.
In 1936 Jesse Owens made history in the Berlin Olympics, reopening the perennial speculation about blacks in the big leagues.
The next spring Paige, Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and many other stars heeded Dominican dictator Trujillo’s well-financed call for a championship team. When they got back, Greenlee was so mad, he suspended the lot of them. Paige ambled out to North Dakota, following his rainbow; Bell headed toward Mexico; and Gibson landed back in the delighted arms of his former owner, Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays. Josh and Buck Leonard teamed in a formidable one-two home run punch that would bring the Grays nine straight pennants.
The 1937 season opened auspiciously in February. Bill Terry took the defending National League champion New York Giants to Havana and could win only one out of six against the wellconditioned Cubans, who of course had been playing all winter. Muttered Terry after the sixth game: “This thing has long ceased to be a joke.”
In August 1938 sportswriter Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News permitted himself a little fantasy in print as the National League season moved into the stretch with the Giants in a hard fight for the pennant. There are seven black players, he said, who could practically insure a flag for them. With Ray Brown and Barney Brown supporting Carl Hubbell on the mound, and with Josh Gibson joining Harry Danning behind the plate, plus Buck Leonard, Pat Patterson, and Ray Dandridge in the infield, and Sammy Bankhead between Mel Ott and Joe Moore in the outfield, the Giants could win in a walk—or so Powers dreamed.
More pragmatic, National League president Ford Frick said the league hasn’t used Negroes because the public “has not been educated to the point where they will accept them.” He cited the problem of traveling in the South, but declared that “baseball is biding its time and waiting for the social change, which is inevitable.” Times, he said, “are changing.”
But the change seemed slow. Yankee outfielder Jake Powell blurted out in a radio interview that he was a policeman in the off-season and “enjoyed cracking niggers’ heads.” Yankee owner Ed Barrow apologized profusely, and Judge Landis suspended the outfielder for ten days. Oddly, Powell had often barnstormed with blacks, who said they thought he was a fine fellow.
The blacks brought the decade to a close in the autumn of 1939 by splitting four games with the big-league all-stars. It was their finest decade yet. In 167 games against the white major leaguers from 1930 to 1939 the blacks had won 112, lost 52 and tied 3.
Yet the bars of segregation seemed rigidly in place. Bill Terry for one predicted that “Negroes will never get into the big leagues.” He may have been merely stating a belief rather than a prejudice. But American League president Will Harridge disagreed. He took one look at the 40,000 fans at the East-West game that August and said
he believed the bars would be down in five years or less.
SWINGTIME AT LAST, 1940–48
The new decade saw a rush of black players south of the border to Jorge Pasquel’s Mexican League. Josh Gibson was one of those jumping, but the Grays won without him, their fourth straight flag.
The biggest news the following year was probably Satchel Paige’s comeback from arm trouble. Kansas City’s Wilkinson had given him a chance when nobody else would, and Satch helped lead the Monarchs to their second straight flag, and to a fourstraight sweep of the Grays in the first World Series since 1927.
In the summer of ’42 Satchel Paige and his Kansas City Monarch sidekick Hilton Smith set down a big-league all-star squad and caused a crisis. Playing in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, the Monarchs defeated Dizzy Dean, Cecil Travis, Zeke Bonura, and others on only three hits, winning 3–1 before 30,000 fans. Across town only 19,000 had seen the White Sox and Browns in a doubleheader that same day. Why not, the Communist New York Daily Worker asked Judge Landis, open organized baseball’s doors to blacks? It quoted Dodger manager Leo Durocher as saying he’d leap at the chance to hire one if he could. “Hell,” Leo said, “I’ve seen a million good ones.”
Landis promptly called Durocher into his office for a conference, and when Leo emerged he said he’d been misquoted. Landis also had a statement to read: “There is no rule, formal or informal,” he said, “no understanding, subterranean or otherwise” against black ballplayers in the majors.
“One hundred percent hypocrisy!” snorted Brooklyn owner Larry McPhail, although Larry added the warning that signing black stars would destroy the Negro leagues.
Dr. J. B. Martin, president of the new Negro American (Western) League, declared that he for one wouldn’t oppose the signing of black stars; it would be a big boost to black baseball, he said.
With the war taking more and more white stars, rumors persisted that the Pittsburgh Pirates would try out Gibson and Leonard. Pirate boss Bill Benswanger declared that “colored men are American citizens with American rights. I know there are many problems connected with the question, but after all, somebody has to make the first move.” Finally, however, he denied the whole thing, although of course, he added, it is the Pirates’ policy to give a job to any qualified man.
In Philadelphia there was talk of a Phils’ tryout for home-town star Roy Campanella. Phils’ owner Gerry Nugent quashed the rumors, saying that was strictly up to the manager and reminding the reporters modestly that “I’m just the owner.” (“All I ask,” Campy commented, “is a break.”)
The irrepressible Bill Veeck listened to the debate with keen interest. He hatched a plan to buy the Phils, stock them with black stars, and waltz to the National League pennant. Unfortunately, Landis got word of the scheme and killed it. “I realize now,” Veeck grins, “that it was a mistake to tell him.”
Out in Chicago the White Sox’ Jimmy Dykes actually did summon up courage to hold a tryout for pitcher Nate Moreland and a college football whiz named Jackie Robinson. Robinson reported with a charley horse. Whistled Jimmy: “I’d hate to see him on two good legs!” Jackie, he reported, “is worth $50,000 of anybody’s money. He stole everything but my infielders’ gloves.” But Robinson and Moreland didn’t get the jobs. “Personally I’d welcome them,” Dykes shrugged, “and I believe every one of the other managers would do likewise.”
Moreland was bitter. “I can play in Mexico,” he said, “but I have to fight for America where I can’t play.”
Why did the racial bar, so firmly in place for over half a century, resist attempts to lower it? Organized ball seemed to blame it on the fans. Said National League president Ford Frick: “We have always been interested in Negro players but have not used them because of the public.”
“There’s no law against Negroes playing with white teams,” baseball’s “bible,” the Sporting News, editorialized, but leaders on both sides “know their crowd psychology” and will not risk an explosion. Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, it said, are “different.” “Clear-minded men of both races have realized the tragic possibilities and have stayed clear of such complications, because they realize it is for the benefit of each and also of the game.”
Looking back today, Ric Roberts, then a sportswriter on the Pittsburgh Courier, sighs: “I thought somebody would come along and pull us aboard the train, as Toscanini did for Marian Anderson in 1934. He said, ‘once in a thousand years’ a voice like that. But we just didn’t have a Branch Rickey back then.”
The draft took many top black players as well as whites. Ironically, the war also brought a belated prosperity to the black leagues. Wartime crowds boosted black baseball into a two-million-dollar-a-year business. At an estimated $40,000 Satchel Paige was not only the highest paid black player in America but the highest paid of any color, black or white. In the spring of ’45 the Red Sox took a look at Robinson, Sam Jethroe of Cleveland, and Marvin Williams of Philadelphia. Coach Hugh Duffy watched them line hits off the fence, shook their hands, and promised to get in touch if the Red Sox ever needed them. He never did. It looked like the same old runaround.
Judge Landis was still as immovable as ever. “Paul Robeson had made a speech to Landis and to all the owners,” Ric Roberts says. “The theme was ‘Have a Heart.’ But at the end of all that, Mr. Landis affirmed his stand. The last thing he told Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier was: ‘There is nothing further to discuss.’ He died with those words on his lips.”
In New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia set up a committee on equal employment opportunity. Larry McPhail, then owner of the Yankees, bluntly told the committee: No colored players will play on the Yankees. The campaign is being pushed by “groups of political and social-minded drum beaters,” he charged. All this Jim Crow propaganda, he said, is just “talking through their hats.” Few if any blacks could qualify for the big leagues “A major-league player must have something besides natural ability,” McPhail said. He must possess the technique, the coordination, the competitive attitude, and the discipline usually acquired only after years of training in the smaller leagues.” McPhail may have been really thinking of the $100,000 a year the Yankees took in in rent and concessions from black teams that used Yankee Stadium plus Yankee farm clubs’ parks in Newark, Kansas City, and Norfolk, Virginia. But he said that signing blacks would contribute little or nothing to solving the basic problem, would be disadvantageous to the black players and fans alike, and would restrict rather than broaden opportunities for black players. McPhail favored a limited number of blacks entering the majors, perhaps a few each year, ”after they show their ability and character.”
McPhail didn’t realize it, but things were already changing—and changing fast.
In April 1945, just after President Roosevelt’s sudden death, the major leagues announced the name of their new commissioner. He would be a Southerner, Kentucky Senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler. “We went right down to see him the morning the story broke,” Roberts says. “Chandler came out immediately, shaking our hands and said, ‘I’m for the Four Freedoms. If a black boy can make it on Okinawa and Guadalcanal, hell, he can make it in baseball.’ And he told us, ‘Once I tell you something, brother, I never change. You can count on me.” I always thought that was a pretty stout thing for a Southerner to say.
“The Courier headlined that! Rickey couldn’t have made a move but for that. The moment Rickey read that in the Courier, he began to move. And Chandler paid for it. Mr. Griffith was outraged. He was outraged! They never forgave Mr. Chandler for that. The first time he stubbed his toe, he was a goner. And it broke his heart. Mr. Chandler has never been the same. None of those people could have done a doggone thing if they hadn’t gotten a green light from the commissioner. And he never got credit for it. I think he’s long overdue for what he deserves.”
That winter the electrifying news was finally out: Rickey and the Dodgers had signed Robinson. The Sol Whites and Charley Grants, the Rube Fosters and the Josh Gibsons had come at last to t
he end of the long dark trail. The door had been opened, but it would not be they who would step inside.
As the 1946 season opened, most eyes were on Montreal, where Robinson was making history in the Dodger farm system, not in the Negro leagues. “We couldn’t even draw flies,” Buck Leonard shrugs.
It’s too bad, because with the returning veterans the black clubs were playing some of the best baseball ever. The World Series that fall between Kansas City and Newark opened in New York’s Polo Grounds, well-attended by scouts from several teams. Newark, with Monte Irvin and Larry Doby in the infield, won it in seven games.
In October Bob Feller put together a truly outstanding all-star squad to tour against Satchel Paige: Mickey Vernon, Phil Rizzuto, Ken Keltner, Charley Keller, Jeff Heath, Johnny Sain, Bob Lemon, Dutch Leonard, and Spud Chandler. In thirteen games from coast to coast they played on almost even terms. In the end the Fellers won seven and lost six and, best of all, made more money than the Cardinals would make winning the World Series against Boston.
Nineteen forty-seven, Robinson’s first year with the Dodgers, opened on a note of tragedy. Josh Gibson died suddenly at the age of thirty-five, a broken, frustrated man, just too old to make the majors after so long a wait. Many other veterans eager to sign, lied about their ages, some successfully, others in vain. Younger ones were signed up quickly—Campanella, Don Newcombe, Doby, Hank Thompson. Older ones, those already forty, knew there was no hope, but these men—Cool Papa Bell, Mule Suttles, George Scales, Willie Wells and many others—gave everything they had to helping the youngsters coming up.