Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues

by John Holway

  When we played white clubs we’d get the usual catcalls from the fans: “It’s getting dark,” or something like that. I remember once, I was in Dayton, Ohio. I had pitched no-hit, no-run baseball through eight innings. And I was in the batting circle, and I heard one of my players say, “Look out, Sug! Look out, Sug!” I naturally just covered up like that. And the ball hit my arm and glanced off the side of my head. You know what had happened? The pitcher had taken his windup, and took a potshot at me and called me a black son of a bitch. Well, this boy Suttles, being a big guy, got between the pitcher and his dugout, and not one of his teammates raised a hand to help him. The fans booed him, and they rushed me to the hospital. Had the ball not hit my arm, maybe I could have been dead. I know I would have had a concussion.

  Well, I stayed in the hospital overnight, and it must have been about 1:30 A.M. and the sister let the manager up to see me. He sat down and talked with me, said he was sorry it happened and everything, didn’t know what happened to the guy, what made him do a thing like that. I know he was under contract to one of those major league ball clubs, but they just paid him off, period, after that. Dayton didn’t use him anymore.

  That’s just like this guy Jake Powell of the Yankees. I remember one year he was here in Chicago. Bob Elson was interviewing him and asked him what kind of work did he do in the winter. He says, “I’m a policeman, I enjoy whipping niggers’ heads in the winter time.” Elson cut him off the air like that, and it wasn’t three weeks from then that the Yankees sold him to Detroit, and when he went over to Detroit, those fans over there threw so many balls and things at him that he was gone. Now that was a man that had been brought up, had been taught evil all through his young life. That stuff was just embedded in him.

  We had problems like that. I remember we had been to New Orleans spring training this particular year, and we were on the way back North. I said to them, “You got an Illinois license on this bus,” and I said, “you’re going to be stopped, and God knows how much money you’re going to have to pay.” So we were coming through a little town, Mayersville, Mississippi, on Highway 61, I think. Foster and Powell, their home was in Mississippi. They just had to have something to eat. And they went in a restaurant. The guy wouldn’t let them in the front door, but he let them in the back, with the secretary, a guy named Moore. I think Moore got about twelve or fifteen hamburgers. The guy told him, “fifteen dollars”—he don’t owe but six. And you know, they had a shotgun on him, locked him up in that place back there until the police came. We had to pay that $15, and then the police fined him for disturbing the peace!

  And it wasn’t like that just in the South. I was up here in Marietta, Ohio, one morning. We were on our way to Dayton, and I was driving. I guess it was about 4:30 in the morning. Everybody in the bus asleep but me, and I was kinda tired. Here comes this police, just blaring his horn, pulled up beside me, asked me, “Where’s the fire?”

  I said, “Well, I should ask you, you’re doing all the running.”

  He was the peace officer of this little small town. He said, “You ran through a red light.” He had me charged with running a red light, talking back to an officer. This was Tuesday. He said the judge wouldn’t be in town until Thursday, did we want to put up a bond or did we want to wait until Thursday? My secretary asked me, “You have any money?” I said, “Yeah, but I wouldn’t give him a nickel.” So he says, “Well, either you put up bond or you have to go to jail.” I told him, “I wouldn’t give you a quarter, now you can put me in jail.” The secretary paid him off, but I wouldn’t have given him my money, not a nickel. You ran into those things.

  Every country you go into, you’re going to have to pay. You take the white Mexican, he’s the same way toward the black Mexican. You know some Mexicans are darker than I am. And some Cubans are darker than I am, and it’s the same way.

  I was in Cuba in 1939, and I won nine, lost one, and I got the best salary, $800 a month American money. I went to Mexico that summer—a lot of major leaguers went down there—and I had a pretty fair season down in the Mexican League. I was nine and two. The next year I went back, I couldn’t get accommodations at the same hotel I was living in before in Mexico City. I asked the hotel manager why, and he said, “Well, you know, we have a lot of tourists that come here, and the whites say they don’t live in the same hotel with you in the United States.” I told him, “If that’s the way you want it, that’s okay.” The club management got me a nice apartment.

  Another year I was playing way down in Mexico somewhere. I don’t know how far it was, but I’ll tell you, I left Mexico City one Monday evening and didn’t get there until Saturday afternoon, so you know I must have been way down there. My manager had me arrested. Well, he didn’t like me, he knew what kind of money I was making. Now he claims that I borrowed 800 pesos from him on the street. I gave him no receipt, nothing, he just gave me 800 pesos for asking for it. I had to go the American consul to get out of jail.

  I’ve faced some tough hitters, Josh Gibson was one. They’ve got some tape-measure home runs that Gibson hit in the old Washington ball park. Gibson’s supposed to have hit one 500-and-some feet. And here at Comiskey Park, I saw him hit a line drive. You know where the bull pen is, and the wall back there where the bleachers sit? I’ve seen him hit a line drive all the way there. No, it didn’t go in the bleachers, but it hit high up on the wall.

  When I saw Oscar Charleston, he was playing first base. I’ve been told that he had been one of the greatest center fielders of all time. But for my center fielder, I’d have to pick that boy Bell that was with St. Louis—Cool Papa Bell. Bell was faster than Mays. If he was on second base and they bunted the ball, the pitcher could not throw to first base or he’d score. When they’d bunt the ball to me, I’d motion to first, turn around on the third base line, and Bell would bump right into me. I’d be standing there waiting for him.

  At that time you could have found 250 to 500 good ballplayers. I mean players that could have made any club in the major leagues, and could have stayed there. Now Jackie Robinson and Campanella were in the Negro League. Well, I don’t think Campanella had two hits off me all the while he was over here. And Jackie Robinson had one single off me, as far as I can remember. They went over there and they were .300-plus hitters. I say if a man could hit .300 in the league we were in, he’d be a .350 to .375 hitter over there. We had some pitchers that were just that tough. You take Birmingham, you take Memphis, Nashville, Kansas City—all those clubs carried five pitchers, and whenever the manager said, “You’re pitching today,” you pitched nine innings. You always got a good pitched ball game.

  Like we used to play out East—Yankee Stadium, Detroit—we’d have 40,000 to 50,000 people. We could only get in there once on Sunday, and I think it was the drawing power of those clubs that promoted the major-league owners to thinking. They said, “Well, now those guys here are drawing 40 to 50,000 in Comiskey Park in their all-star game.” The major-league all-stars would play there, maybe they’d have 34, 35,000 people. We would have standing room. Oh yes, we had whites, they would come.

  But you never picked up a white paper and saw anything in there about Negro baseball. We got more publicity after Abe Saperstein was connected with the club than we had in all the years that I can remember. Then you would find something in the Tribune. Or you’d find something in the afternoon papers. But other than that, before he came along, there was nothing.

  In 1943 they had decided to make me manager of the ball club. And that’s the year I went into the Army. I stayed a year and something, and then I came back here to Chicago.

  Negro baseball was on the downgrade then, because, you know how rumors get around, that several major-league clubs were going to give Negroes a tryout. I know the last ball game I pitched in Brooklyn, in the old Dodgers’ park, I had several guys come up and ask me how old I was. Once after I shut out a Detroit Tiger farm club, a guy walked up to me, said, “You looked pretty good.” I said, “Oh it was one of those lucky day
s.” He asked me how old I was, and I told him thirty-nine. He says, “Sorry I couldn’t have found you maybe ten or twelve years earlier.” He said, “I’m a scout for the Tigers. If I could have got to you twelve years ago, I’d have had a good prospect.”

  I came back to Chicago, I gave away everything I had—my baseball shoes, everything but my jacket. Then I read in the paper about two weeks later, out in San Diego, about eight or nine colored guys that I had played with playing with San Diego. And they all were twenty-six, twenty-eight years old. I could have kicked my own self. I think they were getting $7,500 each for six months. I could have made $7,500 a year for maybe two or three years. I said, “Well, I opened my mouth when I should have kept it closed.” I should have told him I was younger. A heck of a lot of them did do it.

  I thought it would have been New York, the first club to take Negroes. To tell you the truth, I thought it would have been the Yankees. But when Jackie Robinson got in there, he said the Yankees were the most prejudiced ball club he’d ever played against. I know, and the world knows, Jackie caught hell, by being the first. I know he got all the insults any man could have. They threw a cat—it would have landed in his face but I guess he threw his arms up. Down in Florida the po-lice walked out on the diamond, told him, “No niggers don’t play on this diamond with no white boys.”

  You can say the older player is responsible for the black man even getting a chance. Had there not been a Kansas City Monarch ball club, Robinson wouldn’t have been in organized baseball.

  I’m going to say this: I hold the major leagues responsible, in a sense, for what happened to the Negro ballplayers. The owners didn’t have the guts to come up and say, “Now, here’s a good ballplayer, only he’s a Negro.” Branch Rickey was the only one had guts enough to attempt that. Of course now, I remember this about Dixie Walker. He said, “They’ll never put a nigger on the ball club with me,” when they talked about bringing Jackie up. Branch Rickey said, “Walker can go back to pick cotton.”

  But most all of the clubs in the major leagues began to realize the dividends the minute they put a black man on the ball club, because a lot of people that hadn’t gone to the ball games, they went to see how the Negro will play. Was he as good as the white ballplayers? Jackie Robinson proved it, Campanella proved it, Don Newcombe proved it, Larry Doby, Willie Mays proved it. Durocher said Mays is the greatest he’s ever seen. Now when you look at Oakland, Pittsburgh, you find more blacks than you do whites. The starting lineup has three white boys in it; the rest of them are black. And most of those clubs are drawing, and they’re making money.

  As poor as I was, when I left baseball, I never was one to humble myself or beg anyone. Now Abe Saperstein that owned the Harlem Globe Trotters, he and I were very close friends. When I decided to give up baseball, I guess you could call it pride, it was too much to go to him and ask for a job, although we had been very close, used to travel together. He was traveling in the bus with us, trying to book ball games. He’d get so much percentage for every ball game he booked, and that’s the way we became friends. He had a little traveling basketball club, and I knew a lot of ballplayers that were begging him—every time they saw him they wanted something. Well, that wasn’t my speed. If I had my health and strength, I could make it on my own.

  A friend of mine I was talking to a few days back also played with the American Giants. Now, he’s still traveling around with the Harlem Globe Trotters; he’s been all over South America, Europe and all those old places with them. In fact, my wife always told me that I hurt my own self. It’s just one of those things, it’s just my makeup.

  So I went to get me a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and I worked with them until I took sick in 1967. I ended up having to be operated on for a circulatory condition, and so I’m on disability now, I’m not able to work and I have a pretty hard time getting up and down the steps.

  If I had it all to do over again, of course I’d like to get more money out of it, because in this man’s crazy world that’s what counts, is money. If you’ve got it, you’re all right. And if you don’t have it, you catch it. After all these years, I end up with nothing. When you don’t make it, you don’t have a chance to have nothing.

  The only thing I regret is that I wasn’t given a chance. It was just one of those things. My skin was black and that denied me the right to play in the majors.

  I have a little nephew here, sixteen years old, and he made the Chicago Tribune all-star team. He’s hitting .487, he’s fielding .960-something, and the scouts are after him. And I tell him each and every day: “You just look for yourself at all the athletes who came along in front of you, all the progress they have made. Being greedy, you could lose all that.” I said, “Help somebody else.”

  Chapter 14

  BUCK LEONARD

  They called Buck Leonard “the black Lou Gehrig,” and at least one authority, Monte Irvin, agrees that Buck could hit them as far and as often as the Yankee first baseman. If Leonard was the black Gehrig, then his long-time teammate on the Washington Homestead Grays, Josh Gibson, was surely the black Ruth. Together they formed baseball’s most potent one-two punch between the eras of Ruth-Gehrig and Mantle-Maris, and from 1937 through 1945 brought the Grays nine straight pennants, a record probably unequaled by any other professional team in any sport.

  The two were an interesting contrast in personalities. Gibson was fun-loving and liked to go out on the town. Buck was more quiet and enjoyed a good crossword puzzle.

  In 1948 Leonard hit a league-leading .395 and tied teammate Luke Easter for the league home run crown. His lifetime average was .343 against black big leaguers—and .400 against whites.

  I first talked to Buck Leonard in 1969 in his brick home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where a roadside sign proclaims that Jim Thorpe had played his first professional baseball game. Buck talked easily in a slightly high-pitched voice, punctuating his tales with a broad and gleaming smile. Some gray had crept into his sideburns, which he wore modishly long. We talked in his paneled den, filled with baseball pennants, photos, and scrapbooks.

  He was such a good storyteller that I went back again and again. In 1971 I had the pleasure of listening to him talk hitting with Ted Williams—they both agreed that they were guess hitters. Ted still speaks glowingly of Buck’s gleaming smile and vibrant humor.

  Fifteen years later Leonard suffered a stroke that forced him to hobble slowly on a cane when he appeared at the annual Hall of Fame festivities in Cooperstown. Our most satisfying visit was back in 1972, when Leonard himself was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

  Buck Leonard Speaks . . .

  My best home run year, I would say, was 1948. My longest home run went out of the ball park in Newark and went behind some tanks out there beyond the right-field fence. I didn’t have any way to measure it, but some fellow sitting high up in the stand said it just kept right on going. Then I hit a couple of pretty good ones in New York. I hit one in the bleachers in Yankee Stadium one Sunday, hit another in the back of the home team’s bull pen.

  That right-field fence in Washington was a heck of a high one, though. Then too, the ball we used just wasn’t a major-league ball. It was a Wilson 150 cc, and it wasn’t as lively as the big-league ball. Also we used bats off the shelf, where the major leaguers had their bats made. Then the Washington Senators started to have our bats made along with theirs. They would order 800 and order 100 for us.

  I used to hit clean-up for the Grays, right behind Josh Gibson, or sometimes I’d hit ahead of him. We were drawing pretty good crowds in Washington at that time—20,000, 26,000, 28,000. Here’s a picture of a game in 1942; we had 26,000 that night. That same year we played a game with Satchel Paige against Dizzy Dean and we had 29,000. Cecil Travis of the Senators was in the Service, and he played with Dizzy. And we played another game against the Kansas City Monarchs and had 30,000. At the time Griffith Stadium didn’t hold but 30,000. In 1945 we drew more than the Senators, and we weren’t playing as many games. />
  One day about 1942, Clark Griffith had come around and looked at our ball game, and when the game was over he sent word down there for Josh Gibson and me to come see him in his office. He said, “I want to talk to you fellows. You all played a good ball game today,” and so on and so on. “You fellows got good size on you and you looked like you were playing to win. There’s one thing I want to talk to you about. Sam Lacey [sports editor of the Afro-American], Ric Roberts [Pittsburgh Courier] and a lot of other fellows have been talking about getting you fellows on the Senators’ team.” He said, “Well, let me tell you something: If we get you boys, we’re going to get the best ones. It’s going to break up your league. Now what do you all think of that?” We said, “Well, we haven’t given it much thought. We’d be happy to play in the major leagues and believe that we could make the major leagues, but so far as clamoring for it, we’ll let somebody else do that.” He said, “Well, I just wanted to see how you fellows felt about it.” We said, “Well, if we were given the chance, we’d play all right, try to make it. And I believe we could make it.” But we never heard from him again.

  I always thought the Senators might be first to take a Negro, because Washington was about half Negro then. I figured if half the city boycotted the games, the other half would come. But Griffith was always looking for Cuban ballplayers. He had Joe Cambria down there scouting for him. I guess he didn’t have to pay them much money—but he wouldn’t have had to pay us much either.

  When I started out with the Grays in 1934, I was getting $125 a month—for four and a half months. By 1941 I was making $500 a month plus 75 cents a day eating money. In 1942 they doubled my pay to $1,000 a month. I wouldn’t say Josh and I pulled a double holdout like Koufax and Drysdale. See, both of us had a chance to go to foreign countries to play, and we asked for the same amount of money that we were being offered. I told them what they were going to pay me down in Mexico and asked them would they equal it, and they said they would. My best payday was 1948; I made $10,000 that year all told, summer and winter.