Negro Leagues

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Negro Leagues

When Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey brought about the integration of Major League baseball in 1947, they sounded the death knell of the Negro Leagues. Like many players in the old Negro Leagues, Kansas City Monarchs first baseman Buck O'Neil was too old to play in the majors in 1947, and thus the demise of black baseball shortened his playing career. But no one was happier with baseball integration than Buck O'Neil, who later recalled: "as to the demise of the Negro Leagues—it never should have been, a Negro League. Shouldn't have been." Given the history of race relations in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Buck O'Neil is sadly wrong—racial segregation in baseball probably could not have been avoided.

On September 18, 1869, the Pythian Baseball Club of Philadelphia became the first recorded all-black team to play an exhibition game against an all-white team, the City Items. Although they defeated the City Items, the National Association of Base Ball Players rejected the Pythian Club's bid for membership, declaring itself against the admission of any clubs composed of, or even including, African Americans. But despite official and unofficial opposition to integrated play, more than 50 African Americans played alongside whites in organized baseball during the 1870s and 1880s.

The year 1887 signaled the beginning of the end for blacks in organized white baseball. First, the St. Louis Browns refused to play an exhibition game against an all-black club. Then when Cap Anson, then the most powerful player in the game, discovered that the New York Giants were about to hire an African American ballplayer, he made it clear that neither he nor any of his white teammates would ever play a team with black players. The late nineteenth century saw the passage of the "Jim Crow" segregation laws in the South, and at the end of the century in the landmark Plessey vs. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court accepted the notion of separate but equal public facilities. In the face of a growing player's revolt against integrated play, the Major League owners made a "gentleman's agreement" to sign no more blacks. The Minor Leagues soon followed suit, and soon thereafter African Americans disappeared from organized white baseball.

African American baseball fans could still follow a number of independent professional teams such as the Chicago Unions, the Louisville Fall Cities, the Cuban X-Giants, the Indianapolis ABCs, and the New York Lincoln Giants. The best team at the turn of the twentieth century black baseball was the Chicago American Giants, who compiled a remarkable 123-6 record in one barnstorming season, led by their massively built pitcher-manager Andrew "Rube" Foster.

After World War I, black nationalist Marcus Garvey urged African Americans to adopt self-help as their watchword, to build up their own cultural institutions and their own business enterprises. "Rube" Foster heard Garvey's call, and in 1919 he began putting together the Negro National League in an effort to provide the North's new black citizens, products of the black migration from the South, with professional baseball of their own. Foster's league had eight teams, including the Kansas City Monarchs, the Detroit Stars, the Dayton Marcos, the Indianapolis ABCs, the Chicago and St. Louis Giants, the Chicago American Giants, and the barnstorming Cuban Giants. By 1923 the league was a huge success, drawing a season's total of some 400,000 fans.

White businessmen, drawn by the potential profits of black baseball, formed a rival organization, the Eastern Colored League. This white-owned Negro League had six teams, including the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Philadelphia Hilldales, the New York Lincoln Giants, the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants, and the barnstorming Cuban Stars. With the establishment of bifurcated black baseball, a Black World Series was played in 1924 between the Kansas City Monarchs and the Philadelphia Hilldales. While Major League baseball turned toward the home run and Babe Ruth inspired "fence-ball" in the 1920s, the Negro Leagues kept alive the type of "scientific baseball" inspired by Ty Cobb, with an emphasis on base hits, stolen bases, defensive strategies, and guile.

The Great Depression hit black baseball even harder than the white Major Leagues. The white-owned Eastern League collapsed in 1929, and the Negro National League went bankrupt in 1931. Black baseball relied on barnstorming to survive after 1931. The strongest of the barnstorming teams was the Homestead Grays, an all-star team owned by Cumberland "Cum" Posey. His rival Gus Greenlee, who ran the numbers racket in Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods, bought a semipro team, the Crawford Colored Giants, in 1930, and began raiding Posey's roster with offers of better pay.

Crawford's roster included James "Cool Papa" Bell, a smooth fielding center fielder who may have been the fastest man in baseball history and later made the Hall of Fame. But Crawford's greatest star, and black baseball's biggest home run hitter, was catcher Josh Gibson. Gibson hit 70 home runs in the Negro National Leagues final season of 1931, and his lifetime total may have approached 1,000. Legend tells us that on one afternoon in Pittsburgh, Gibson hit one ball so hard that it never came down. The next day in Philadelphia a ball dropped from the sky into an outfielder's glove and the umpire pointed to Gibson and yelled, "You're out—yesterday, in Pittsburgh!" Legends aside, Major League scouts who saw Gibson play referred to him as "the black Babe Ruth," while fans of the Negro Leagues thought that Ruth should have been called "the white Josh Gibson."

Gibson was a product of the Black Migration to the North. His father was a sharecropper's son from rural Georgia, who moved to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills. Gibson had initially trained to be an electrician, but he went into baseball when he realized that he could earn more money. Unlike Ruth and the other power hitters of the "rabbit-ball" era, Gibson had a short, compact swing at the plate, relying on his massive arms and torso for his power, making it difficult to slip a breaking pitch by him. In 1943 the Pittsburgh Pirates sought permission from the commissioner's office to sign Gibson to a Major League contract, but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis refused. Gibson, perhaps baseball's greatest home run hitter, died a broken man.

Gus Greenlee built a $60,000 stadium for the Crawfords, and in 1933 he took steps to revive the defunct Negro National League. The league now contained six teams, all of them under the control of his fellow racketeers—among the only members of the black community with enough capital in the midst of the Great Depression to finance a league.

The most popular star in black baseball was a tall, gangly pitcher named Leroy "Satchell" Paige. Anytime a team got into financial trouble, they would hire Paige to pitch for them, and the crowds would pour in. Paige was born in the rural south, just outside Mobile, Alabama. He began in the Southern Negro League, playing for the New Orleans Pelicans, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Nashville Elite Giants, and the Cleveland Cubs, always searching for the best money, a pattern he would follow in the Negro National League.

Because black baseball was played in so many places and under so many auspices, no one knows precisely how many games Paige won. But Paige once struck out Rogers Hornsby five times in a barnstorming game, and after he beat the Dizzy Dean All-Stars in 1934, Dean pronounced him the greatest pitcher he had ever seen. Paige became best known for his humorous aphorisms, such as his prescription for "How to Stay Young": "avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood; if your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts; keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move; don't look back—something might be gaining on you." Despite his sleepy appearance, Paige had a shrewd sense of how to sell himself. His showmanship kept the Negro Leagues alive during the hard times of the 1930s.

By the late 1930s there was growing pressure to integrate baseball. At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Jessie Owens triumphed in track and field, winning four gold medals and representing American defiance of Nazi racial theories. In 1937, Joe Louis knocked out Jim Braddock to win the heavyweight championship, leading a small number of black sportswriters to begin actively campaigning for baseball's integration. The Congress for Industrial Organization (CIO) and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) also began to advocate integration in their official publications.

But America's participation in World War II did the most to advance the cause of baseball's integration. In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, warned that he would lead 50,000 blacks in a march on Washington if defense industries were not immediately opened to blacks as well as whites. President Franklin Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, making racial discrimination in federal hiring illegal. Black workers migrated in ever-greater numbers to northern cities seeking employment in the defense industries, causing a boom in attendance at Negro League games. But at the same time the hypocrisy of the United States fighting Nazi racism abroad, while "America's Pastime" practiced an overt racism at home, became more and more self-evident.

For 25 years Judge Landis had worked ceaselessly to enforce the old "gentleman's agreement" against the hiring of blacks by major league teams, but he died in 1944. Landis' replacement, Albert Benjamin "Happy" Chandler, was quoted as saying: "If a black boy can make it on Okinawa and Guadalcanal, hell, he can make it in baseball." Branch Rickey, the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had long believed that both fair play and big profits argued in favor of integration: "The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of the game is the black race. The Negroes will make us winners for years to come, and for that I will happily bear being called a bleeding heart and a do-gooder and all that humanitarian rot." Rickey only needed the right man to break the color line.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was that man. The grandson of a slave, he had been born in Cairo, Georgia in 1919. His family moved to California, where at Pasadena Junior College and the University of California, Los Angeles Robinson excelled at every sport. In 1944 when Robinson left the Army he joined the Kansas City Monarchs, playing shortstop for $400 per month. Robinson hit.387 for the Monarchs his first season, and he had a tryout with the Boston Red Sox. Although Boston manager Joe Cronin was impressed with Robinson, the Red Sox passed on the opportunity to be the first team to integrate (instead they would be the last team). Instead it was Branch Rickey's Dodgers, on October 23, 1945, who announced that Jackie Robinson had been signed to play for their AAA team in Montreal.

Just as 1887 had signaled the beginning of the end for blacks in organized white baseball, 1945 signaled the beginning of the end for the Negro Leagues. But few mourned its final official passing in 1955. After Robinson's debut with the Dodgers in 1947, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, African Americans took their rightful place in the national game, redeeming America's pastime.

—Todd Anthony Rosa