Revisiting the Birth, Bloom, and Bust of Black Baseball

National Negro Baseball League founder Rube Foster with his Chicago American Giants.

On May 2, 1920, the first game between teams of the brand new National Negro Baseball League (NNL) was played in Indianapolis.  The league was the brainchild of Rube Foster, a pitcher who had been managing Negro teams, semi-pro and professional since 1907.

The league was formed that February at a meeting held in a Kansas City YMCA.  The charter teams were the Chicago American Giants, Detroit Stars, Kansas City Monarchs, Indianapolis ABCs, St. Louis Giants, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos and Chicago Giants.  Foster’s own Chicago American Giants dominated the league in the early years, winning the first four consecutive championships.

Blacks had been playing organized baseball since at least the early 1870s.  Most clubs were amateur or had one or two paid players on the team.  Local and regional leagues came and went.

In the days of virtual apartheid in sports, only a handful of Blacks played on White teams.  Oberlin College players Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Welday were signed with the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings and stayed with the club when it moved up to the old American Association, a short lived Major League in 1884.  A few other players who could pass or who claimed to be Native American or Hispanic also have briefly played.

Black and white teams sometimes met in off-season exhibition games.

United States Postal Service first class stamps honoring the Negro Leagues and Rube foster.

In 1885 the first all-pro Black team, the New York based Cuban American Giants was organized.  It played in local eastern leagues and barnstormed, mainly in the South until it was dissolved after the 1899 season.  Famously, they twice beat white major league teams in exhibitions.

From the turn of the 20th Century to the formation of Foster’s league, Black professional baseball was most famous for barnstorming—touring the country, most small towns, and taking on all comers.

Although the roster of teams changed, the NNL was concentrated mostly in the Midwest and Boarder South.  In 1923 Eastern professional teams organized as the Eastern Colored League (ECL).  From 1923 through ’27 the two leagues held their own World Championships.  The ECL folded in early 1928 but re-emerged with most of the same teams in 1929 as the American Negro League.

Neither league, however, could survive the Depression.  By 1932 both were out of business, although Black minor leagues like the Negro Southern League continued to operate.  Some of the stronger teams in the defunct majors continued to operate, reverting to the barnstorming model.

A second league operating as the NNL opened in the 1933 season.  It struggled but climbed back to a major league status.  In 1937 the competing Negro American League (NAL) was formed leading to another annual championship series and All-Star games, known as the East-West Games.  It was in these leagues that legendary Black ball players rose to national prominence.  The level of play was so high that white professional teams began to wish they could recruit from it.  But the color bar seemed insurmountable.

 

In the 1940s and '50s the Kansas City Monarchs were the dominant team in the Negro Leagues with some of the most legendary stars including some who finally helped break the color barrier to play in MLB.  This is their team in 1942.

In 1947 the NAL absorbed the NNL.  From then on it was the only remaining Black major league.

When Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers finally broke the color line by putting Jackie Robinson on the field in 1947, it spelled eventual doom for Black baseball.  It took a few years, but by the mid-1950’s virtually every Major League team was stocking up on Black players, either from the NAL or signing them directly.  Black fans followed the best players to the Major League parks.  The NAL sputtered out of existence after the 1960 season.

Satchel Paige at his 1971 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Several players including Robinson who got their start in the Negro League were enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.  But it was not until 1972 that the hall inducted a player who spent most for his career in Black baseball—the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige who was brought up to the Majors long past his prime briefly by Bill Veek and the Cleveland Indians.

This diamond at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City features 12 life size bronze statues of Negro League greats including Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Rube Foster, and Buck O’Neil.

Black baseball got its own shrine in 1990 when the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was founded.  In 1997 it moved into a permanent home in a complex it shares with the American Jazz Museum at 18th and Vine Streets in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

 
 

May Day is International Working People’s Day—Accept No Imitations

 

A French May Day poster from around the turn of the 20th Century.

Chicago was a-boil with labor turmoil in 1886.  The burgeoning city had become a major manufacturing center and tens of thousands of immigrants had poured into the city since the Civil War to join displaced American-born farmers and former independent craftsmen in giant factories.  Hours were long, working conditions hard and dangerous, bosses harsh, and pay cuts frequent. 

Since the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 tensions had been building.  And so had a labor movement—craft unions loosely organized under a city central labor body, and the Knights of Labor, officially a benevolent society whose national leadership was opposed to strikes.  But unlike the craft unions, the Knights would enroll all workers—skilled and unskilled alike.  In addition, immigrant communities had their own radical leadership and press.  None was as vigorous as or developed as the Germans, who were not only the largest immigrant community in the city but had a highly educated leadership steeped in European radicalism.  Many of these leaders identified with the growing international anarchist movement.

There were several major strikes ongoing in the city that spring.  The largest was at the giant McCormick Harvesting Machine plant where strikers had been replaced by scabs under police protection and daily clashes were occurring at the factory gates. 

On May 1st workers responded to a call for a General Strike for an 8 Hour Day which had been issued nationally by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (ancestor of the American Federation of Labor.)   In Chicago the International Working Peoples Association (IWPA) organized a march by 8,000 workers led by Albert and Lucy Parsons, the main English language figures in the anarchist labor movement.  The General Strike got so much support that even half of the scabs at McCormick laid down their tools to join.

Employers were in a panic at the turn of events.  They met with city officials demanding suppression of strikes and demonstrations and agreed among themselves to redouble their own efforts to violently suppress strikes by use of the Pinkerton Agency and bands of thugs and criminals hired off the streets.  

Chicago  Police attack pickets at the McCormick works on May 3 inspiring a protest rally at the Haymarket the next evening.

On May 3 a rally in support of striking McCormick workers was addressed by German anarchist leader August Spies.  When strikers confronted scabs emerging from the plant after the 4 pm end of shift, police opened fire killing six workers and wounding scores.  Outraged Spies rushed to the North Side where his daily newspaper, Arbeiter-Zeitung was published.  He and his associates decided to call a protest meeting at the Haymarket just west of downtown for the next day.  Flyers in German and English were hastily printed and rushed into distribution.  Spies noticed that the flyers contained the words “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!”  He ordered the copies destroyed and new ones printed without them.  Spies had consistently counseled non-violence.  Most of the thousands of flyers distributed omitted the words, but a few hundred of the first run were circulated before they could be recalled.

The evening of May 4, a huge crowd gathered at the Haymarket in drizzling rain to hear speakers orate from the back of a wagon.  Mayor Carter Harrison stopped by and observed that the crowd was orderly and peaceful.  He ordered police massed nearby not to intervene.  The last scheduled speaker of the evening, English-born Samuel Fielden, a Methodist lay preacher as well as a labor activist, was addressing a thinning crowd when the police officer in charge, Inspector John Bonfield, who was getting “supplemental” income and support from a coalition of major employers, decided to act. He ordered a phalanx of 175 officers to advance through the crowd from the rear.  Captain William Ward addressing Fielden on the wagon ordered the crowd to disburse.  Fielden protested that the assembly was peaceful, and he was nearly finished anyway.  Ward issued a second warning.  Fielden said, “All right.”

Then someone—it has never been determined who—threw a bomb from a side ally into the massed police.  Five officers were killed, and others injured.  Police responded by firing wildly, wounding many of their own.  About 60 officers were wounded—mostly by friendly fire, but so were dozens of workers, including Fielden.

The crowd ran and Fielden limped away.

The press went, predictably, berserk.  The offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and regular meeting places and haunts of anarchists and unionists were raided.  Police quickly rounded up much of the German leadership. 

A warrant was out for Albert Parsons, who had spoken at the rally earlier but was gone when the attack occurred.  Parsons disguised himself and fled to Wisconsin.  He later decided to turn himself in and stand trial in solidarity with his German comrades.  

The men charged in the Haymarket case and the poster that called workers to the rally.

In addition to Spies, Parsons and Fielden authorities charged Adolph Fischer, George Engels, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe.  Some of the defendants had not been at the Haymarket that night at all, and Neebe was out of town.  21 year old Lingg was known to be an advocate of propaganda of the deed and had written a provocative article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung advocating the use of dynamite.  But he was not at the rally.

The trial began on June 21 and was presided over by Judge Joseph Gary who made no attempt to conceal his animus to the defendants.  Although no evidence could be brought forward linking any defendant to the bomb, prosecutors argued that they were in a conspiracy and that the defendants were guilty because they had not actively discouraged the unknown bomber.  All eight men were convicted by the jury.  Seven were sentenced to death and Neebe to 15 years in prison.

Before sentence could be carried out, Lingg committed suicide in his cell by biting a blasting cap. 

After appeals had been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887.  The next day, November 11, the four remaining condemned men were led to a scaffold in a courtyard of Cook County Jail and hung.  Their execution drew outrage and protest from the labor movement around the world.

Illinois Governor John Peter Alteld, a pro-labor Democrat defied public opinion to pardon the surviving Haymarket defendants

In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld, a liberal Democrat, signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab and concluded all eight defendants were innocent. The pardons and his opposition to calling in Federal troops to intervene in the Pullman Strike ended his political career.

In 1898 Samuel Gompers, head of the newly reorganized AFL petitioned the First Congress of the Second International (socialist) to designate May 1 to commemorate the Martyrs of Chicago and support a new general strike call for an 8 hour day scheduled for May 1, 1890.  The International enthusiastically agreed calling for “a great international demonstration” on that date.  Huge crowds responded around the world including a march by tens of thousands in New York City.  The event was so successful that it was made annual the next year and has been celebrated globally ever since.

But in the United States, where May Day was born, the holiday was officially abandoned within a few years.  Samuel Gompers stuck his historic deal with the employer’s organization, the Civic Federation, which gave craft unionists a “place at the table.”  Part of that deal was the abandonment of May Day, now associated with Socialism in exchange for recognition of a non-ideological Labor Day in September around the time of a local New York City building trades celebration.

A May Day rally in New York's Union Square in 1913.

Industrial and militant unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) kept May Day, as did socialists of all stripes.  Large celebrations persisted in many cities until the post World War II anti-Communist hysteria when the press successfully identified May Day with military parades in the Kremlin.  

After leading a May Day service at a small Unitarian Universalist congregation that met in the United Electrical (EU) Workers hall, I stopped by the Haymarket to see the newly installed monument on the spot of the original speaker's wagon.

In recent years, even conservative unions have revived the May Day tradition.  The Chicago Federation of Labor funded a new Haymarket Memorial featuring a speaker on a wagon at the exact location of the original and hold annual commemorations there.  Hispanic and immigration activists have staged huge marches for immigration reform on May Day, increasingly with the support of the labor movement.

A poster for one of the May Day marches  linked to immigrant rights in 2013.