Here’s what I believe is the draft card for longtime Monarchs and Hilldale first baseman George Carr:
What marks this man as the Negro Leagues’ George Carr is 1) his middle name, Henry, and 2) his birthdate, September 2, and birthplace, Atlanta, which match several passenger manifests from the early 1930s (though in the manifests the year is given twice as 1896 and once as 1897). Riley has Carr born in 1895 (no specific date) in California. There were two black men named George Carr who registered for the draft in Los Angeles; the other, a Pullman porter, was born in Russ, Texas, on August 18, 1893.
The interesting thing, as you will have noticed, is that Carr lists his occupation as “movie actor,” employed by someone at Universal City. One of Carr’s teammates on the Los Angeles White Sox of the late 1910s, and on the 1920 Kansas City Monarchs, was the well-known actor Edgar “Blue” Washington, father of Kenny Washington, who reintegrated the NFL in the late 1940s (and was a teammate of Jackie Robinson at UCLA).
Edgar Washington’s acting career is well-documented and lasted into the 1950s, including roles in Gone With the Wind (1937) and the original Angels in the Outfield (1951) (though his draft card lists him not as an actor, but as a “laborer” at the Economy Paper Co.). By contrast, I’ve never heard anything at all about Carr being an actor as well. The draft card says his employment was “off and on”; as an African-American actor in the 1910s, he most likely would have been restricted to precisely the kinds of stereotyped roles Washington would specialize in later as butlers, comic-relief sidekicks, low-life criminals, etc. Still, it would be interesting to find out what (if any) films he actually appeared in.
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