Agate Type

Roy Tyler

The First World War disrupted and transformed American life, drawing Black workers and their families out of the South to fill northern factories. The massive population shifts sparked local conflicts all over the country (East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919) as white people reacted with hostility and often violence to the influx of Black workers. At the same time the wartime draft brought hundreds of thousands of Black men into the military and armed them. Again, white people did not take this well. Perhaps the most notorious flashpoint occurred in 1917, when Black members of the 24th Infantry clashed with white police and civilians in what became known as the “Houston Riot.” More than 20 people were killed.
 
Much has been written about this event, and at least one film has been made, so I’m not going to try to narrate the whole story. Suffice it to say that prosecution and punishment were meted out exclusively to the Black soldiers. According to Wikipedia, 118 members of the 24th Infantry were court-martialed and 110 were ultimately convicted in one of the biggest trials in American history to that point. Fully nineteen of these soldiers were executed. Among those incarcerated for lengthy prison terms was one Roy Tyler, an 18-year-old from Kentucky, who was one of at least 41 Black soldiers sentenced to life in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

It’s worth noting that Black and white interpretations of the Houston events differed greatly. To the mainstream press the Black soldiers were rioters and murderers; to Black Americans, they were the “Houston martyrs,” and the Black press often did not accept the framing of the conflict as a “riot” (Chicago Defender, January 3, 1925 p. 3). Here I should refer you to this excellent article by Timothy Rives and Robert Rives that appeared in the National Archives’ Prologue Magazine back in 2004 (Vol. 36, No. 2), which I will rely on heavily for this post. As they write, “The Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment emerged a symbol of radical resistance to southern apartheid, its dead martyred, its incarcerated celebrated in the black press. At eighteen, Tyler was a hero.” Just last month, the U.S. Army set aside the convictions of the 24th Infantry soldiers, including Tyler, and granted them honorable discharges.
 
Within a couple of years of his incarceration Roy Tyler began to distinguish himself as “the best all around athlete in the prison,” setting records in “running and high jumping.” When the former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson came to Leavenworth after his conviction under the Mann Act, Tyler served as his sparring partner as he prepared for his fight with his namesake, Topeka Jack Johnson (Kansas City Star, September 17, 1924, p. 11). Of average height for the time (5’8 ½”) and weighing 180 pounds, Tyler was tough and imposing; in 1921 he was the last man standing in a free-for-all “battle royal” (Leavenworth New Era, June 3, 1921, p. 3). His “powerful” physique helped him survive the dangers of prison. In one incident he stopped a knife-wielding attacker, in another he saved a deputy warden’s life from an assailant (Kansas City Star, ibid.). He also started playing baseball.
 
The article by Rives & Rives covers four Leavenworth inmates who went on to feature in the Negro leagues: David Wingfield, Joe Fleet, Albert Street (who was picked up by the American Giants in 1925 but apparently never appeared in a game), and Roy Tyler. They played for the prison’s Black team, the Booker T. Washingtons, or just “Booker T’s,” who became not only the premier team in the penitentiary but one of the best teams in the whole region at the amateur/semipro level, playing against a wide range of opponents, including the Kansas City Monarchs. Roy Tyler batted in the middle of the order and impressed with his long runs and shoestring catches in the outfield. In 1924 he ended up with a .607 batting average. That September he was paroled.
 
His parole advisor, according to Rives & Rives, was none other than Rube Foster, playing a role reminiscent of what he claimed he had done for Dave Brown a few years earlier (though this hasn’t been substantiated). Jack Johnson was also a confidant and advisor to Tyler, and as Rives & Rives speculate, very possibly he served to connect Tyler and Foster. In the spring of 1925 Tyler started the season with the American Giants and played a few games with them. He is also recorded as playing for the Cleveland Elites in 1926, then joining the Fort Wayne Pirates as player-manager, before an incident involving a woman he was living with, and a white visitor to her house, got Tyler convicted of robbery and sent to an Indiana prison. He is then credited with appearing in a single game as a pinch hitter for the Columbus Blue Birds in 1933, which to this point has marked the end of his Negro league career.
 
Here it’s necessary to note that Negro league historians (including Seamheads) have not gotten Roy Tyler’s professional career quite right, somewhat to the detriment of his historical reputation as a player. The other day Adam Darowski of Baseball-Reference informed us that a user had read the Rives & Rives article and pointed out that Tyler couldn’t have played in a Negro league game in 1933. Although he was released from the Indiana Reformatory in 1932, his conviction for robbery violated his federal parole, so he was returned to Leavenworth to finish out his original (life) sentence. His sentence was commuted and he was released in 1936 after a long campaign by the NAACP. He was one of the last of the 24th Infantry soldiers involved in the Houston incident to gain his freedom.
 
Interestingly, the game in which someone named Tyler pinch-hit for the Columbus Blue Birds against the American Giants occurred on July 16, 1933, in Indianapolis’s Perry Stadium, where the American Giants were based that season, due to the conversion of Schorling Park in Chicago into a dog-racing track. The Indiana State Reformatory, where Roy Tyler had been incarcerated until 1932, was in Madison, only about 25 miles northwest of Indianapolis. So, absent any other information, it would not be completely impossible that Tyler was released on furlough and able to appear in a game. But this was not the case. In 1933 Roy Tyler was in prison in Kansas, where he was playing for the prison’s now-integrated baseball team, the White Sox.
 
Thus the Tyler who played for the Columbus Blue Birds was someone else—I haven’t been able to find any candidates, so for now he remains unidentified. And while checking this out, I found that another adjustment needs to be made to Roy Tyler’s record.
 
Following earlier historians (most notably Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia), we show a player named Eddie Tyler appearing in the outfield for the 1925 St. Louis Stars in both the regular season and the NNL playoffs. Riley then shows this same player as a pitcher for Hilldale in 1926 and the Brooklyn Cuban Giants in 1928. While checking to see if this player could be identified as the 1933 Columbus player, I found that Tyler of the 1925 St. Louis Stars appeared as “R. Tyler” in box scores, for example:
 

 Roy Tyler was identified explicitly as the American Giants player in spring training and the early part of the 1925 season. He last appeared for Chicago on May 5. While I did not find any mention of a transaction between St. Louis and Chicago, nor any mention of the St. Louis player’s full name, “R. Tyler” first appeared for the St. Louis Stars on July 20, and stayed with them through the playoffs, so there’s no conflict between the Chicago and St. Louis stints. Moreover, I found a 1926 mention of Roy Tyler, by then of the Fort Wayne Pirates, as a former St. Louis Stars player:
 

 

So Roy Tyler pretty clearly played for both the American Giants and the St. Louis Stars in 1925. The following season he moved to the Cleveland Elites, where he batted third and hit .269 in 26 games before joining the Fort Wayne Pirates. It’s worth noting that the Elites were managed by Candy Jim Taylor, who had managed the St. Louis Stars in 1925, and brought at least three other ’25 Stars with him to Cleveland (left-handed pitcher Percy Miller, right-hander and Cleveland resident Slim Branham, and second baseman Charlie Watts), as well as a couple other St. Louis-based players (Eddie Wall, Charles Zomphier). As Rives & Rives note, Candy Jim Taylor managed three of the four Leavenworth Negro leaguers (Wingfield, Tyler, and Fleet).
 
How this affects our view of Roy Tyler: it’s overall perhaps a fairly minor point, but Tyler played pretty well for St. Louis in 1925, hitting .341 and helping them to a playoff spot. On a team festooned with stars like Mule Suttles and Willie Wells, Tyler was a useful backup outfielder. But with his record adjusted (the St. Louis games added, the one ’33 Columbus game subtracted) his Negro league career goes from .265/.306/.363 in 29 games, mostly for the awful ’26 Cleveland Elites, to .301/.333/.398 in 57 games, plus a playoff appearance (2 for 7 in 4 games). I haven’t figured his new OPS+, but it would certainly be much better than the 69 he’s currently credited with. So, although he remains a (fascinating) footnote, his standing rises appreciably with this new information.

His record will be corrected in the next Seamheads update, probably within the next month or two.

Meanwhile I haven’t been able to substantiate the name “Eddie” (or Edward) Tyler, or establish that a “Tyler” played for Hilldale in 1926. (This, of course, doesn’t prove anything other than my lack of evidence.) I did find one mention of a pitcher named Tyler for the barnstorming 1928 Brooklyn Cuban Giants. If anybody has found anything on these Tylers, or on Tyler of the ’33 Columbus Blue Birds, let me know.
 
The image of Roy Tyler appears in Timothy Rives & Robert Rives, “The Booker T Four’s Unlikely Journey from Prison Baseball to the Negro Leagues,” Prologue Magazine (Summer 2004, Vol. 36, No. 2). The image of the trial of the 24th Infantry soldiers is from Wikipedia.

Checkerboard Plaid

A few weeks ago John Zinn posted these marvelous photographs on Facebook showing the semipro Doherty Silk Sox of Paterson, N.J., playing an unidentified Black team at Doherty Oval sometime between 1915 and 1929:

The photos are from the collection of the Paterson Museum, and John was trying to identify the Black team.
 
The most striking thing about these photographs is the black-and-white checkered uniforms worn by the Black team. This reminded me of this photo:
 


This picture of Charles Earle was published in the New York Age (June 8, 1918), after Earle had joined the Grand Central Station Red Caps as team captain, so I had always thought this might have been the only visual representation of the Red Caps’ uniforms. It’s blurry, but to my eye it strongly resembles the checkerboard uniforms in the Paterson photos, and I had never seen any other uniforms like them in that era, at least belonging to Black teams. So it seemed very likely that Charles Earle played for the team in John’s photos, which would date them to 1918 or before. But I couldn’t find any evidence that the Grand Central Red Caps had played in Paterson in those years.
 
However, in 1916 & 1917 Earle played for the Brooklyn Royal Giants. And their uniforms that year were described in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, in an account of an April 29 game between the Royal Giants and the white semipro Bushwicks at Ridgewood Field in Brooklyn:

 This is a precise description of the uniforms found in John’s photos. Here’s a detail from the third photo above, showing the Royal Giants’ first baseman, Ernest Gatewood, and the U.S. flag on his left sleeve:

 

Moreover, the Royal Giants played the Silk Sox in Paterson on May 13, 1917, two weeks after the uniform description was published, the Silk Sox winning 8-1 (Paterson Morning Call, May 14, 1917, p. 3):
 



My only remaining question involves the fact that there exists a pair of photos often said to show the 1917 Brooklyn Royal Giants, wearing completely different (and more conventional) uniforms.

L to R: Doc Sykes, Louis Santop (wearing his 1914 Lincoln Giants “World’s Colored Champions” uniform), String Bean Williams, Charles Earle, Pearl Webster, Ernest Gatewood, Bill Kindle, Joe Hewitt, Bill Handy, Lefty Harvey, Johnny Pugh

Top row, L to R: Nat Strong, Doc Sykes, Max Rosner
Middle row, L to R: String Bean Williams, Charles Earle, Bill Kindle, Bill Handy, Johnny Pugh
Front row, L to R: Louis Santop, Pearl Webster, Ernest Gatewood, Joe Hewitt, Lefty Harvey
 
All the players in both photos played regularly for the Royal Giants in both 1916 and 1917—except for Doc Sykes, who, as far as I can tell, only played for the team in 1916, not in 1917. So it’s my contention that these photos show the 1916 Brooklyn Royal Giants, while in 1917 the team adopted the striking black-and-white plaid uniforms with red trim that are pictured in the Paterson Museum photos.
 
Thanks to Heather Garside of the Paterson Museum and John Zinn. The three Silk Sox/Royal Giants photos appear courtesy of the Paterson Museum.

Comeback

This blog has been silent for two whole years, largely because I have been very busy on other fronts, as you may have heard. In coming days I’ll be restarting the blog, as well as launching some additional projects. In the course of my research into Black and Latin American baseball I’ve accumulated great gobs of material and ideas, enough for more books than I will ever be able to write. I may not be able to complete everything, but I’d like to at least get some of this stuff down on paper or in pixels. More on this soon.

In the meantime, I have occasionally been elsewhere on the web, in the form of interviews, podcasts, Zoom events. I’m not any good at this, mind you, but here are links to a few, just to prove I haven’t been completely idle the past couple of years.

 

Interviews / Articles:

•Ralph Carhart put together a joint interview with me, Bob Kendrick, Larry Lester, and Scott Simkus, having us all respond to the same questions (you’ll need to scroll down).

•Marc Carig of The Athletic wrote this very good article on the problems of Negro league statistics, one of the best treatments of the subject out there.

•This MLB.com article talks to Ron Teasley, the one (known) Negro leaguer that MLB’s recognition would add to the all-time major league roster. There’s also a bit of my personal history as a Negro leagues historian.

•This interview with the Indiana State Library blog focused on the importance of Indiana libraries, and libraries in general, in Negro league research.

 

Podcasts / Zoom Events:

•The SABRcast with Rob Neyer

•National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Virtual Voices of the Game: Negro Leagues Baseball History (with Larry Lester) (Facebook)

 •A Sports Reference podcast on the Negro leagues

•Adam Darowski’s Building the Ballot podcast

•Sports Info Solutions: Celebrating Great Defense in the Negro Leagues

•Seattle Mariners Podcast No. 730: Negro League Stats

 

(Image at the top is from the Los Angeles Record, January 7, 1906, p. 1)

Claudio Manela

Here’s an artistic rendering of the Filipino lefty Claudio Manela, who played in the Negro National League, Cuban League, and Eastern League in the early 1920s—to my knowledge the only Negro leaguer born in the Philippines. It’s by LeRoid David, a Sacramento artist and baseball fan with a strong interest in Filipino ballplayers in America.

It’s based on the one quite blurry photograph of Manela that has circulated on the web—LeRoid has imagined the details of what Manela might have really looked like. Here’s the original:

Thanks to LeRoid for sharing!

Looking at the Seamheads DB master file, here are the birthplaces of Negro league players (that is, players for Black professional teams in the U.S.) known to have been born outside the continental United States:

Bahamas: 1 (Ormond Sampson)
Canada: 3 (Jimmy Claxton, Bill Galloway, Red Eagle Smith)
Cuba: 270
Dominican Republic: 8
Jamaica: 1 (Oscar Levis)
Liberia: 1 (James Wilson)
Panama: 12
Philippines: 1 (Claudio Manela)
Puerto Rico: 25
Spain: 1 (Alfredo Cabrera)
U.S. Virgin Islands: 1 (Alphonso Gerard)
Venezuela: 1 (Carlos Ascanio)

Among team officials and others, Alexander McDonald Williams of the Pittsburgh Keystones and Central Baseball Park was born in Barbados, and Stanislaus Kostka Govern of the Cuban Giants and New York Gorhams was born in the then-Danish West Indies (later the U.S. Virgin Islands).

Sol White's Official Base Ball Guide: New Cover

This year has seen the re-release of my edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide by Summer Games Books. It’s worth getting an actual paper copy of the book, as it sports a new cover by the great baseball artist Gary Cieradkowski.

Be sure to check out Gary’s account of how he created the cover, as a nod to other vintage baseball guide covers.

The 1926 Cleveland Elites

(Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926, p. 10)

The above shows the 1926 Cleveland Elites and their bus. Aside from its interest as a photograph of a quite obscure team, it is also one of the earlier images I have seen of a Negro league team bus.

The Elites unfortunately did not amount to much—the owner Sam Shepard, a former St. Louis Stars owner, hired Candy Jim Taylor, former Stars manager, to run the new team, but Taylor couldn’t replicate his success in St. Louis. He used at least 37 players trying to come up with a winning formula, but wound up quitting and going to Detroit before the season was done. Cleveland finished 8-40-1 in league competition. (Amazingly that was not the worst record in the league—the Dayton Marcos finished 6-36 to beat out their fellow Ohioans for last-place honors in the very lopsided 1926 NNL.)

Although on the diamond the Elites were way behind the league, on the roads and highways they were leading the pack. As the caption indicates, the multi-talented Shepard designed the Elites’ bus himself, as well as that of the champion Kansas City Monarchs. (Incidentally, while there are many photos of Monarchs buses from the 1930s and later, I don’t think I’ve seen one from the 1920s.)

The 1920s were the decade when Negro league teams switched from trains to buses. This gave them vastly more flexibility. It was once common for games to be curtailed or the second games of doubleheaders cancelled so one or both teams could catch a train. If they could jump on their own bus right after the game teams could stay an extra few hours if necessary—or at least that was the idea. With more control over the travel schedule, team owners found it easier to book more and more games—and the season became even more hectic and exhausting for the players.

UPDATE 11/2/2020 Here is an item from a week earlier about Sam Shepard and the Elites team bus:

(Chicago Defender, May 22, 1926, p. 10)

Also, with respect to the discussion in the comments about the size of the Elites roster: there were roster limits in the NNL. Teams were usually expected to keep no more than 16 players, though this varied a bit, and enforcement of the rule was not always strict. Sometimes teams were content with less—for example, the Cuban Stars used only 13 players over their whole 1926 NNL schedule.

The Elites definitely kept around a large number of players, and Candy Jim Taylor made use of them, with lots of relief pitching, in-game substitutions, pinch-hitters, and pinch-runners. It seemed to be a mixture of cycling through a high volume of players in the hopes of finding some talent while desperately seeking for any possible advantage within a given game.

Here’s a box score for a game played on May 31, a few days after the bus photo was published, showing the Elites using 17 players, including Taylor and Frank Duncan, the veteran player-coach who briefly took over as manager later in the year.

(St. Louis Argus, June 4, 1926, p. 7)

For whatever reason, nothing worked at all—the Elites were trounced in this game 11 to 1, finished with 8 wins and 40 losses in league competition, and folded before the season was over. Taylor finished the year with Detroit, then returned to St. Louis in 1927, eventually leading the Stars to a pennant in 1928.

Koke Alexander

Here’s an update on a player who has been something of a mystery, “Koke” Alexander of the Dayton Marcos and other teams in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

First, I ran across a photo of him playing for Dayton’s Colored Men’s Improvement Association team in 1922. He’s in the middle, with Samuel Dewitt, another player I’ve never seen an image of, on the left, and Will Owens on the right:

(Dayton Herald, July 1, 1922, p. 8)

Unfortunately, I think these images are not really good enough to use on the Seamheads site.

A number of Black men named Alexander lived in Dayton around this time. The two I always thought were the likeliest candidates to be the ballplayer were:

1) Julius Forrest Alexander, manager of an “athletic club” according to his WW1 draft card,  proprietor of an “amusement club” according to the 1920 census, and later (in 1928) the sponsor of a baseball team called the Dayton Independents. He was born in 1886, though, so was possibly a little old to be a professional ballplayer on the side. Also Koke Alexander moved to the Columbus Buckeyes and Chicago Giants for the 1921 season—it would seem unlikely that the owner of a club would leave his business to go play ball for a couple of second division teams. While Koke was appreciated as a good player in both Dayton and Chicago, he was hardly a star, and probably wasn’t pulling down a large paycheck.

2) Luther Cornileus Alexander, who worked as a sandblast operator in an iron foundry. “Coke” is a form of coal used as fuel in an iron-producing blast furnace; this seems as good an explanation for Koke’s nickname as any. Also, Luther was born in 1893, making him aged 25 through 28 during Koke’s top flight career.

However, some time ago I found a more solid lead than either of these (very speculative) possibilities—an entry in the 1921 Dayton City Directory:

This doesn’t seem to match any white ballplayer I can find. Moreover, Dayton didn’t have a white league team in 1920 or 1921, but of course the Dayton Marcos, featuring Koke Alexander, played in the Negro National League in 1920.

As it turns out, there was a Black man named Alfred Alexander who filled out a draft card in Dayton in 1917:

Born in 1888, he’s a little older than I would have expected, though it is certainly possible he was really younger than this—it’s very common to find earlier birthdates on World War I draft cards than in other records. I have tried to track him down in other records, including in his birth state of North Carolina, with no luck so far, so he remains a little mysterious. But this is I think the best lead I’ve come up with.

John Henry Lloyd & the Georgia Rabbit

In the past I have made the case (here and here, and in my edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide) that deadball era pitcher Walter Ball was mistakenly credited with a nickname, “The Georgia Rabbit,” and given the wrong full name—George Walter Ball—as a result of a pair of punctuation errors, twenty years apart, in two quotations from Sol White. Briefly put, Walter Thomas Ball was accidentally combined with a different pitcher, previously unknown to researchers: George Washington, a.k.a. the Georgia Rabbit, who pitched for the Cuban X-Giants and Philadelphia Giants, and who collapsed and died of cardiac arrest before a Philadelphia Giants game in Connecticut in 1908.

The other day I ran across a this 1919 item from Cary B. Lewis’s column “Around the Diamond” (Chicago Defender, March 1, 1919). It’s one of the earlier versions in print of the familiar story about a young John Henry Lloyd repurposing a wire basket as a catcher’s mask.

I had certainly seen this item before, but hadn’t remembered that, when he was hit by the two foul tips that swelled both his eyes shut, Lloyd was catching none other than “the famous twirler ‘Georgia Rabbit’.”

This story has them playing for the Macon Stars in 1907. My guess is that it probably took place a couple of years earlier, as in 1907 Lloyd was with the Cuban X-Giants and Washington was with the Philadelphia Giants. Lloyd joined the X-Giants in July of 1906—interestingly, Washington had pitched for them earlier that same year, in May, though as far as I can tell they didn’t play for the X-Giants at the same time.

White Racial Violence & the Negro Leagues: The Chicago Riot of 1919

The following is a piece I wrote for the Outsider Baseball Bulletin nearly ten years ago (September 8, 2010), presented with a few slight edits and updates.

On a hot July day in 1919 the Chicago American Giants disposed easily of the upstart Detroit Stars, 7 to 1, in Detroit’s Navin Field, while the Tigers were away in Cleveland. Meanwhile, roughly around the time the game ended (5 p.m.), the 29th Street Beach on the South Side back in Chicago was packed with people from the city’s varied ethnic neighborhoods. “Racial feeling,” the Chicago Tribune would report the next day, “had been on a par with the weather,” and it “took fire” when a black teenager named Eugene Williams, floating on a raft, strayed into a section of the beach that was informally regarded as white territory. White men shouted at him and began throwing stones; one of them, George Stauber, was especially persistent, and succeeded in knocking Williams off his raft. Whites on the beach on the beach actively obstructed black swimmers from going to his rescue. Williams, evidently panicking, drowned.

Cartoon by John T. McCutcheon (Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1919)

Despite the entreaties of indignant African Americans, a cop on the scene refused to arrest Stauber. Scuffles and fights spread along 29th Street and into the city, and in less than half an hour the whole “Black Belt” section of Chicago was aflame with interracial violence. Over the next several days waves of fighting surged and subsided, as roving gangs of white vigilantes, many of them members of neighborhood athletic clubs, pulled black commuters from trolleys and beat them, shot people from cars, looted black-owned businesses, and set fire to houses. Future mayor-for-life Richard Daley, at the time a member of the Hamburg Athletic Club, may have been one of the instigators, though nobody has proven that. Police reserves, and eventually the Illinois National Guard, were called out. The latter occupied the American Giants’ Schorling Park, which was situated squarely in the middle of the riot-torn area. In the end the official toll was 38 dead (15 white, 23 black), and hundreds of all races and ethnicities injured.

In Detroit, the players may have heard of the disturbances from friends or relatives Sunday evening (although there were reports of telephone and power lines being cut on the South Side). Rube Foster and the Chicago sportswriters Dave Wyatt and Cary B. Lewis were guests of honor at a dinner put on that evening by the Detroit Stars owner, Tenny Blount. Rube, the Chicago Defender later reported, was “so happy over his two victories that he ate a whole five-pound steak.” Whether or not the dinner was interrupted by news of events in Chicago is unknown.

In any case, Rube, Wyatt, Lewis, and the players would definitely have gotten the news when they picked up the morning papers to check out the story about the previous day’s game. “Race Riots Spread Over Negro Belt of Chicago,” proclaimed the front page of the Detroit Free Press. The first line of the accompanying story told of “a Negro” who was “found probably fatally wounded late tonight at Thirty-ninth and Halsted streets,”—only a few blocks west of Schorling Park, which was on 39th Street between Princeton and Wentworth avenues—with a bullet wound in his chest. The article went on to tell of three other black people who were “dragged off street cars” and beaten at the same corner; all three suffered fractured skulls.

A photograph of white rioters, some clutching bricks, searching for a black man; from The Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922). This is the first in a sequence; two further photographs show the rioters throwing bricks at a prone man and then his lifeless body being examined by police.

Most of the American Giants players with known addresses lived somewhere in the “Black Belt,” on streets like Wabash, Michigan, or Indiana avenues. Rube Foster’s longtime home was at 3242 Vernon Avenue, just a few blocks from the 29th Street beach where Eugene Williams was killed and only a block and a half from one of the major disturbances. And of course the majority of the Detroit Stars, as former American Giants players, had Chicago connections. Three of them would still appear in the 1920 census (taken the following January) living in Chicago: Pete Hill, Bruce Petway, and José Méndez. Had Hill moved his wife Gertrude and their nearly 10-year-old son Kenneth to Detroit for the summer—or was he thinking of them, back in Chicago, locked in their Wabash Avenue residence while smoke and gunshots filled the streets, as he took the field at Mack Park on Monday afternoon?

Map of the riot area (Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1919).

Whatever their personal feelings, the teams had a seven-game series to play. This was their livelihood, ticket sales were booming, and the show had to go on. The American Giants tempted fate by sending outfielder Cristóbal Torriente to the mound, though perhaps Foster reasoned that as a southpaw Torriente was a good choice in Mack Park, with its short right field porch. Whatever he thought, he lost the gamble. In the third inning Méndez started a rally with “the longest hit of the day,” a blast that hit a tree in the outfield and fell in for a double. His teammates teed off on Torriente for three more triples in that inning. Three Detroit players—Hill, Frank Warfield, and the pitcher, Dicta Johnson—hit two triples apiece in the 13 to 5 rout.

The box score appeared on Tuesday morning in a Detroit Free Press that headlined its front page, “Troops Lent To Stop Chicago War As Mobs Kill 7.” That afternoon John Donaldson, “in rare form” for Detroit, held the Giants to six hits as both Hill and the normally light-hitting Méndez homered to give the Stars a 7 to 3 win.

According to the next morning’s Free Press, “Negroes Fleeing Chicago As Fury of Battle Increases.” Many of the players doubtless read the lengthy accounts that followed of smashed street lamps and gunfights in the dark, police phone lines overwhelmed by calls from lone women trapped in their houses and too terrified to step out, white mobs attacking the (black) Provident Hospital where an endless stream of wounded and maimed people had flowed for the past three days. Whatever they thought of it, the teams played on. And the Stars won their third straight, another handy victory, 8 to 5, featuring Pete Hill’s 18th homer, another triple by Warfield, and a bases-loaded double by Candy Jim Taylor after Hill had been intentionally walked.

Members of the black community evacuating a riot-damaged home while guarded by the state militia. From The Negro in Chicago (1922).

As the riots in Chicago rumbled on, the Stars won a slugfest on July 31, 12 to 8. Five home runs were hit by left-handed hitters, including a grand slam by Donaldson. Detroit now led the current series four games to two, and had succeeded in tying the season series at five apiece. After a day off on August 1, the Stars won their fifth straight on Saturday, August 2, 10 to 6, Hill getting his 19th home run. The scheduled seven-game series was completed, the unheralded Stars winning five games to two. The Hilldale club of Philadelphia was arriving in Detroit the next day, and the American Giants had been due back in Chicago for a seven-game series against the rejuvenated Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, a team that now featured superstars (and former American Giants) John Henry Lloyd and Cannonball Dick Redding.

But Schorling Park was now occupied by the state militia. The Bacharachs cancelled their whole western trip, and the American Giants were stuck in Detroit. With three major black teams in the same city, a three-corned double-header was arranged for Sunday, August 3. In the opener the American Giants, behind Dick Whitworth, ended Detroit’s streak with an authoritative 9 to 1 win.

The situation in Chicago was beginning to wind down, devolving into cleanups and investigations. Fires in nearby Polish and Lithuanian neighborhoods, originally reported to have been set by black rioters, were now thought to have been set by “white malcontents and anti-Negro agitators…working with blackened faces, to throw suspicion upon their racial adversaries” (Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919). The Black Belt was now largely cordoned off, and relief trucks brought in supplies of food and milk. In the meantime Foster in Detroit was being presented with a new car by the Maxwell Automobile Company, sponsors of a white semipro team that played an extensive schedule against the best blackball teams in 1919, “in appreciation of his character as a ballplayer and a business man.”

One of the fires set by white rioters wearing blackface. From The Negro in Chicago (1922).

It’s unclear now what Foster and the American Giants did for the next few days. It seems quite likely that they may have returned to Chicago while the Stars took on Hilldale. Three American Giants players—Oscar Charleston, Bill Francis, and Tom Johnson—stayed behind to bolster the Stars as they turned back Ed Bolden’s club, three games to two. With his home field unusable for the near future, Foster arranged for a lengthy tour in the East. It kicked off with one last two-game series between the Stars and American Giants in Mack Park on Saturday and Sunday, August 9 and 10. The two teams were knotted at six apiece for the season, so this would decide bragging rights for the season between the two premier African-American teams in the Midwest.

The first game broke the pattern of the series. The elongated and now obscure, but very effective, right-hander String Bean Williams shackled the Stars and their left-handed power in Mack Park, holding them to two hits (one a double by Pete Hill) in a tight 2 to 1 victory. This gave the Giants a 7 to 6 edge on Detroit; the Stars now had one last chance to end on even terms with their rivals. The second game pitted Tom Johnson, who had been loaned to Detroit for the Hilldale series but was now back with Chicago, against Sam Crawford, the Stars’ ace. Jesse Barber, the first batter up for the Giants, lofted the ball over the right field fence, and Foster’s men never looked back, ending up 5 to 3 winners, and closing out the season series at 8 to 6 in their favor.

The 1919 Detroit Stars. L to R: Dicta Johnson, Frank Warfield, Joe Hewitt, Frank Duncan, Pete Hill, José Méndez, Tenny Blount, Edgar Wesley, Vicente Rodríguez, John Donaldson, Bruce Petway, Frank Wickware, Sam Crawford

The Detroit Stars, for their part, didn’t lose another game to a major black team that year, closing with a four-game sweep of the Dayton Marcos and two wins against the Cuban Stars in December. The American Giants embarked on a month-long odyssey through Pittsburgh (where a series with the Cuban Stars was disrupted by a streetcar strike), Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and Dayton. (Foster never did come to an agreement with John Connor, owner of the Bacharach Giants, so the two teams didn’t meet in 1919.) Finally, to much anticipation, the American Giants returned home for their first game in Schorling Park in six weeks, a matchup with the Cuban Stars on August 31. “A great demonstration awaits the American Giants,” wrote the Defender, calling them “true warriors.” To bring home the connection between martial pride, self-respect, and sports, James Smith, a former player, sportswriter, and “winner of hero medals in France,” was to be presented at the game with a special award paid for by fans. The team’s homecoming felt like a celebration of the black community’s survival.

Black community members & militia. From The Negro in Chicago (1922).

The 1919 Chicago riot was only part of a wave of racial disturbances that swept the nation during the war years and immediately after, culminating in the horrific Tulsa massacre of 1921 (dramatized in HBO's Watchmen), where vigilantes dropped explosives from biplanes and the black section of town was almost completely destroyed, leaving 10,000 people homeless. The “Chicago war” was not the only such incident to affect black professional baseball: the East St. Louis disturbances in 1917, when between 100 and 150 black people were killed by rioting white workers, seems to have driven Charlie Mills’s St. Louis Giants out of business for two years, as white owners of ballparks apparently refused to accommodate them.

The Negro National League, founded in February 1920, was finally possible only because the black populations of cities like Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City had swelled enormously in just a few years. Ironically, the same conditions that underpinned the outburst in interracial violence—the Great Migration of African Americans to the industrial cities of the North during World War I—also paved the way for the great dream of black baseball pioneers to become a reality.

The 1919 Chicago American Giants. Top row, L to R: Bingo DeMoss, Leroy Grant, Dave Brown, Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Dick Whitworth. Middle row, L to R: Dave Malarcher (?), Bobby Williams (?), George Dixon, Johnny Reese (?). Bottom row, L to R: unknown, Jimmie Lyons, Bill Francis, unknown, Jim Brown (?).

Cigars against the Kaiser

(Chicago Defender, August 24, 1918)

While researching the other day’s post on black baseball and the 1918 flu pandemic I ran across this photo montage in my files, showing several of the Chicago American Giants in 1918: Dick Whitworth and Rube Foster in the top photo, and George Dixon, José Méndez, and Frank Wickware across the bottom. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone post or reprint this anywhere.

In that post I mentioned how the “work or fight” rule led players like Bruce Petway and Pete Hill to find work in an “essential” industry, in their cases as civilian employees of the U.S. Army (the Quartermaster Corps), which you can find recorded on their draft cards.

 

Cubans like José Méndez who were residing in the United States also had to register for the draft. Whether or not the work or fight rule applied to them, I don’t know. In any case Méndez, who was a professional baseball player and had been for more than a decade, listed himself as a cigar maker, with Rube Foster as his employer. Maybe the cigar industry was considered vital to the war effort?