Below is a list of players reserved by Negro National League clubs after the 1922 season, published in the Chicago Whip (12/16/22), an African-American weekly paper that’s now pretty hard to find. In fact, though it was published from 1919 to 1939, apparently all that’s left of the paper now is a fairly rare 1919-22 run on microfilm, and a few scattered single issues. The Whip’s Depression-era “Don’t Spend Your Money Where You Can’t Work” campaign was a major part of pre-World War II civil rights history, yet hardly any examples of the newspaper during that time still exist.
Anyway, this reserve list is interesting because it gives first names to some players who don’t have them in standard reference works, or in other cases shows different first names than we normally see. I’ve used a few names that I found here (e.g. “Elmore Barbour” for the player known in Riley and elsewhere as “Bull Barber”—his name was usually spelled “Barbour” in the box scores). You can’t take this as gospel, but it is another piece of the puzzle.
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