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 September. 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 (?), unknown, George Dixon, Johnny Reese. Bottom row, L to R: Bobby Williams (?), Jimmie Lyons, Bill Francis, unknown, Jim Brown (?).
Excelente trabajo, muy bien documentado, he aprendido mucho, enhorabuena!!
Posted by: Lázaro González | April 14, 2023 at 01:43 PM