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.

Comments

[DennisCAbrams]

It's me. I'm "a user [who] had read the Rives & Rives article and pointed out that Tyler couldn’t have played in a Negro league game in 1933." Very cool to be able to do my part in correcting the record.

[Gary Ashwill]

Hi Tim, Roy Tyler was in the Indiana Reformatory from 1929 to 1932, and back in Leavenworth (for violating parole) from 1932 to 1936, when his sentence was commuted. So he probably couldn't have played for Columbus in 1933.

[Tim Tassler]

Tyler was in Fort Wayne from 1926 to 1929 when he ran into trouble with the law.

[Tim Tassler]

Roy Tyler came back to Fort Wayne with Columbus in 1933. The FW Colored Pirates was originally a team that Rube Foster put together. Tyler mentioned that in his interview with his parole officer. Tyler actually lived in a boarding house/brothel. He was the strong arm and was arrested when he threw a customer out of the house.