Agate Type

asheville royal giants

In the comments to this post I remarked that I’d never seen a photo of the Asheville Royal Giants. Thanks to Mark Aubrey, now I have. Here they are:

You can see more photos in Bill Ballew’s book, Baseball in Asheville. Edward W. Pearson, a Spanish-American War veteran and businessman, founded the Royal Giants around 1916, and they continued to play into the 1920s, joining the Blue Ridge Colored Baseball League in 1921. For more about the team, Mark points to an article by Bijan Bayne about “Early Black Baseball in North Carolina” (pdf).

Here’s something else Mark found out about the Royal Giants:

(Charleston Evening Post, August 26, 1922)

It seems likely that this is Forrest “Wing” Maddox of the 1921 Knoxville Giants and the 1923 Birmingham Black Barons.

blue ridge colored baseball league, 1921

There is still a huge amount of regional black baseball history out there to be unearthed.  Numerous small (and usually short-lived) black baseball circuits were scattered around the country that went virtually unnoticed in the national (and even local) press at the time, and have been almost completely forgotten since. The year 1921, for example, produced a bumper crop of small black baseball leagues across the south.  I know of at least four—the Negro Southern League, the Negro Southeastern League, and the granddaddy of them all, the Texas Colored League, along with a North Carolina league that I just ran across for the first time today.  From the Charlotte Observer, March 22, 1921:

I’ve found references to two of the other teams, the Charlotte Red Sox and the Spartanburg Sluggers, but have no idea how long the Blue Ridge Colored League lasted, assuming it even got off the ground.  Whatever its fate, the league’s existence serves as a reminder of the now nearly invisible substratum of town teams and amateur and semi-pro ball that fed players to the big Negro league clubs.