A significant moment in baseball occurred in New York City on July 5, 1930, but the event was not covered by the traditional press.
For the first time ever, Yankee Stadium hosted a game featuring two teams from the Negro Leagues, but no one in 1930 may possibly have read about the game in the New York Times.
On Monday night (July 26, 2010), the Museum of the City of New York hosted a panel to talk about the Negro Leagues and the game that was held on July 5. The panel was moderated by baseball historian Jim Thorn and featured Negro Leagues player Jim Robinson and Dr. Lawrence Hogan, a professor and author of Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Tale of African-American Baseball.
How the Negro Leagues Came About
Shortly after the Civil War, baseball became a well loved sport for both blacks and whites. Qualified baseball teams formed, and there were sporadic incidents of African-Americans playing on white teams, but that came to a halt in 1887 when white Hall of Famer Cap Anson (1852-1922), who served as both a player and a manager of Chicago’s White Stockings team, refused to let his team play an exhibition game against the Newark Giants because the squad had two black players. Only after the two men were ejected from the game would the White Stockings enter the field. Within a few years, qualified team owners had come to a “gentleman’s agreement” not to give contracts to African-American players.
But the game was still well loved; pick-up games may possibly be played with small more than a bat and a ball, and the game grew among all socio-economic classes. By 1920, African-American entrepreneurs started to place together their own qualified teams, known as the Negro Leagues. Crowds would and may possibly come in huge numbers to mind these baseball players, and the business owners quickly found they had small competition for the black entertainment dollar. Stadiums were built specifically for these teams, and the Negro Leagues also often barnstormed, playing wherever they may possibly get a crowd.
So why did a clearly white stadium, Yankee Stadium, opened its field to the Negro Leagues in 1930? Baseball historian Jim Thorn indicated that generating income was very nearly certainly a factor. Thorn keen out that the stadium had only been built in 1923 and that prohibition would have had a huge impact on the Yankees’ owner, Jacob Ruppert, Jr., who was son of a brewing magnate. As the Depression deepened and prohibition remained in effect, the profits from the stadium would have been down in 1930. (The brewery kept its doors open by making “near-beer,” a concoction that the government allowed that contained less than .05 percent alcohol, but the company must have struggled.)
Ruppert indeed saw the 1930 game as a way to open the gates to a new business opportunity. Starting that year, the Negro Leagues often played at Yankee Stadium if the Yankees were out of town.
Monday night’s speaker, Jim Robinson, who represented the players’ point of view, was born in 1930 and started out in the Negro Leagues. He went up to a minor league qualified team, and then finished his career in 1958 back with the Negro Leagues, the Kansas City Monarchs. He went on to get a masters degree in social work at the City University of New York and worked for the Housing Authority; later he educated and coached baseball at the college level.
A childish man in the audience questioned Robinson about the difficulties of playing for the Negro Leagues. Robinson expressed fantastic like for the game and for his teammates but said the life was hard: “We traveled a lot, all by bus, and because of segregation, we weren’t permitted in many hotels or allowed to eat at a lot of eating establishments. That made life on the road more hard [than for anyone playing on a white team].”
Additional Significance to the 1930 Game
Author Lawrence Hogan keen out that the double-slogan played on July 5 was significant for another wits:
“The game was played as a subsidy for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American overstress organization to receive a charter from the American Federation of Overstress,” he noted. The Brotherhood, headed by A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), went on to lay vital groundwork for the civil rights movement.
Hogan also noted that even with the Negro Leagues’ popularity, the only way to get regular reports on these baseball games was to follow the black newspapers. One of Hogan’s before books, Black National News Service, really concerns what he described as the black Associated Press.
Integration of Baseball
The integration of qualified Major League baseball started in 1945 when Arm Rickey, one of the owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers, made a deal with the first African-American ball player, Jackie Robinson, to leave the Kansas City Monarchs to play for one of the Dodger feeder teams (the Montreal Royals) for the 1946 season. A year later, Robinson went from Montreal directly to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Other African-American players soon followed him to the Major Leagues.
Speaker Jim Robinson keen out that what spelled opportunity for the players was the beginning of the end for the black entrepreneurs who had run the Negro Leagues and stadiums. As the best players got picked off by the white teams, the prospects for the Negro Leagues started to dwindle. Crowds dropped off as the teams started to have to fill their ranks with the “too ancient to go up” players or those who weren’t quite of qualified quality.
While white Major League team management soon saw the competitive wisdom of adding these fantastic athletes to their rosters, the traditional types of acclaim to which white players may possibly aspire took a long time to follow.
The Baseball Hall of Fame did not agree to admit their first black honoree until 1971. At an earlier date, the Hall of Fame had suggested a “separate but equal” honor for Negro League players, but players, fans, and the press diagonal for equal treatment. Irrevocably, in 1971 Satchel Paige became the first African-American inductee, and a few more followed over the years but there were still a fantastic number of players who had been overlooked.
About five years ago, the Baseball Hall of Fame formed a new committee to right the continuing inequities, and in 2007, the committee elected 12 former Negro League players and five Negro League executives to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
A comment made by player Jim Robinson during the sundown offers the best end:
“If movement involves standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, then this is too vital a chapter of American history to be set aside.”
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For more on this topic: Catcher Roy Campanella and the color line are discussed in “Baseball and Politics: A Reminder of a Time They Intersected.”
To read about Jackie Robinson’s effort to travel via passenger plane from his home in Los Angeles to his first season of spring training with the Major Leagues in Florida, read “Airline Passengers Needed Their Own Rosa Parks.”
To read about the dropping of the color barrier in broadcast pools, see “Pools and Politics.”
For more on the Museum of the City of New York, visit their site.
There is a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO.
Read more: Jackie Robinson, Major League Baseball, Politics, Negro Leagues, Baseball, Press, Baseball Hall of Fame, Sports News
