Black Baseball: Challenging the Color Line
One hundred years ago today … Black baseball teams the Bacharach Giants and the American Giants commenced a skein of head-to-head games around the northeastern US that some considered an East-meets-West championship series.
(See Todd Peterson’s “May the Best Man Win": The Black Ball Championships 1866-1923.”)
The Bacharach Giants were new in town, in that they were an Atlantic City team that owners John Conors and Barron D. Wilkins (both Harlem nightclub owners) had moved to New York, primarily Dyckman Oval in Inwood, for the 1920 season. The American Giants, visiting from Chicago, were the team owned by Rube Foster, who is credited with having founded the first version of an organized league for Black baseball, the “Negro National League,” early in 1920.
While those Giants were battling it out, another team of Giants, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, who played in Dexter Park–located in Woodhaven, Queens–“were also proclaiming themselves ‘Colored World Champions’ “ (Peterson).
As these games were underway, Ted Hooks of the New York Age was arguing that the time was right for baseball’s major leagues to admit Black players.
New York Age, 9 October 1920, p. 6. Chronicling America.
Hooks, the Black weekly’s chief sportswriter, points out that baseball’s current gambling scandal (which we will be covering later this month), and the ejections from the sport by figures such as Heinie Zimmerman, constituted a prime opportunity to lobby for the inclusion of Black players.
RELATED POSTS:
July 17: "Black Baseball: Giants, Giants Split Doubleheader at Ebbets Field”
July 24: “African Americans in sport: the color barrier and other discrimination”
– JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 10, 2020
TAGS: African American, black sports, journalism, sportswriting, color barrier, racism, Harlem Renaissance