The Kansas City Monarchs, “World’s Colored Champions,” played more games on the barnstorming circuit than in the Negro National League. Like Rube Foster’s Cuban X-Giants three decades earlier, they traveled with their own portable lighting system, beginning in 1930. The white major leagues played a first night game in 1935.
Yet for white America, electric floodlights were not powerful enough to bring black ball out of the shadows. And when Jackie Robinson broke the color line, he left many Negro League stars behind, too old to perform at peak level before a new audience. Satchel Paige became the glorious exception, when in 1948 he became the majors’ oldest “rookie” at age forty-two. But boys like me grew up in the 1950s and ’60s loving baseball and not knowing a blessed thing about Rube Foster or Judy Johnson or Martin Dihigo or Oscar Charleston; it was left to the Baseball Hall of Fame to right a historic wrong and, beginning in 1971 with Paige, include the men who had been excluded from the playing fields in their prime. Inspired by Ted Williams’s advocacy of the Negro Leaguers in his own induction speech in 1966, and informed by the dedicated research of such writers as John Holway and Robert Peterson, the Hall of Fame has given us the great gift of Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Pop Lloyd, and many more.
For black America, there had never been any question about the greatness of these men; all the same, a young generation of African-Americans could take pride in seeing their legendary heroes honored in Cooperstown. The plaques in the Hall of Fame Gallery, however, only hint at the rich character of that shadow-ball time: on the one hand, the prejudice, the privation, the struggle for recognition; on the other, the innovation, the tenacity, the adaptability required for survival. Although the Negro Leagues survived into the 1960s, the last players of note they produced were in the early fifties: Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, and Hank Aaron — who when he retired after the 1976 season was the last major leaguer who had begun his playing career in the Negro Leagues.
The ageless Satchel Paige, he of the flawless control and the surprising be-ball (surprising because suddenly “it be right there”), was one of the few established stars in the Negro Leagues to make the bridge to major-league baseball (others were Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, and Sam Jethroe; Jackie Robinson played only one season with the Kansas City Monarchs and was regarded only as an up-and-comer). As Satchel wrote in his ghosted autobiography, “Pitchin’ Man,” he played for many teams in his long day at the park, which began in 1927, and he always was “the attraction.”
Buck Leonard was known as “The Black Lou Gehrig,” in counterpart to his teammate Josh Gibson, “The Black Babe Ruth.” Leonard was a smooth-swinging and slick-fielding first baseman for twenty-seven years, mostly with the Homestead Grays. Gibson was the home-run king of the Negro Leagues. Today we see such well-intended comparisons as condescending if not odious.
The black leagues not only had excellent players; they had visionaries like Rube Foster, the portly pitcher who founded the first Negro League in 1920. They had inventive executives: in 1930 Kansas City Monarchs owner J. L. Wilkinson worked out a way to transport lights to his team’s games. A truck carried the portable lighting system and the truck’s engine generated the power. “What the talkies are to movies,” he said, “lights will be to baseball.” He was right.
Baseball’s integration was a wonderful event for white America, but for black America it was a mixed blessing. Access to the broader range of national experience was gained, but some vital things were lost, too: entrepreneurial opportunity, pride of ownership, and a culturally binding institution. The extent of that loss has become painfully clear in recent years.
A Baseball Story for MLK Day was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.