Negro League Baseball at Yankee Stadium
By Dr. Lawrence D. Hogan
The Negro League’s like a light somewhere. Back over your shoulder. As you go away. A warmth still, connected to laughter and self-love. The collective Black aura that can only be duplicated with Black conversation or music.
— Amiri Baraka, from The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, 1984
Yankee Stadium has been for close to one hundred years the home of many of the great moments in the history of our National Pastime, as well as epic events in boxing and football. Stadium events more sublime than mere sporting events have seen Billy Graham calling sinners to repent; Nelson Mandela admitting to be a Yankee; and two Popes celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the baseball cathedral that it is said the prowess and celebrity of a once troubled youth raised by the Xaverian Catholic Brothers, was responsible for building.
Arguably as sublime a Yankee Stadium moment as any came in 1930. In hosting that event only seven years after the opening of their great ballyard in the Bronx, the New York Yankees brought into their history a Negro League baseball seed that takes its rightful historic place in our nation’s most hallowed baseball canyon.
In late June of 1930 banner advertisements in New York’s leading Black newspapers, the Amsterdam News and the Age put out the cry.
Let’s Fill the Yankee Stadium!
2 BIG BALL GAMES
A Double-header — The Clash of the Season
New York Lincoln Giants vs. Baltimore Black Sox
Saturday, July 5th
FIRST GAME AT 1:30 P.M.
Positively the Biggest Event of the Year — For the First Time the Famous
YANKEE STADIUM
Is Donated to the Colored People of Harlem for the Benefit of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters by Courtesy of
COLONEL JACOB RUPPERT
Owner of the New York Yankees
Merely to have been the first appearance of Black professional baseball players at Babe Ruth’s House would be significant in itself. But a benefit for the infant Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) makes the occasion all the more noteworthy. The union that A. Philip Randolph was struggling to establish is one of the epic stories in the annals of American labor and African American history. And the name Randolph keeps company with that of King, and DuBois, Douglass, and Washington at the top rung of Black national figures who have affected the history of our nation. In the 1930s Randolph, through events such as the Yankee Stadium doubleheader, built a union that gave Black workers for the first time a significant place within the ranks of the American labor movement. He would go on from his BSCP organizing drive to become the first Black vice president of the American Federation of Labor; to test with considerable success the tactics of mass protest in his March on Washington Movement of 1941; and in 1963, through his personal prestige and leadership, give Dr. King the magnificent “I have a dream” platform of the Lincoln Memorial in our nation’s capital.
The BSCP July 5, 1930 benefit double header in the limelight of Yankee Stadium was a grand success. Between games the redoubtable Bojangles Robinson running backwards outraced several YMCA track stars. The band of the 369th infantry regiment, Harlem’s famous “Hell Fighters,” entertained the large crowd. And when the receipts were tallied, and expenses paid, Randolph’s Brotherhood treasury was more than $3,500 to the good.
While there is no indication of Yankee Stadium being donated to other Black social and civil rights causes, there would be a significant Black baseball presence at the Stadium through the remainder of the 1930s, through the years of World War II, and up to the integration of the majors. When the Yankees were on the road, teams from the Negro Leagues played before large crowds at the Stadium with a regularity that is surprising only to those who do not know their baseball history. And that regularity was a major financial underpinning for teams that struggled to pay expenses.
In a 1986 interview for the documentary “Before You Can Say Jackie Robinson,” veteran Amsterdam News reporter St. Clair Bourne points at the significance of that Negro League Yankee Stadium presence.
When these guys came along, and they started playing this kind of ball, and people saw them here, people would come out. Usually, it would be a Sunday after the season or on an empty weekend. And I always felt that had something to do with the gradual moving of Blacks into baseball. Because sooner or later the owners were going to get smart enough to realize that the real part of baseball was green, not black or white. They found out — Rickey was the first to realize it — that if you picked a guy who was exciting, and put him on the team, you were going to get people coming through the gates.
The newspaper accounts and box scores for the July 5, 1930 inaugural opening of the “Colored” chapter in the history of the Stadium take special note of several players. Bill Holland of the Lincoln Giants became the first Black pitcher ever to pitch in Yankee Stadium. It was the first time two Black umpires ever officiated at the Stadium. Lincoln’s shortstop Bill Yancy had the distinction of being the first Black player to set foot on the turf at the Stadium. Yancy’s excitement was such that he ran out onto the field early, pretended to catch fly balls in right field like Babe Ruth, and stood alone at home plate pretending to hit home runs into the right field stands like the Babe. Bill Yancy counted playing at Yankee Stadium as one of his biggest thrills.
No player on either team that day was given more attention than a fellow the reporters affectionally referred to as “Pop,” the manager and first baseman for the Lincolns. On the Stadium field “Pop” would steal a base, be credited with a sacrifice, go 4 for 8 at bat, and handle 24 putouts at first base without an error. Not a bad day’s performance for a player nearing the end of a career in Negro professional baseball that began in 1906.
There is a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York bearing the name of that player.
John Henry Lloyd
“Pop”
NEGRO LEAGUES
1906–1932
A line of the inscription on that plaque reads as follows.
INSTRUMENTAL IN HELPING OPEN YANKEE STADIUM TO NEGRO BASEBALL IN 1930
Who is this John Lloyd who merited baseball’s highest honor in 1977? Testimony from his contemporaries provides an answer.
There are students of our nation’s greatest game who claim that “Pop” Lloyd could have been the best shortstop ever to play that position in professional baseball. A St. Louis baseball writer of Lloyd’s day went even further in his estimate. When asked who was the best player in baseball history, this white journalist replied: “If you mean in organized baseball, my answer would be Babe Ruth; but if you mean in all baseball, organized or unorganized, the answer would have to be an Atlantic City, New Jersey colored man by the name of John Henry Lloyd.”
An echo of this assessment is that back in the early days of radio, pioneer sportscaster Graham McNamee was interviewing the great Ruth himself. McNamee asked the Babe who he regarded as the greatest player of all time. “You mean Major Leaguers?” Ruth asked. “No,” said the broadcaster, “the greatest player anywhere.”
“In that case” Ruth is reported to have replied, “I’d pick John Henry Lloyd.”
Well might the Bambino would have so commented if what Alvin Moses reports is accurate. In a feature article in April 1933 for Abbott’s Monthly the Black reporter would note “that if you have been in New York when the Yanks were playing and John Henry Lloyd had an off day, you will always find the big Race man seated in the Ruthian dugout. Lloyd and the Babe are great friends and discuss close plays during the progress of the game.”
Speaking in 1927 from the baseball mad Cuba where “Pop” had played many a game against the island’s best teams, Rafe Conte, the dean of sports chroniclers in Cuba, said about the man they had long called “Pop” and now were referring to as the “Ancient Mariner” and “Old Warrior” that this athlete “will pass into history as the greatest player of all time to be produced by the national game.”
In October 1924, Ed Lamar, one of those present at the creation of Black professional baseball, told columnist Rollo Wilson that he was especially happy when he found the reporter writing about his friend, the “kid.” “I was the first white man he played ball for in the North about 1905, 1906. I wish I had a team composed of nine of his kind. I look on him as being the greatest asset to a club of any player in the game today.”
The New York Herald singled out the Ancient Mariner as one of the big guns in semiprofessional baseball. Commenting on that white paper’s praise for this old Black player, Romeo Daugherty of the Amsterdam News recalled how many times back in the early 1910s the old Lincoln Giants, anchored at short stop by the then the young “Pop”, had beaten the best white teams. “Big League players,” the Black scribe remembered “use to come to Olympic Field between 136th and 137th to learn the finer points of the game from John Henry and his associates on the old Lincolns.”
Oh, de Captain said to John Henry
I b’lieve this mountain’s sinken in
John Henry said to de Captain
Oh my, ain nothin but my hammer suckin’ win,
Lawd, Lawd, ain nothin but my hammer suckin win.”
John Henry Lloyd was in his own sphere the equal of the steel driving man of legend and song. He was affectionately known as “Pop” to generations of youth in his adopted hometown of Atlantic City, New Jersey who took much inspiration from this giant of the baseball diamond. Pop is remembered fondly by his pupil and great Newark Eagles pitcher Max Manning as a “gentle giant, strong in character, an honest man, a wonderful person. John Henry Lloyd contributed quite a bit to my knowledge of baseball,” Manning tells us, “and also to my knowledge and learning about being a gentleman, because that’s what he truly was. It seemed like adversity would just fall off his shoulders. He would never dwell on adversity. He would always go to the brighter side of whatever would come up.”
Former Atlantic City Mayor Jim Usry, a self-confessed angry young man, and a protégé of Pop’s, recalls how the great shortstop taught him how to persist in the face of difficulties and discrimination that might well have embittered a man of lesser character. “Pop would say, your time will come. I always remember that.”
In 1949 when the rest of America was beginning to erase from its memory any recollection of the Negro League chapter of its national game, Atlantic City dedicated a stadium to its beloved “Pop.” When asked on that occasion if he regretted if his playing days were long past before the color line in baseball was erased, John Lloyd spoke these humble sentiments. “I do not consider I was born at the wrong time. I felt it was the right time, for I had the chance to prove the ability of our race in this sport, and because many of us did our best to uphold the traditions of the game and of the world of sports, we have given the Negro a greater opportunity now to be accepted into the majors with other Americans.”
John Lloyd had no children of his own. But like his friend and admirer, Babe Ruth, he found ample opportunity to express his love for young people. In his retirement years he became a janitor in the Atlantic City school system. In that humble position he became a living legend to several generations of schoolchildren. Whitey Gruhler, long time Atlantic City Press sports editor, described Pop’s hold over the children. “The youngsters cluster about him between sessions. They all call him Pop, and love to listen while he spins baseball yarns of the past. Sometimes they refuse to break away from him and Pop has to pick them up bodily and carry them, into their classrooms. He is their hero, this big, soft-hearted, soft-spoken congenial man with a tired look in his eyes, but the bubbling spirit of youth in his heart.”
Among the many years of managing that this soft-speaking big-hearted player’s Hall of Fame plaque references, many of the highlight times came with a team called the Bacharach Giants, who in 1922 were a founding member of the Eastern Colored Major League. In 1926 the Bacharachs brought to their home town of Atlantic City the Negro League World Series.
The feats and exploits of the Bacharachs would make for banner headlines on many occasions for the newspapers of Pop’s era. And as frequently as not it would be the great John Lloyd who would command the attention of the newspaper readers. Here we have the Philadelphia Tribune of July 12, 1924 announcing BACHARACH MANAGER NOW SHARES HONORS WITH SPEAKER, LAMB, AND CHAS DRESSEN. The opening paragraph reports on the aging John Lloyd surpassing even the feats of his youth. “Atlantic City, NJ, July 4 — In connection with the explosion of fire crackers during the Fourth of July celebration, John Henry Lloyd, manager of the Bacharach Giants, exploded theory when he banged out his eleventh straight hit and proved that a veteran player who might be expected to be bowing to old age can still tie a world’s record that youngsters are striving to equal every day.”
Pop Lloyd’s world was a place largely hidden from the dominant society by a color line that had whites seeing stereotypes, while Blacks celebrated the extraordinary baseball talent of men with colorful names like Cannonball, Smokey Joe, Rube, Dandy, the Devil, and Lloyd himself, El Cuchara. These baseball legends played year round for teams like the Original Cuban Giants of Trenton, New Jersey and St. Augustine, Florida; Chicago’s powerful American Giants of Black baseball’s founding father, Andrew “Rube” Foster; the Monarchs of Kansas City with their great Satchel; the Newark Eagles of “million dollar infield” fame; and Pop’s own Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In 1999, led by the John Henry Pop Lloyd Committee, the memory of those wonderfully nicknamed baseball men, and their colorfully named teams, was celebrated at a community ball yard in Atlantic City which was celebrating its 50th anniversary year. John Henry “Pop” Lloyd Stadium, “dedicated to one of baseball’s greats,” had been opened for play by the political fathers of one of America’s premier resort cities in October of 1949. John Henry “Pop” Lloyd Stadium was the first substantial monument to the memory and feats of those who played their baseball in “leagues where only the ball was white.”
The House that Ruth Built and Pop Opened was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.