Amid segregation, baseball stars who lived lives to be admired

The names roll off the tongue, a litany of athletic majesty and mystery, with a hint of teasing humor thrown in. James “Cool Papa” Bell. Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Walter “Buck” Leonard. John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. William “Judy” Johnson. George “Mule” Suttles. Joshua “Josh” Gibson. Yet ask a hundred fans, a thousand, to list the best ballplayers of all time, and very few will recall these stars of the Negro Leagues, men enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown.

They aren’t overlooked intentionally. Neither are they easily dismissed based on examination of the level of competition they faced, as was the case last month when Ichiro Suzuki’s stats from Japan arguably elevated him to baseball career leadership in hits. Rather, Negro Leaguers remain largely invisible to common memory because they performed behind a social curtain that existed prior to integration, when prominent newspapers largely shunned coverage of their careers, many thought “white” was synonymous with “better,” and a tacit and often-denied agreement among owners excluded them from Major League Baseball.

Derrick Jones, a retired educator, is intent on gently drawing back that curtain, making neglected history come alive. “These are men to be highly respected, and they lived a life to be admired. That’s just something I feel strongly about,” says Jones, a Wilmington native who brought his interactive program about Negro League baseball to Hillsborough this past Saturday at the behest of Free Spirit Freedom, a local nonprofit. “It’s an American history story, it’s not necessarily a black history story.”

Jones, a resident of Virginia’s Tidewater area, travels four or five times annually to share his “Traveling Museum of Artifacts from the Negro Leagues Era and Players,” as well as an impressive knowledge of many of black baseball’s greatest figures. He brings along 11 rectangular tables’ worth of memorabilia he’s collected over the years – baseball cards and printed images, vintage newspaper clippings and old programs, photos and signed balls and other assorted souvenirs. He also has figurines of favorite players he hand-painted himself.

Jones recruits audience members, preferably children, to don ballcaps, and uniforms he had made, as visual aids for his hour-long presentations. Participants also read aloud notes on players’ careers and personal lives that are affixed to baseball gloves, part of what he calls sharing “the human side of these giants.”

Interested in opportunity

There’s no question Negro Leaguers were victimized by the prejudices of their times. Yet to a large extent, sport’s early racial pioneers were less interested in social change than in simple opportunity. From the 1920s through the latter 1940s, premier black ballplayers reveled in playing what was then America’s national pastime, measuring themselves quite successfully against white Major Leaguers on barnstorming tours and in exhibition games.

Top performers played for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Washington Potomacs, the Kansas City Monarchs and Homestead Grays, Chicago American Giants and Atlantic City Bacharachs. They faced local all-star teams, white and black; played two and three times per day in different towns; played each other according to league schedules. The Indianapolis Clowns employed the first female big leaguer, Marcenia “Tomboy” Stone, in 1953. Newark’s Effa Manley was the first female team owner.

For years the Negro Leagues’ East-West All-Star Classic, played at the Chicago White Sox’s Comiskey Park, was among the nation’s best-attended sporting events, attracting 51,000 fans in 1941.

“Where they played is basically in rented ballparks, segregated ballparks, and under segregated conditions,” says Jones, 61. “Why they played is very forthright – for the love of the game.”

But when African-American servicemen returned from fighting in World War II, patience for discrimination wore thin. Jones likes to ask if listeners are familiar with the statement, “Take the hose out of the tank.” As it turns out, the declaration belonged to Jackie Robinson, a young member of the Kansas City Monarchs who broke the major league color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was soon followed by, among others, Negro League alums Willie “Buck” Mays of the Birmingham Black Barons; the Newark Eagles’ Monte Irvin, Larry Doby and Don Newcombe; Roy Campanella of the Washington Elite Giants, Ernie Banks of the Monarchs, and Henry “Pork Chop” Aaron of the Clowns.

Long trips, rickety buses

Older stars got a brief taste of the majors as their careers wound down. Hard-throwing Paige, a legendary character given to calling in his fielders, having them sit down, then striking out the other team, was 42 when he broke into the majors in July 1948. He played in the American League for five seasons, barnstormed for 12 years, then left a rocking chair in the Kansas City Athletics bullpen in 1965 to pitch three innings at age 58.

During Paige’s Negro League heyday, teams traveled long distances in often-rickety buses under constant threat of insult, humiliation and worse in restaurants, hotels, and other retail establishments. As Jones recalls proudly, such treatment led an exasperated Robinson to tell a teammate, “’Take the hose out of the tank.’ That speaks volumes,” he says. “They were preparing to buy gas at a filling station. However they weren’t allowed to go into the store to buy items. And then Jackie, him being the man that he is, he said, ‘Take the hose out of the tank.’ That’s what I mean about respecting these men. They stood for something.”

Those who stood up to Jim Crow restrictions, as well as those who laid the groundwork, are integral to the tapestry Jones shares with audiences. One of his presentation themes, based on an exchange of letters in later years between Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr., is “Parallel Goals Plus Mutual Admiration and Respect.”

Jones, an African-American who graduated from Appalachian State and took his traveling museum there last year, doesn’t dwell on the toll taken by racial exclusion and prejudice. Bitterness is avoided, although the simple facts of segregation are not.

“I’m all about healing,” Jones says, stressing his educational background. “There’s always been a discord about race in this country. But we also have to share the truth with children, and let them make their decisions. You have to tell children the truth about situations in history.”

The best game: baseball

In Hillsborough he doesn’t mention, though, that integrating the majors soon killed the Negro Leagues, draining teams of their greatest prospects and box office attractions. Much the same happened to the CIAA in the 1960s when racial barriers came down in ACC basketball, according to late Winston-Salem State coach Clarence “Big House” Gaines.

In fact, some older African-Americans argue integration cost the black community as much as it gained, leading to the destruction of thriving black business districts and schools, along with the community cohesion supported by both. Jones doesn’t see things that way. “The healthiness of us living as one is much more paramount,” he observes.

Even better, Jones has found a way through sharing stories of Negro Leaguers to apply his hobby to the life lessons he hopes to impart.

“There are two things on this earth that the Lord put here that I think are the best things,” Jones tells an interviewer. One he calls the Virginia mullet fish, also known as kingfish, whiting, or sea mullet. “That’s the best meat the Lord put on this earth. And the best game the Lord put on this earth is the baseball game. That’s my feeling.”

Judging by his enraptured Hillsborough audience, he’s hardly alone in that assessment. At least about baseball, anyway.

This story was originally published July 3, 2016 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Amid segregation, baseball stars who lived lives to be admired."