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| Moses Fleetwood Walker |
Unfortunately, the Omicron Covid-19 variant is rampant, so the live lecture gave way to (you guessed it) a Zoom meeting. Reinstein is an able, engaging and vivid story teller – wish we could have been at the BPL Rabb Hall, but his passionate interest in history, sport and people came across with still vigorous energy, even tho ‘over the wire’.
Don’t know Ted – except over the Tube on Chronicle, a great TV news magazine that does just that: chronicle the stories of New England history, place and life. -- but I had the good time working with Ted’s brother Bill Reinstein back at the turn of the century on ITworld.com where he was founder and publisher. Tremendously accomplished family.
Before Brooklyn is probably best described (from this lecture telling, anyway) as a bit more of a cultural history than it is a sports history. Reinstein has special interest in the actors surrounding segregated games, ones working to integrate the so-called national pastime in the long days of Jim Crow. Black business people, journalists and Pullman Porters take roles in the saga of the fight to end segregation in baseball, albeit mostly by putting together an alternative world of baseball that finally could not be ignored. It is a story in which Boston, as it turns out, played a surprising - tho nominal - role.
It is a spirited story Ted tells, tho there may not be much here new for the baseball historian. For my part, I did not know about black players that made played before the Jim Crow curtain dropped. When Jackie Robinson played it was not integration but re-integration, Reinstein said ...
The first African American Major League Baseball player was Moses Fleetwood Walker. Most people today have no idea who Moses Fleetwood Walker was. You know, the interesting thing is most people have no idea that when baseball began in its real infancy in the decade or so, after the Civil War had ended, baseball was an outlier, in the sense that it was somewhat integrated, not extensively. There were never more than one or two black players on a professional baseball team. But there were some.
Walker was noted, said Reinstein, as a dynamic force who changed the nature of the position of catcher. In early baseball …
Sometimes you'll see a writer referring to the catcher as the backstop. But generally today backstop refers to a physical structure on a baseball diamond, you know, where we keep the ball from rolling away. That's what a catcher was before. A place where teams would stick there least talented player. Who had one job. Just keep the damn ball from rolling off the field and delaying the game. But Moses Fleetwood Walker transform it. He was the first catcher to wear shin guards - first catcher to wear chest protector - first catcher to wear protective mask and the first catcher to throw a runner out attempting to steal a base because he was what we would call today a five tool player, he could throw, hit, run. He was an extraordinary player, and he was good enough that he was signed. To a major league contract in 1884. With the Toledo Blue Stockings in Ohio, which at that time was a major league baseball team. So…
Bleak future arises then. In the form of Adrian Cap Anson. Who the Blue Stockings meet in contest. Then who enters the scene but Adrian 'Cap' Anson? Racist, bully, Chicago Cubs captain ...
He bitterly resented the Cubs taking the field against the team that that day for a little black ball player. He played the game under protest. He said that going forward, his Chicago Cubs would no longer take the field against any team that fielded a black player. Major League owners had to regard this threat rather seriously because not only was Cap Anson, the most famous player in all baseball at that time, but the Chicago Cubs were not only in terms of their image as the most famous baseball team there were also the most financially successful baseball team.
Team owners conspired in the summer of 1887 in Buffalo, New York. And this is how well they regarded Cap Anson's threat. They formed a gentleman's agreement to keep blacks out of major league baseball. No press conference, no transparency about it. There was no vote that was recorded.
Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brothers, Bud Fowler, Frank Grant – the names and the stories flow. One by one, day by day, they were excluded from the Big League competition, the last one being Bud Fowler who around 1895 was “the last black player standing”.
“My blacks skin bars me,” he said, and took to barnstorming in 1890 when Old Jim Crow flew supreme.
A retired player named Rube Foster was determined to create the Negro Leagues, and he joined with other owners (all of whom were black, save for J.L. Wilkens of the Kansas City Monarchs) to do just that. The league grew as another possible universe, with Pittsburgh being a particularly notable stop on the way. The black part of that city fielding the Homestead Grays and the Crawfords, which came to the battery of Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson. Teams like this would often play in big league parks, and sometimes compete against the white Big Leagues.
These meetings were dramatic evidence of talent. Satchel Paige was said to have struck out Joe DiMaggio three times in one game (a first). In Pittsburgh, Satchell Paige, Josh Gibson change the story. The black players were playing at a very high level and some people began to question the color barriers, said Ted Reinstein.
The African-American press -- some cities had several black owned and operated newspapers – employed skilled sports journalists that dramatically described the leagues, the players and the action. The word spread. The Negro press told the story of the black baseball stars, and promoted the idea of an integrated America and an integrated baseball. In Reinstein’s telling, the Pullman Porters that maintained railroad sleeping cars and accoutered the dining cars. They would carry the news by lining the kitchen breadbaskets with copies of the latest local papers from one city (say the Chicago Defender of Chicago), that they dropped off in another (say, Kansas City), while picking up another black news bundle (perhaps The Call of K.C.) to distribute in San Francisco. The story of the Negro Leagues was also told in the sports section of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party paper, which also pushed for integration.
In the face of continued evangelism the “color barrier could not be ignored” Reinstein told the BPL Zoom audience.
Still, the leagues had skidded to a halt as the Great Depression crunched black income – core and disposable. The Monarchs carried on as barnstormers, covering much of the Western Hemisphere. Its rosters at various times included players such as William Cool Papa Bell, Satchell Paige, Bill Foster, Buck O'Neil. The team was active in 1945, when it signed Jackie Robinson, whose contract would soon sign with the National League Brooklyn Dodgers, to take on the brunt of American Racism and conquer. A now aging Satchell Paige, and young future greats Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, and others, made it into the Majors in Robinson’s wake. The Monarchs continued until they were disbanded in 1965 (as a barnstorming team after playing several years out of Grand Rapids, Mich.).
Like other parts of Reinstein’s story, Jackie Robinson’s nearly aborted but ultimately futile tryout with the Red Sox has been covered elsewhere. But the telling is warm and compelling, especially of this troubled tryout. The background is that Boston City Council yearly had to renew a waiver of the Blue Laws to allow the Red Sox to play at home on Sundays. And City Councilor Isadore “Izzy” Muchnick threatened to withhold this waiver if the Red Sox did not grant black players a tryout. Muchnick was crusading against racism and, said Reinstein practicing a Jewish “Tikkum Olam” – promoting social justice, and endeavoring “to repair the world.”
Red Sox owner Yawkey and his feeble confederates made a sham of the tryout. Postponing it for days under the ruse of FDR’s passing, and then making short shrift of the opportunity. The players that tried out along with Robinson were Marvin Williams and Sam Jethro, the latter to eventually become the first black player on the Boston Braves roster. The Boston Evening Traveller broke the story of the tryout. And, said Reinstein, this helped spur Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey to move more quickly to close a deal with Jackie Robinson.
I say three cheers for Izzy Muchnick, Pullman Porters, the Afro-American press, all the great good baseball champions unfairly sidetracked, and Ted Reinstein for his telling of this history. - Jack Vaughan, Boston, 2022
Footnotes:
1-On the Pullman Porters’ role in distributing black papers
particularly touched me, as my spouse C’s grandfather was in fact a Pullman
Porter. His porter’s hat sits on a shelf in our home still.
2-The shadow of Red Sox racism still looms. This was determinedly the
last team to integrate. Local interest in righting of history, however, was
strong in recent years - enough to strip the street name “Yawkey Way” from the
bit of avenue that abuts the entrance to Fenway Park. After Owner and Jim Crow
fellow traveller Tom Yawkey’s passing, that part of Jersey Street had been named
for him.
3.In October, Ted Reinstein lectured at the Bourne Library on Before
Brooklyn, and, as it is on YouTube, I include it here.
4. Last summer, Hank Aaron died. Willie Mays and a handful of
Negro League players are thankfully still with us.
5. The Spirit of Cap Anson lives on, and must be met at every salient.
6. From Wikipedia
On November 20, 1951, baseball scout Ed Scott signed Aaron to a
contract on behalf of the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League,
where he played for three months.[21][22]
He started play as a 6 ft (180 cm), 180 lb (82 kg) shortstop,[23]
and earned $200 per month.[24] As a result of his standout play with the
Indianapolis Clowns, Aaron received two offers from MLB teams via telegram, one
from the New York Giants and the other from the Boston Braves. Years later,
Aaron remembered:
I had the Giants' contract in my hand. But the Braves offered
fifty dollars a month more. That's the only thing that kept Willie Mays and me
from being teammates – fifty dollars.[25]
While with the Clowns he experienced racism. Of a time his team
was in Washington, D.C. Aaron recalled
We had breakfast while we were waiting for the rain to stop, and I can still envision sitting with the Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all the plates in the kitchen after we finished eating. What a horrible sound. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates, they'd have washed them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Aaron
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