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I played with a very good friend of mine.
He and I used to pretend like we were playing
against eight other guys and we played with anything
that we could to pretend like it was a baseball
and we used broomsticks.
I don't know that you would call it baseball.
But we did the best we could.
A baseball is round, the bat's the same, you know?
If you have talent, no matter what color you are,
and if you can play, you can play.
Baseball is the greatest game that's ever been invented.
I think there's always been
in African American life
a real appreciation of improvisation.
You figured out other ways of being able to succeed.
And a perfect example of that is what they did with baseball.
And that's the story really of the Negro Leagues.
"Prince" Joe: I hear Black people talking
about church, I talk about the Negro Leagues.
So much depth. You had all kind of stars.
There was a camaraderie, man.
You finished playing a baseball game?
And, man, you go to the nice places
within the Black community,
and all of your people were there.
They're so loving, you know?
Greatest thing that ever happened
to me in my life.
Negroes didn't play ball 'cause they were making money.
They played the ballgame because they loved to play it.
The Negro Leagues, I think is a story
about what Black Americans were able to achieve
at a time when they only had themselves to rely on.
They are a proud bunch of men
who play between the white foul lines.
They accepted their role as a part of a movement
before we coined the term "Civil Rights Movement."
Bob K: To go to a Negro Leagues game,
you could feel the immense pride
that Black folks had about this product
known as the Negro Leagues.
To a large degree because they understood
that it was something that was inherently ours.
Now, it was shared with the rest of the world,
but it was still ours.
The stories
about the American Negro Baseball League
were always good news.
People would say, "Did you hear about the League?"
And you always knew that they meant
the Negro Baseball League.
♪ Yeah ♪
Bob M: I wish you could have seen all that I have seen.
For over ten years,
I was an umpire in the Negro Leagues.
When I first heard about the leagues
as a young man,
I knew I wanted to be a part of that world,
closer to all of my heroes.
♪ Yeah! ♪
♪ Did you see Jackie Robinson Hit that ball? ♪
♪ It went zoomin' Cross the left field wall ♪
Bob M: Getting my dream job as an umpire
in the Negro Leagues allowed me to see, firsthand,
some of the best players in the game.
Some of the greats never achieved renown,
but there were quite a few
celebrated Major League ballplayers
who got their start in the Negro Leagues.
♪ Satchel Paige is mellow So is Campanella ♪
♪ Newcombe and Doby too ♪
♪ But it's a natural fact When Jackie comes to bat ♪
♪ The other team is through ♪
Bob M: We didn't realize it at the time,
but the great ballplayers of the leagues
would transform the game.
Jackie Robinson is recognized
as the first professional African American ballplayer
to play in the Major Leagues.
Well, we know that in 1884,
Moses Fleetwood Walker
played for a professional team, the Toledo Blue Stockings.
So there were African American professional ballplayers
in the 19th century.
African Americans have been playing baseball
for as long as White people have been playing baseball.
As the sport began to take hold in popularity,
post-Civil War, Black people were there always.
There were organized Black teams,
and they barnstormed.
They played against other Black teams.
They played against White teams.
There were Blacks who did play
with Whites on teams. But the team was majority White,
it may have one or two Black players on it
and that seemed to be something that was more acceptable
to the White paying public.
If they only have one or two Black players
as opposed to a team
that might have majority Black players
and one or two White players.
But as we move forward through history,
we see that segregation starts to tighten its hold.
In 1887,
the character named Adrian "Cap" Anson
who's up in the Hall of Fame right now,
one of the fathers of professional baseball,
is scheduled to play in Newark
against the Newark Little Giants.
Anson is a racist.
There's no question he's a racist
because two Black players,
one of them named George Stovey, a pitcher,
and the other Moses Fleetwood Walker.
Anson sends word ahead,
"If those two so-and-so's..."
and he uses a word stronger than "so-and-so's,"
"...are seen on the field of play,
my team is not gonna play."
Cap Anson, at the time, is really popular,
and the idea that Cap Anson could potentially represent
the beliefs and ideals of White people
throughout baseball, throughout America in general,
is something that these executives
really pay attention to.
So when he says that he's not willing
to take the field with Black players,
they're like, "Okay."
The International League directors
held a secret meeting at the Genesee House yesterday,
and the question of Colored players
was freely discussed.
Many of the best players in the League are anxious
to leave on account of the Colored element,
and the board finally directed Secretary White to approve
of no more contracts with Colored men.
African American ballplayers were very good
at this game, and they were so good
at the game that the fear was that,
you know, they would consume the positions
that White players were vying for.
In 1896, we have
the Plessy versus Ferguson decision
that determines that separate is equal.
Now, it's not, and we know that.
And so, it sets up, essentially,
what we have going well into the 20th century,
which is this legal doctrine that says,
"It is okay to keep everyone separate."
What was happening there is that a hand goes up
with a stop sign on it, and it's saying to Blacks
outside of baseball, but also inside of baseball,
"You can't do this. You can't do that.
You can't go here. You can't be this."
Well, what do you do when that comes at you?
You turn back into yourself.
You find resources that are your own resources,
and you establish things for yourself
that the larger world is saying you can't do,
et cetera, et cetera.
Really all over the country
Black people were coming together
and forming these self-sustaining communities.
It's okay if they never fully bring us into society.
We can do it ourselves.
We enjoyed ourselves because we were by ourselves.
And nobody trying to tell us what to do.
So we learn how to do with what we had.
See, what do old ladies say? "Got to use what you got"?
So we had to use what we had.
So Black businesses come into being
in that period of time,
founded for themselves out of their own resources,
Black schools and baseball too.
After the Plessy versus Ferguson decision,
great Black professional baseball teams come into being,
and the players and the games were ballyhooed by newspapers
that were their own newspapers.
And those newspapers knew
the audience that they had to play to.
Everybody read the Chicago Defender
and thePittsburgh Courier...
...the two leading Black newspapers in the country.
My grandmother, in our little town,
wouldn't take the weekly newspaper.
She said it was written
for Whites, by Whites, and about Whites.
I mean, there were several major Black newspapers,
and Chicago Defender
was probably the major Black newspaper.
And lots of people read it.
Lots of Black people read it in the South.
And the Chicago Defender was a big promoter
of Black people moving to the North.
It was a push-pull thing.
You're being attracted by the possibility
that life could be better for you moving,
and you want to get away from a situation that's bad.
So something's pushing you out,
as well as something is pulling you forward.
Bob M: For Blacks in the Jim Crow South,
life was a struggle.
Where I grew up in Alabama,
fear and violence were commonplace.
The Ku Klux Klan always did its dirty work at night
and would often drive right past us on the way
to a lynching or cross-burning ceremony.
Bob M: Mama would shout,
"Y'all kids, hurry up, and turn off the lights,
and lay down on the floor."
With the house pitch black, I could hear my heart pounding
with terror as I lay there.
If rifles were shooting in the air...
...then we knew
some poor Black soul
had been lynched just over the hill.
My brother had written me several times,
encouraging me to join him in the North.
I longed to go.
So on a chilly October day, I hopped aboard a freight train.
As the train chugged forward,
I could feel the weight of Southern oppression
lifted off my shoulders,
on our way to a promised land of jobs,
independence...
...and a better life for a Colored man in America.
We had a dream.
People felt that
this is a land of opportunity. Okay, so I will move North,
I will move West, et cetera.
All of these areas where we hope to find the real America.
America that allows us to be all we can be,
all we can become.
And it's a flood tide, that immigration.
Over a million Blacks come up
out of the South to settle in urban centers in the North.
So it's no surprise that Black baseball
would develop as Black people moved out of the South
and into cities where the segregation
was a little less rigid and they had transportation
to get people to go to a ballgame.
These kinds of things made a huge difference
in making it possible for Black people
to have an array of teams in cities.
So now, you see
a few entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it in baseball.
And people like Rube Foster, in Chicago, is able to see
that a Black club can be
a successful business enterprise.
Bob K: Andrew Rube Foster owned the Chicago American Giants,
and he managed the Chicago American Giants.
And Rube Foster, in my own estimation,
is the greatest baseball mind this sport has ever seen.
Rube Foster was light-years ahead of his time.
He was better known as a pitcher,
he pitched seven no-hitters in his brilliant career.
Quite frankly, by 1905, he might have been
the greatest pitcher in the world.
Bob K: He is credited with having invented
what we now know to be the screwball.
Back then, it was called a "fade away,"
and ol' Rube perfected this pitch.
So much so that the great
Major League manager, John McGraw,
would sneak Rube into his camp so that Rube Foster could teach
Christy Mathewson how to throw the screwball.
Christy Mathewson threw the pitch all the way
into the National Baseball Hall of Fame,
that he learned from Rube Foster.
Rube's greatest asset was his genius as a manager
and as an executive.
He's the founder of the Chicago American Giants,
1910 or thereabouts and through the next decade,
Rube Foster makes that team into the greatest Black team
up to that point in time that there was.
Mr. Foster was a pretty smart dude, now.
You would thought he went to school somewhere,
but he didn't.
He would go down South to the Negro colleges in Texas,
and he would get a lot of the ballplayers
out of the schools.
If he was a fast man, a good runner, he'd say,
"Would you put on some football pads?
I want you to learn
how to steal bases."
And Mr. Foster taught them all the tricks.
He exploited the rules to his maximum benefit.
We're looking at a bunt-and-run...
...drag bunting...
double steals...
a suicide squeeze play at home plate.
He made the game more up tempo.
You see, he was adamant about the style of play
that would become signature Negro Leagues Baseball.
Fast, aggressive, daring.
They bunt their way up.
They steal second, they steal third.
And, man, if you weren't too smart,
they were stealing home.
During World War I,
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a very famous editorial
in the crisis called "Close Ranks."
He told Black people, "We need to set aside
our grievances and go join with the country to go fight
to save democracy."
News reporter: Fighting with the eighth Illinois
on the Swanson Front...
...372nd on the plains of Mons-En-Chaussée.
But he thought that doing this,
Black people would show their loyalty,
and Black people would show they were American citizens,
and Black people would show that they were putting
being American
above being Black, and that this would get them
some degree of acceptance. This would get them some degree
of White people listening to their grievances
and responding to their grievances.
He turned out to be totally wrong.
What happens is that they come back
into a racial world that is terribly negative.
In a couple of instances, the Chicago Defender prints
a Black soldier in his uniform being hanged, being lynched.
The Red Summer of 1919 was one of the worst summers
of White terroristic violence in history of this country.
From the late winter up until the following fall,
there was violence all over, and it was, almost all of it
was White violence against Blacks.
The most noted was Chicago.
There was also terrible blow up in Washington, DC,
Wilmington, Delaware, Elaine, Arkansas.
It happened all over.
And part of it was White people wanting to tell Black people
the war doesn't change anything, and we're still in charge.
But it convinced a lot of Black people,
all the more, that we need to close ranks
in another kind of way to build our own institutions.
You had the rise
of someone like Marcus Garvey.
You had people who were telling Black people,
in essence, that they had a destiny.
Soon after, we got Alain Locke writing
his great book called, The New Negro.
The New Negro had a new voice.
The New Negro was not going
to sit back and accept these segregated sanctions anymore.
And so we got a new mindset.
This is the perfect time in America to start
an organized league in 1920.
Rube Foster certainly has to be aware
of all these people trying to figure out
how to move Black people forward
in a society that has constantly ostracized them,
that has kept them on the margins
and doesn't appear to be changing.
So Rube Foster wrote a series of op-eds called,
"The Pitfalls of Baseball" for the Chicago Defender,
and he talked about the importance
of organizing Black baseball.
How it would benefit,
not just the players, but the owners of each team,
for them to form this connected league
and to have scheduled games and play against each other
and build a fan base.
"I have fought against delivering Colored baseball
into the control of Whites,
thinking that with a show of patronage from the fans
we would get together."
So he gets paperwork done in the state of Illinois
to incorporate this non-existent league
that no one has even agreed to do yet.
And he gets these other team owners to agree,
and they meet in Kansas City at the Y.
Bob K: You know, I wish I could have been
a fly on the wall in that room because Rube Foster had to be
a master salesman.
He had to be because he had pulled
these independent Black baseball team owners.
So they were already making money.
And now he had to convince them that they could be
even more successful if we organize
and we now share a piece of the pie
by creating our own league.
And so, you know Rube was a great salesman
because he was able to do that.
And on February 13th, 1920, they walked out having signed
the documents to start the Negro National League.
His motto for the League
he stole from abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
"We are the ship..."
- "...and all else..." - "...the sea."
Bob K: Yeah, he was serving notice
to Major League Baseball
that a new player had arrived on the scene
to be reckoned with.
Bob M: When it came to promoting a game,
no one did it better than the Negro Leagues.
Window placards, newspaper advertisements,
and word-of-mouth were in the works,
well in advance for most games.
Sometimes I spent the ten cents to buy a ticket.
Other times, I'd peer through the knotholes
in the wooden fence outside the stadium.
Pitchers zipped balls with such speed across the plate
that it was hard to follow the pitch.
Batters stretched singles
into doubles, and doubles into triples,
with lightning speed.
It was obvious the fans didn't want the celebration
to end, and neither did I.
Negro Leagues baseball was so popular
that Black churches would move their service time up an hour
so fans could go to the game.
If you know anything about the Black church,
you don't mess with service time.
But when the great Kansas City Monarchs are playing,
any of those great Black teams,
service time would move up to ten o'clock,
and everybody filed out going to that
Sunday doubleheader looking good.
When they went to baseball games,
men would dress very sharply.
Ladies wore dresses and big hats, beautiful hats,
with flowers and whatnot on them.
You would buy the fanciest clothing in the world.
The age of the 20th century,
the Harlem Renaissance, New Negro Renaissance,
was the age of the rise of the Black professional.
You know, you got a new kind of presentation
of the Black professional musician.
You got a new kind of presentation
of the Black professional athlete
with Negro League Baseball.
These were professional men, sometimes women,
who were doing something at a very, very high level
and had a tremendous virtuosity.
Any time you saw Black people doing something
that was virtuosic, you always... You felt like,
"Okay, I can go on
and deal with the rest of my week...
...'cause I saw some Black people doing
something that's really excellent."
That's a home run in the right field
into the stands! First home run of the series!
Meanwhile,
White baseball will soon become a station-to-station game.
You don't run. You don't steal. You don't bunt. No hit and run.
You try to hit it out of the park.
And I think that's a reflection of Babe Ruth's influence.
But it's, in many ways, the antithesis
of the Black game.
Bob K: If a guy went into the hole,
flipped it behind his back, start the double play...
well, we see that now every night of the week
as a top-ten highlight on some network.
Back then, the Major Leaguers would say
that they were "showboating."
But what the Major Leaguers were trying to say then
that the Negro Leagues didn't play the game
the right way.
But really that was a code word to say they didn't play the game
the White way.
But still, it was a fabulous time
for Black men in baseball
because coming out of World War I,
there were lots of people who were looking
for that equality, but now they have
their own league. How about that?
So once Rube Foster organizes the Negro National League,
other people start to see that, "Hey, there's a possibility."
1923 rolls around.
There's a guy in Philadelphia by the name of Ed Bolden,
and he'd worked for the post office for years.
He was the owner of the Hilldale team.
He sees the writing on the wall,
that Rube Foster's influence is headed towards the East.
So Ed Bolden gets
all of the Eastern teams together,
and they have a big meeting, and they form
the Eastern Colored League in 1923.
With the creation of the Eastern Colored League
on the East Coast, the Negro National League,
that was primarily based in the Midwest,
has a competitive league
that now they can stage a World Series against.
So in 1924, the Kansas City Monarchs
of the Negro National League played the Hilldale Daisies
of the Eastern Colored League
in the very first Colored World Series.
The World Series in 1924 was the best of nine,
not seven like it is today.
It turned out to be a great series.
Series is tied up four games each.
We're in Chicago now,
the weather is in the mid-fifties.
José Méndez has a cold, and Rube Foster says,
"You have to pitch this game."
Hilldale comes out with Script Lee.
Script Lee is a submarine pitcher.
The Hilldale pitcher had everything
a pitcher could ask for in the first seven innings.
During that time, only one man reached first.
Then came the eighth.
But he runs out of gas and he starts to pitch overhand.
The bases were full.
Allen looked over the ball, then singled to right scoring.
Duncan slid into home plate...
...half a second ahead of Riggs' throw to Santop.
Monarchs score five runs
and José Méndez, on three hits, shuts out the Hilldale Club,
and the Monarchs take the most dramatic World Series
ever played.
It really kind of established Black baseball.
It was saying to White baseball, "Look, we're the same.
We have the same end of the year championship series,
the same way you do.
We've got our two separate leagues,
like the National and American League,
the same way you do." And that was important.
As much as Rube Foster and other executives wanted to,
you know, get into baseball, and have successful teams,
so they could make their own money
and so that they could do this incredible thing for
and within the Black community.
There was also this constant effort
to show White baseball that Black baseball
was good enough, with the hopes that, ultimately,
Black baseball could become one with White baseball,
that they could join forces.
Bob K: And Rube's initial vision
was that he would create a league that was so dynamic,
that he would force Major League Baseball's hand to expand.
So if we were looking at it in a more modern-day context,
think football with the NFL and the AFL merger,
or for those who are basketball fans,
the merger of the NBA and the ABA.
Now, this was Rube Foster in the 1920s.
That's how forward-thinking and how much a visionary
this man was.
Well, Rube Foster was in Indianapolis for a game
in May of 1925,
and unfortunately, he was subjected
to carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky gas heater.
Oh, he was rescued by his teammates
who came to his room to deliver a telegram.
Some newspaper accounts said he was in serious condition.
He was rushed to the hospital.
I don't think he ever fully recovered.
By September of the following year, in 1926,
he was admitted to a sanitarium.
Rube Foster died on December the 9th, 1930.
Bob K: And Rube Foster, when he dies,
the fans of Chicago lined the streets for three days
to pay their respect to their beloved Rube Foster.
Thousands of people came from afar
to celebrate this great legend.
Rube Foster's death was a great loss
to baseball and Black America.
And the Negro National League
began to struggle.
And then, of course, not only do they lose Foster,
the Great Depression hits.
And so the combination, I think, of the two of those things
really brings about the demise
of that first Negro National League.
As bad as the Great Depression was
for most White Americans, it was a heck of a lot worse
for Black Americans.
When it comes to Blacks, it's the old phrase,
"Last hired, first fired."
That's what faced Blacks.
So the Black community, which had enjoyed
a certain measure of economic success in the '20s,
is once again facing hard times.
And that was a bad time for this country for,
not only the Blacks,
but for the majority of poor people. It was bad.
I know. They could come to a baseball game,
forget about all their woes.
And I was just as proud of making them happy.
And when I'd come in,
you'd think I had a million dollars.
That's how much baseball meant to them.
Bob M: All I wanted to do was talk baseball.
Bob M: The older folks who hung out at the barbershops
were more than happy to share their wisdom with me.
Stories of seeing greats like Oscar Charleston,
"Cool Papa" Bell, and Josh Gibson.
And legendary teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords
and Homestead Grays rolled out of the mouths of old men
as if they knew each player personally.
Back in the '30s, Pittsburgh becomes
the crossroads of Black baseball in America.
It wasn't the largest Black community by far,
but it was situated geographically
on the East-West rail lines,
which meant that any Black intellectual,
politician, figure of note, or ballclub that's traveling
from New York to Chicago, or anywhere else,
is going to stop and play in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh becomes the home to, along with the Chicago Defender,
the most influential Black newspaper in the country,
the Pittsburgh Courier.
Some of the greatest jazz musicians of the era
made their fortunes in Pittsburgh.
And in the world of sports,
you have clearly the two greatest
Negro League dynasties of the 1930s...
the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords.
And those teams had two owners,
who were both intensely competitive,
Gus Greenlee and Cumberland Posey Jr.
They were men of different temperaments.
They had different styles.
I think they knew that their rivalry was something
that was good for both of them
and good for Black baseball as a whole.
Cum Posey, who lived a block and a half from me,
was a great basketball player at Penn State.
His father was a fairly well-to-do man,
and so he had the time.
Most Black kids in those days had worked after school
and on Saturdays and Sundays...
to supplement your family's income.
But Cum had the time to deal with a hobby.
And he took some of these Black baseball players
and made up a team.
It was just a great experience
to have been in Homestead
at that time and tied in with that great ballclub
called the Homestead Grays.
Bob K: In 1931, Cumberland Posey introduces the world
to a young phenom
by the name of Joshua Gibson.
♪ Before ol' Henry Aaron Before ol' Willie Mays ♪
♪ A brown-skin man Hit homers ♪
♪ Over every wall They raised... ♪
He was one of the few people...
that was as good
the first year as he was the last year he played.
He was actually a natural.
♪ Ooh, Josh Gibson... ♪
Joshua Gibson came North in the Great Migration
after World War I.
His father, Mark, left sharecropping
to become a steelworker in Pittsburgh.
Josh left school after the ninth grade
and then was discovered
on the sandlots when Gibson was about 16 years old.
I saw a young man playing, very muscular,
very young.
Near the end of the game, he hit a home run
and he hit the ball out of existence,
it looked like. They didn't even go after it.
It went up over a mountain.
And from that day on, they just loved Josh, all of 'em.
Josh was not pretentious. He was amiable,
and he treated everybody the same, and he could play.
And you knew if you had Josh in the lineup,
you were going to be a winning club.
Perhaps a championship club.
♪ Ooh, Josh Gibson ♪
Josh Gibson made a name for himself
with the Homestead Grays.
When we look at his numbers, his home run at-bat ratio
is between Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds.
We're looking at a Gibson home run
every 14 times at bat.
He always led
every league that he ever played in,
in batting average.
He might go, you know, get eight for ten,
you know, a 13 for 15. You know, like that.
Yeah. He was tough to get out.
Griffith Stadium,
there was 405 feet down the left of the line
and behind that, there was a scoreboard
that had a big hotdog on it with mustard on it.
And Josh hit the ball over the 400 feet,
up over the back above the stands,
and hit that advertisement board
and peeled the paper right off it.
So we used to tease and say that he knocked
the mustard off the hotdog.
I remember one time
I was walking up the ramp with Josh,
and one little kid ran up, said, "Mr. Gibson, Mr. Gibson,
will you give me one of your broken bats?"
Josh says,
"Son, I don't break bats. I wear them out."
Now, that Josh Gibson, he was the type of person
that just liked everybody.
And always with a smile, like a big overgrown kid.
If I step on the bus, he'd say, "Why, oh, my, Ms. Posey."
And he'd run and he'd almost pick me up
and put me in the bus and everything
he'd see that I had there and say.
And the first thing he'd say to the boys is...
And that was it.
Bob K: Cumberland Posey,
of course, had built the great Homestead Grays,
and Cumberland Posey had financial wherewithal.
And so he was able to pluck
star players away from other Black baseball teams.
And he would do that with regularity.
And then here comes Gus Greenlee.
Gus Greenlee would build the great Pittsburgh Crawfords,
as now a rival to Cumberland Posey's Homestead Grays.
He was in a lot of businesses.
He ran a very popular restaurant called Crawford Grill,
and he was the leading entrepreneur
in the Black numbers gambling business.
Well, the numbers, essentially,
were what we now know as the lottery.
They would base the winning number
usually on a number in the stock tables that day,
and every day, everybody played the numbers.
My grandmother...
...who, you know, and my grandparents
who ran a funeral home, played the numbers every day.
Gus Greenlee was as fine a man as you would want to know.
And I found that Gus would do anything for anybody
who was a friend of his.
If he didn't even know them, and they got in trouble,
if there was anything he could do to help them
out of trouble, he would do it.
Gus Greenlee was approached
by a couple members
of the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team,
and at the time they were like a semi-pro sandlot team
and, you know, said that they needed money,
they needed an investor. And Gus jumped in headfirst.
When he took the ball team,
he let us know that when he took it that he was going to the top
and he's gonna do and get the best he could.
I think his top motivation was he looked across town
and he saw Cum Posey, the son of the biggest
and wealthiest Black family in town, and said,
"If I can build the Crawfords into a team
that can beat the Grays,
I'll be the top man in Pittsburgh."
Bob K: He did to Cumberland Posey,
what Posey had done to other teams.
He outbidded Cumberland Posey for his star players.
He convinces Oscar Charleston
to cross town and join the Crawfords.
Then he sets his sight on Josh Gibson.
So now, Josh Gibson is playing for the Crawfords.
And so he steals every good player
that Cumberland Posey ever developed.
But then the Crawfords are able to pick up Satchel Paige.
I just could pitch and then the master just give me
a home. And you just... It was hard to beat me.
You couldn't ought to beat me.
I did some things in baseball I've never seen anyone else do,
and I didn't know what I was doing
one half of the time. But still, I did it.
Satchel Paige is born in Mobile, Alabama.
He's dirt poor.
He has to go out and hunt game with rocks,
and he gets his name, Satchel
because later on, after he's nine or older,
he's able to work at the railroad depot
carrying bags, luggage, satchels.
He learned how to pitch
at the Mount Meigs Reform school.
And so, after that, he comes out of there
and begins his climb to baseball fame.
A fellow by the name of Bill Gatewood,
I just love the way he went, the way he pitched.
He said, "You know the thing is, if you listen to me,
I'll make you one of the greatest pitchers
in the world."
He said, "Because you love to play,
you love the game,
and you try to do what I tell you."
He says, "You see all the fellas out there?"
He says, "I have the devil with them
trying to make them practice."
He said, "You practice without me asking you."
So he was gonna help me.
But now, as far as me saying,
"I am the greatest pitcher in the world."
I didn't say that. It's other people saying it.
Bob M: Once I became an umpire in the leagues,
I finally got my shot to go behind the plate
and call balls and strikes for the legend.
I had never seen a ball move the way it did.
I was stunned, and so was the batter.
Satchel throw balls that looked small,
throw the small ball, which is true.
It'd be turning so fast,
it looks smaller than the regular ball.
"Prince" Joe: I weakly grounded a ball back to him
and I felt like I'd hit a home run.
Just to know that I had made contact with the ball.
Satchel Paige is, without a doubt,
the greatest pitcher in Black baseball history.
We can now show Satchel Paige's strikeout rate per inning
is very similar to Nolan Ryan's.
Bob F: He would be one of the top five
or ten pitchers in baseball history
if he'd been in the big leagues throughout his career.
But I saw him pitch and he threw
with very little effort whatsoever. And the hitters say,
"Well, you can't throw the next one by me."
Boom. There it goes.
And, well, you're not going to get that one by me.
Oop, oop! There it goes.
He went out on that mound and he looked up at the crowd.
He said, "Duty, the sun is shining,
but I'm gonna make them think it's nighttime."
He struck out 21 of the 28 men he faced.
We knew when we saw Satchel Paige pitch,
when I saw Satchel Paige and Satch could call in
the whole team and strike everybody out.
You know, I saw that. He'd call them all in.
Here he is, seven of us, kneeling around the mound.
He threw nine pitches, and the side was out.
When he was in the backyard, he just did amazing things.
Like he'd say, "Look at that.
Look at that berry hanging over there on the bush.
I bet I can hit it." And I'd say, "No you can't."
And he would pick up something and...
...hit it and I would say,
"Oh, wow!" You know, that's what little children do.
They don't think, well, it was 55 feet away
and it was the size of a quarter.
You would have to be a heck of a shot to make it.
Before Gus Greenlee hired Satchel,
the initial Negro League,
which was formed by Rube Foster,
had essentially fallen apart.
So in 1933, Greenlee and some others found
the second Negro National League.
So they became the Negro National League.
But now it's all Eastern teams. And in 1937, the Western teams
organized the Negro American League.
And so, Gus Greenlee
starts to bankroll a bunch of new... ideas.
And one of those people
talk about is the East-West game.
And it was going to be the premier event.
Gentleman Dave: They picked the best of the teams,
players from the East
and the best of the players from the West,
and they rented Comiskey Park.
We started playing in 1933. It was only 22,000 that year.
From that day on, the crowd kept going and going,
until the one time we had 70,000.
People came from all over the country.
You had all the entertainers come in, you got Count Basie,
Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Lena Horne was there.
Anybody who was anybody was there at that game.
♪ Keep on swingin' Trying to get to second base ♪
Bob K: This was the crème de la crème
of baseball.
There's Satchel Paige. There's Hilton Smith,
there's Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard, Mule Suttles.
All these great stars. They're all there.
Oh, man, you're talking about a gala affair. A weekend.
They start coming in by Thursday.
Didn't leave until Monday morning.
The real impact of the East-West Classic
was that White sportswriters started to cover it,
and once they did, some of them, for the very first time,
saw a kind of baseball they had never seen before,
where games were won...
...not just with hitting, but with base stealing,
with these incredibly acrobatic catches
in the outfield, with just a level of speed
that they had never seen in baseball.
And they started to write about that,
and the appeal that could have for White fans, as well.
So the East-West classic is having a big impact
on the vision of the future for baseball.
♪ Well you may run on For a long time ♪
♪ Run on for a long time ♪
♪ Run on for a long time Let me tell you ♪
♪ God Almighty Is gonna cut you down ♪
♪ Go tell That long-tongued liar ♪
♪ Go tell That midnight rider... ♪
Bob M: Before, during and after the season,
teams would travel throughout the country
and play in exhibition games to enhance their income.
I was given the chance to go on the road
with many different teams.
We'd travel right after a game,
sometimes driving all night long to get to our next destination.
♪ I thought I heard The shuffle of angels' feet... ♪
It's 11 or 12 o'clock at night,
and you're just leaving a ballgame,
and you're on a hike for 400 miles
or more to the next stop.
And you find ways, you know, to amuse yourself.
And as you well know,
singers have been a part of our culture.
And they have their quartets, and you would hear one
going down the road in the middle of the night
and hear them singing.
♪ Run on for a long time Let me tell you ♪
♪ God Almighty Is gonna cut you down... ♪
Barnstorming was a schedule that the teams
would have playing different teams.
They may play a league team one day,
and then they'd play
the local shoe factory the next day.
And just playing, in most cases,
as many games as they could play.
I mean, it wasn't uncommon
for a team to play three games in one day.
When I was playing
baseball with the Philadelphia Stars
on 4th of July, we played four games.
Play the game at ten o'clock in the morning,
doubleheader in the afternoon, and then we'd get in the bus
and ride over New York State and play that night.
We played so many doubleheaders
that when we had played one game,
we'd call that an off day.
They had to find a way to get money
turning over all the time.
Their system was to have a game every day.
As long as they could play somewhere every day
in order to keep those payrolls going to keep it afloat.
♪ That's all, brother You'll knock no more ♪
♪ Well, run on For a long time ♪
We would get tired when riding.
We would fuss like a bunch of chickens.
But when you put the suit on, well, it was different.
You just, you knew that was your job,
and you just go to it.
♪ Tell the gambler Rambler, backbiter ♪
♪ Tell 'em God Almighty Is gonna cut 'em down ♪
Bob M: Players kept their minds off their struggles
playing cards and sharing stories.
Of course, we'd always run into a few ignorant kooks
who would call us names.
In those moments, responding to racism,
we weren't players, and umpires, and managers.
We were brothers.
They thought that the Homestead Grays...
was a White team.
So they had us booked into a very nice hotel.
See, Posey was the traveling secretary,
and he was very fair skinned.
So he went in, and he got the rooms
and everything.
So they started to unload the bus...
...and when the players got off,
they said, "Oh, no, no, you can't stay here.
This is a White hotel."
Black hotels in the South,
even in major cities like Birmingham, Memphis,
New Orleans, and whatnot, they were very rare.
And usually the ballplayers would find a rooming house,
a Black rooming house in the town,
and that was where they had to stay.
I can remember a town
where we put up in a rooming house in Arkansas.
When you turn on the lights,
you see the bedbugs start to go for cover.
You have to sleep with the lights on
because if you don't,
those little gremlins would come out
and you wouldn't get any sleep anyhow.
Satchel Paige makes
the point one of his first games.
They arrived at the park
and he said, "Oh, I'm really tired.
I want to hurry up and get to bed and get some rest."
And the manager said, "What bed? What do you mean,
get to rest?
We're staying here in the ballpark."
I mean, you... you had to sleep on your suitcase
in the ballpark.
We didn't stop much because they wouldn't feed us
in the restaurants.
So we had to eat out of paper sacks
and go in a grocery store.
We got one dollar a day meal money,
and we would buy one loaf of bread
and we would buy a jar, a big jar of peanut butter.
That's what we lived off of for three or four days.
Peanut butter and bread.
Sometimes I'd wonder, I'd talk. I'd say,
"Well, how in the world do they expect you to play ball
and you can't even eat?"
You haven't had a bed to sleep in.
You slept in a bus.
It wasn't healthy. It wasn't comfortable at all.
How they could play two and three games in two days
is really a mystery.
Bob M: On long bus rides, I had overheard
Negro League players talk
about their incredible experiences
playing winter ball in the Caribbean.
The players said that a Black man
could just be a man and not have to worry
about paying the social consequences for it.
Bob M: It sounded about perfect to me.
First, I played in Puerto Rico,
then I played in Cuba, and then Mexico.
It was a wonderful place to play.
They give you a chance to go down there,
and the salaries were a little better.
The crowds were better.
The teams in those towns were the kings of the towns,
it was like high school.
You can say that
when the game was played on weekends
and the whole town was at the game.
Fans were more like football fans, you know,
"rah rah" cheering and hit a home run
you'd take your cap around and they'd put money in the cap.
And they had a company called Don Q Rum.
Every home run you hit, you'd get a case of Don Q Rum,
you know? So it was fun.
There little kids run behind you
and after the ball game, they want your autograph
and it makes you feel a part of something,
instead of being something separate unto itself.
But when you are out of your own country,
and you find everything so much better...
you know, it's a revelation in a way,
if you never experienced it.
But it's like heaven, you know?
I want to go back, you know, I got to go back there.
There was very little discrimination.
So you felt, you know, free.
The fact that, you know,
you were accepted for your ability,
not from the color of your skin,
and that really made you feel great.
I think from the very beginning,
there was a sense of a kind of a solidarity or connection
between Black players here and Latin players,
dark Latin players.
So in some ways,
baseball generated a kind of diaspora,
'cause these Black Latin players
could not play Major League Baseball either.
They had to play in the Negro Leagues
that they were playing in the United States.
And so Martín Dihigo and José Méndez,
Cristóbal Torriente,
the game was just full of Latino ballplayers.
Negro Leagues was a rainbow coalition
of players of color,
everything from chalk to charcoal.
That was the pigmentation
that played in the Negro Leagues.
News reporter: Millions enjoy a great year in American sports.
But Dizzy and Daffy Dean,
the Cardinal Ace's new national heroes.
Dizzy Dean pretty much saved baseball
during the Depression.
Babe Ruth was kind of fading out for the Depression 1934,
and him and his brother come in with the Cardinals.
They win the pennant,
and then they go to the World Series.
So they're like on top of the world.
And they could have gone home, but they were gonna barnstorm.
And so they played in that particular year, 1934.
They play six games against Kansas City Monarchs,
two against the Philadelphia Stars,
three against the Pittsburgh Crawfords,
and two against the New York Black Yankees.
And they tour all the way across the country.
But people didn't, hadn't seen Blacks
and Major League All-Star teams mix too much in those days.
So we always had large crowds. I think we played ten games.
We played against
Dizzy Dean and his brother in Cleveland,
and they had a sellout crowd. And...
Satchel beat Dizzy two-one in 12 innings.
Bob K: The record books bear out that the Black teams
won the majority of those head-to-head matchups.
What that tells me, number one, is there was no doubt
in the minds of those Major League athletes
that these guys could play.
Now,
we knew that we could play baseball with anybody.
If you've got Satchel on your team,
you can play our teams that got nine devils on it.
Somebody asked Dizzy Dean, they said,
"Who's the greatest pitcher you ever saw?"
And Dizzy Dean was known to be a little conceited,
and they figured he's gonna start talking about himself.
He said, and he told them
that the greatest pitcher he ever saw was a Colored boy
named Satchel Paige.
He said, "If you can get him and me on the same team,
we could win the pennant by the 4th of July
and go fishing until the World Series started."
I remember we were playing in California
in the winter league,
and I was with Satchel Paige's All-Stars.
And we were playing the Major Leagues All-Stars.
And we played three Sundays.
And then Judge Landis, who was the commissioner
at that time,
sent a telegram out and told the Major Leaguers
not to play us any more
because they had everything to lose and nothing to gain.
We had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
I can only be for the best team in each league to win a pennant.
But to you fans, no heartaches and not even a grouch.
May you all win.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis
is brought in as the first commissioner of baseball
after the Black Sox scandal of 1919,
which was the throwing of the World Series.
So the owners give Kenesaw Mountain Landis
essentially almost dictatorial powers,
because they needed to clean up the image of baseball
after the Black Sox scandal.
Whatever views Landis had, we know that by his actions,
he maintained segregation in Major League Baseball
far longer than it needed to be maintained.
Landis will soon prevent teams of Major Leaguers
from barnstorming against teams of Negro Leaguers
because he doesn't want
intact Major League teams being defeated.
Whatever he says about, "Oh, there's no law.
There's no rule against integration."
The reality is, at every step, he did nothing but block it.
News reporter: Today, Destination Freedom
will play that chapter entitled "The Ballad of Satchel Paige."
♪ Nobody knows when he first Played on a baseball field ♪
♪ Some say he put out Caesar ♪
♪ When old Julius Tried to steal... ♪
As his name recognition grows as a tremendous winner,
other teams want him to come in, pitch two or three innings,
and that's when the relationship between him and Gus Greenlee
becomes...
strained.
By 1937, he had put in two, like, really great seasons
for Gus Greenlee.
He was back with the Crawfords, and all of a sudden,
these guys start hanging around the stadium,
and it turns out that they were emissaries
from the strong man in the Dominican Republic,
Trujillo.
So he sent his emissary with 30,000 dollars
to offer Satchel Paige
to play for him, and then also carte blanche
to then bring as many players as he could bring with him.
Paige then was able to reach out
to other star Negro League players,
particularly those on the Crawfords.
"And yeah, I'll go with you. Sure. For what? How much money?
Pay me a couple thousand. Oh, yeah, right. I'm coming."
Paige brought in a total of nine Pittsburgh Crawfords
from a roster of 16.
But it destroyed the Pittsburgh Crawfords
because they lost their best players.
By 1938, they were history.
It was too bad because Greenlee did a great deal
for Black baseball.
So at that point,
Cum Posey takes advantage, pounces.
And he lured Josh Gibson back,
started stealing some of the players back.
And then you had the makings of,
really, the last great Negro League dynasty,
which was the Homestead Grays.
And they made it to five of the last
Negro League World Series
in the last decade of the Negro Leagues.
News reporter: The stakes this time
are the greatest men have ever fought for.
And what are the stakes? The American state.
The liberty of the whole earth
depends on the outcome of this contest.
Bob M: Following the US entry into World War II,
African Americans once again embraced the opportunity
to fight for their country.
Close to 120 Negro League ballplayers
joined in the war effort.
In the spring of 1943, I enlisted as a member
of the United States Marine Corps.
I was one of the first Black Marines
in the history of this country.
Black soldiers were always put on the front lines,
used as pawns to pave the way for the White soldiers.
On the battlefields of Okinawa, Saipan, and Guam,
I would endure many harrowing experiences.
More than half of my company was killed.
There were so many dead bodies lying around,
they could have covered the playing field
of any Major League ballpark with the corpses.
I had given America two and a half years of service,
and the country still had not granted
full rights to me or my Black brothers.
It was a huge contradiction
that Americans were fighting this war effort
on behalf of civil rights and liberties for people abroad.
And Black people understood
that they were still second class citizens at home.
And I think Black people took that as an opportunity
to start pushing for more.
The Double V campaign
was started by the Pittsburgh Courier.
The Courier rallied Black opinion
around the country,
around the idea of "We will support this war.
We will enlist to fight.
We will buy war bonds and support the war.
We will be patriotic, but we want it understood,
that when the war is over, we are going to get our rights."
And this is what they call the Double Victory campaign.
The idea of having to fight two wars, one overseas,
and more importantly, one here at home against segregation.
And in that discussion comes one of, I think,
one of the most powerful images and stories that comes out
is the idea they can fight,
and go, and fight, and die at Guadalcanal,
but they can't play on a diamond together?
At the time,
baseball was America's most important sport,
and so integrating that
they felt symbolically would be such a major step
to see Black people and White people
working together on the same team
to achieve a common goal of winning a game.
I was involved
in an organization of young people
interested in breaking
the Jim Crow ban in the big leagues.
We used to go collect signatures
from the fans coming into Forbes Field
that we want to have Negroes get into the big leagues,
and there were lots of petitions
like we were making in Pittsburgh, in New York.
Many, many petitions
were gathered at the Yankee Stadium.
The owners knew that this has got to change.
Bob K: Now, the Black press
was pushing this agenda all along. Sam Lacy, Faye Young.
There were other great Black writers
who were all trying to alter the course of baseball
and move Black folks into Major League Baseball.
But Wendell Smith,
one of the great Black writers of that era,
was really its primary front man.
Wendell Smith started writing
this whole series of stories about the issue.
And so, when teams came to play in Pittsburgh at Forbes Field,
he would park himself at the Schenley Hotel
across the street from the ballpark
and buttonhole the top managers and coaches and players and say,
"Are you in favor of integrating the Major Leagues?"
And he got all of these top,
well-known people on the record saying "Yes."
And then he and other sportswriters used
some of that data to start pressuring
the Commissioner Landis
to consider the integration of Major League Baseball.
And he had been dodging the whole issue
for a couple of decades.
In December 1943, leaders of the Black newspapers
met with the commissioner of baseball
and the owners of baseball
about getting Blacks into the big leagues.
And they selected Paul Robeson to be the spokesman
of the delegation here in New York.
Paul Jr: Dad was then a great theatrical star, film star,
the leading concert artist in the country and in the world.
So my father's attitude was, especially,
because I've reached this pinnacle,
because I'm who I am...
I have to do whatever I can do
to advance the interests of African Americans as a whole.
And in this case,
what better way than to throw my weight behind the campaign
to break the segregation
in organized baseball in particular.
So Paul explained
to the commissioner and to the others,
"We have a million Blacks in the armed forces,
and now, right during this war,
they... You still have this ban against them in what sport?
The national sport.
How does that fit in with what we're fighting for?"
Voice as Paul Sr: We live in times
when the world is changing very fast,
when you may be able to make a great contribution
to not only the advance of our own country
but of the whole world.
Because a thing like this...
...Negro ballplayers becoming
a part of the great national pastime of America...
can make a great difference
in what peoples all over the world
feel towards us as a country
in a time when we need their help.
Paul Jr: He made about a ten, 12-minute presentation,
which was quite impassioned. It was off-the-cuff
and really had an enormous effect
on the owners, apparently because unusual,
they applauded at the end and all that.
And then of course, everybody withdrew,
and they went back into private session.
Branch Rickey,
who's president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, says,
"Are we going to discuss and make a decision
on the proposal to integrate Major League Baseball?"
And Landis said,
"We have considered it. No action has been taken."
He said, "It is a matter for each club to determine
whether or not to sign a Black player."
But as long as he is the commissioner,
there will not be any player who can't cross the color line.
But in 1944, Commissioner Landis dies.
It really changes everything.
♪ Goin' to Kansas City Kansas City, here I come... ♪
Bob M: Sailing home was a bittersweet journey.
We had defeated a dangerous enemy,
all the while earning respect as soldiers.
Bob M: We hoped life would be better back home.
♪ They got some Crazy little women there... ♪
Bob M: After the war,
my brother begged me to give him a lift to Kansas City, Missouri.
Kansas City had jobs, nightlife, a thriving Black community,
and a professional Black baseball team,
the world famous Kansas City Monarchs.
♪ Standin' on the corner... ♪
Bob M: When I arrived in Kansas City,
the Monarchs were stocked full
of some of the League's best known talent.
♪ With my Kansas City baby... ♪
Bob M: Clifford Connie Johnson, Buck O'Neil, Ted Strong,
Willard Brown, and Satchel Paige.
♪ I might take a plane... ♪
The Monarchs were big shots,
as far as I was concerned.
We thought that they were the greatest things
that Kansas City had, you know.
We'd sit over there
and talk about who had pretty legs
or who was built and looked real fine.
You know, they looked good.
♪ Ah, but you know Yeah, must die... ♪
This was a good time for baseball,
a good time for musicians.
They would come to the ballgame, see us play.
And at night we go on and see them,
dance and everything.
By the time we get to the '40s, really,
this is the heyday of Black baseball.
Because of World War II,
there's money pouring into the Black community, right?
Like defense hiring,
these manufacturers can no longer say,
"Well, we're not gonna hire you 'cause you're Black."
It's all hands on deck, right?
So now, Black people in the general community
have more money to go to baseball games
and to support these institutions.
So by the late '30s and early '40s
Black baseball was considered to be the third largest
economic institution in the Black community.
'Cause you have vendors,
and you have advertising, and you have ticket sales,
and you have all of these other aspects to the game
that weren't considered, you know.
People were making money from it.
Bob K: The impact that it had on urban communities
was something that we've not seen to that magnitude
since the Negro Leagues.
So when we think about Black baseball
and its impact on cities like Chicago,
Kansas City, New York.
Wherever you had successful Black baseball,
you typically had thriving Black economies.
♪ They got some Crazy little women there... ♪
Bob M: My arrival in Kansas City in 1946
came at an exciting time for Black baseball in the town.
Bob M: When the Monarchs advanced
to the Negro League World Series that year
against the hot contender from the East,
the Newark Eagles.
They were run by powerhouse owners,
Abe and Effa Manley.
The ballplayers, they have a word they used.
I realized it was the most important word
in their vocabulary, and the word is "satisfied."
"I am satisfied." If they're not satisfied,
all you've got is a guy in a uniform.
And then on the case
of our old time Negro ballplayers,
they were happy doing what they did.
Effa Manley was a woman
who said the things that needed to be said,
even if nobody wanted to hear 'em,
and did the things that needed to be done,
even if nobody else wanted to do them.
She is called
"The First Lady of Black baseball"
because there really,
at that time and pretty much after that,
weren't any other women
closely involved in successful Black baseball teams.
And there weren't very many other women closely involved
with successful White baseball teams, either.
But she was also an enigma.
There's questions of like, "Was Effa Black? Was Effa White?
Was she passing,
or was she just living her truth?
Was she just living her life?"
Before she gets into baseball,
she comes of age in Harlem in the 1920s and early '30s,
and she is absorbing all of it.
I immediately became very much involved
in civic affairs.
I was attending a dinner one night,
and we got into this conversation
about how hard it was for Negroes to find employment.
The department stores and other big stores
on 125th Street in Harlem,
which was the main business street there, had no,
other than elevator operators,
you couldn't see a Black employee in the store.
So she decides to launch a boycott
against a department store in Harlem,
because even though 70, 75 percent of their sales
were coming from the Black community,
they would not hire Black women as salesclerks.
It worked. And if you were gonna see
how Effa Manley was gonna run her team
in the Negro National League,
you need only look at those few months
in Harlem in 1934.
Abe Manley was involved in numbers operations,
and Abe had always been a really big fan
of Black baseball.
Once he marries Effa and sees what Effa is capable of
during this Blumstein's boycott. He can trust her.
He knows that she will do the work,
that she is smart, that she is savvy.
He's like, "Yeah, let me give this Black baseball thing a go."
Little by little,
I found myself doing more and more.
I drew up the schedules, bought the equipment,
went to all of the meetings, of course.
I found myself completely involved,
and I enjoyed it.
Bob K: She was a shrewd negotiator.
She knew the business of baseball as well as any man,
and Monte Irvin was fond of saying,
"She never missed a payday."
You had a lot of respect for her,
and she tried to keep you on, you know, tried to,
particularly young fellas.
She'd try to advise them what to do,
how to do it and that kind of a thing.
But I think it was her ability
and her characteristics and what she was like
and what she wanted the League to look like
that made her a presence
in the Negro League situation, you know? Very important. Yeah.
For many years in the '40s, the Homestead Grays
were constantly winning the pennant,
and the Eagles were right behind them.
And in 1946, they finally caught up.
It was special for Effa.
She'd been in baseball at this point, her and Abe,
for over a decade.
And this was the moment that she had been working to.
She had Larry Doby,
who became the first player in the American League,
when he signed
with the baseball team out of Cleveland.
Monte Irvin was on that team, Leon Day was on that team.
Bob K: Leon Day throws
an opening day no-hitter...
...in 1946.
Opening day, that was tremendous.
It was... I mean, it was...
That's why that reaction, it was shock.
The Black people threw the little blue cushions
they used to give you to sit on,
they just covered the stadium with pillows.
And pillows were sailing out from all over the place.
I was a little boy looking at that,
I thought... I was like, "Wow, look at this."
Bob K: And the Newark Eagles rode that wave
all the way to the World Series
against the Kansas City Monarchs.
The Monarchs were ahead, three games to two,
and were on the verge of winning.
The Eagles won a slugfest in the sixth game to tie it up.
So they're back at Rupert Stadium
for the seventh game.
And he gets to the ninth inning.
The Eagles are ahead, three to two.
Monarchs last chance. First guy makes an out,
the second guy singles,
but he's thrown out at second,
trying to stretch it into a double.
So now there are two outs,
and Effa Manley is just as nervous as a cat
because the next guy gets a hit.
She's something like in her memoirs,
"How can a human heart take all this tension?"
She says, "I can't look,
I hear the crack of the bat and I can't look.
I finally opened my eyes,
and the ball is coming right down
in first baseman Lennie Pearson's mitt."
He grabs it. The Eagles win.
Boy, did we have a ballclub in 1946.[chuckling]
I don't believe
any ballclub in the country could have beaten us.
I'm in the Navy.
I'm a boatswain, stevedore platoon.
It's an all Black battalion.
It's 10:30 at night.
Everybody's in bed, and the officer said,
the officer of the day,
"Boatswain O'Neil, come to my office at once."
I say, "Oh, hell, what did I do now?"
He said, "You know what?" I say, "No, sir."
"Branch Rickey just signed Jackie
to an organized baseball contract."
I say, "Whoop, give me that horn."
I got on it.
I say, "Hear this, hear this, hear this."
Woke up the entire camp.
And I said, "Branch Rickey just signed Jackie Robinson
to an organized baseball contract."
They whoop, they holler, they shot their guns.
We didn't sleep much that night. Oh, man. That was it.
I came out of the service,
I joined a baseball team. In a year or so,
I was with the organized baseball,
and in a very short time,
I was up there in the Major Leagues.
Boy, I was a pretty lucky fellow because we do pretty well
in the Major League in baseball.
♪ I got a good thing A good thing going on ♪
♪ Woke up this mornin' It's a brand-new day ♪
♪ And I know everything's Gonna come my way ♪
♪ 'Cause I got a good thing A good thing going on ♪
Jackie Robinson had been this incredible athlete at UCLA,
and he was known across the country
as this football star,
but there was no avenue for him to play football.
And so, baseball really became the best outlet for him
to be a professional athlete to make money.
And that door opened for him through the Negro Leagues,
through the Kansas City Monarchs.
At the time,
Wendell Smith decided that Jackie Robinson
was the player that had the best odds
of breaking through into the Major Leagues
because he had the right temperament,
and he had the right look
that would be accepted by White fans.
So it was actually Wendell Smith
who put Jackie Robinson on Branch Rickey's radar screen.
Organized baseball
hasn't had a Negro player since 1884,
when Moses Walker was with Toledo.
But 63 years later, in 1947,
Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers
and blasted his way to stardom.
Bob M: We never thought we'd lived to see the day
when a Black man would be admitted into the Major Leagues.
Equality was within our reach.
If a Black man could integrate the great American pastime,
anything seemed possible.
Every Sunday in my hometown Fairfield,
I would read about three guys,
Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial.
Those are the guys
that were on the sport page every Sunday.
So when Jackie came in in '47, he gave me hope.
Well, man, one of these days
I might be on the front page like that.
Brooklyn became Harlem.
Or that is to say, it was a place most loved.
And whether you would ever go there or not, you knew Brooklyn
because Jackie Robinson was there.
One of the very first times
that I went to see the game at Ebbets Field...
First of all, going on the subway,
you'd have thought all of Harlem was heading there.
Everybody I see, they're bringing along baskets.
They've got chicken. It's like a big picnic.
All of Harlem now is going to Ebbets Field and so,
you know where they're going, and you know why they're going.
Jackie. Everybody's talking about Jackie.
Jackie changed people.
The whole dynamics of America changed.
You know, when the Dodgers began playing on the road...
you saw tumultuous scenes, you know, and...
this was... There was a first in everything.
There was an exhibition game in Georgia.
This tremendous crowd of Black people,
and the Dodgers emerged from their dugout.
A big roar of greeting from the Black crowd.
The second thing is booing from the White stands.
Okay. Then the third thing happens.
What's the third thing? White people begin standing up
and clapping to differentiate themselves.
How many? Hundreds.
So, who are these people, you know?
They're not all hidden closet progressives, you know.
So that's a great dynamic at work there.
Black and White took the field together.
How do you estimate the meaning of that, you know?
Jackie Robinson not only opened the doors for baseball,
but he opened the doors for a lot of other opportunities
because he brought to mind
to a lot of predominantly White businessmen,
why shouldn't we have a Black telephone operator?
Why shouldn't we have a clerk in our store?
They didn't understand that,
until they got to see Jackie Robinson
producing like a professional baseball player
and then projected that into other areas of life.
I think Jack was one of the catalysts
for the civil rights movement,
that somehow he alerted White people
to the fact of discrimination
and what the losses were for the society,
that you couldn't include this talent.
And I think he made Black people,
who had been made to feel inferior,
feel prouder of themselves.
Signing him was remarkable
because Jackie was not a great player when he started,
but every year he improved and became very exciting,
and a great second baseman, and a team leader.
He just... He did a great job of pioneering.
But the hostility to Jackie was very, very strong.
And now, the Cardinals were probably the most hostile.
And I saw Enos Slaughter run down
and just deliberately reach out with his left foot
and spike Jackie Robinson's ankle.
The things that happened on the ball field
hurt more than anything else, simply because of the fact
that I had been in athletics for many, many years,
and I had never really experienced some of the things
that were happening to me at this particular time.
So Mr. Rickey felt that for the first few years
that we couldn't oppose actually some of the things
that were said and done to us.
We had to sort of turn the other cheek.
I found that very difficult. Matter of fact,
my doctor told me to get away from baseball
for fear I was gonna have a nervous breakdown.
I knew what he was going through,
and I could hear it in certain cities,
like Philadelphia and Baltimore,
some of the places where there would be
racial epithets coming out of the stands
and that kind of thing.
And I would... It would make me angry.
But I was just as committed to the course
that Jack had chosen, as he was,
and he would fight back with his bat.
I mean, he would do well,
and that would silence those detractors.
In that pressure cooker of that first year,
he still was Rookie of the Year, and they won the pennant,
which has to be the most incredible,
courageous feat in the history of American sports.
Just look at this, and think about Jackie Robinson.
Dark-skinned Black man puts on a white uniform,
picks up a bat made of white ash,
stands in a white batter's box
to hit a white baseball from a White pitcher...
...thrown over a white home plate,
hits the ball between two white foul lines.
He's called "out" or "safe" by a White umpire,
as White fans boo or cheer.
He was an ink spot
on the white canvas of injustice.
And so, no matter how you feel...
...he was under a tremendous pressure...
to try to blend in.
All those that I talked to or was around were very excited
about the Negroes breaking into the Majors,
you know, which I myself was, in a way,
except that it did wreck our business.
And I do feel it was an unfair approach.
I feel that it should have been handled much differently.
Black executives of Negro Leagues teams
were on board with integration in the sense that they believed
that integration in baseball
would mean integration in all of society,
that Black people would ultimately become "equals,"
if you will.
I'm not even gonna say that they were opposed
to integration in baseball
in terms of its effect potentially on their teams.
You know, whether they might lose some of their best teams.
You know, once Jackie was signed away from the Monarchs,
you know, they understood
that their players could be next.
In fact, their players were next.
I don't even think
they were really opposed to that.
The conflict came in
because they wanted to be treated fairly
as businessmen and women.
Even Cum Posey was an advocate,
before he died,
of integration.
He would give speeches and he would say,
I hope to, you know,
eventually see Black players playing in the Major Leagues.
But it was always with the expectation that the...
that the Negro League teams would be compensated,
that if they jumped
from the Negro Leagues to a pro-team,
that the pro-team would essentially
do what they would do, you know...
...amongst themselves,
which are, they would buy out the contract.
Branch Rickey opposed that from the very beginning.
In fact, he mocked the idea
that Jackie Robinson had any contractual obligation
to the Kansas City Monarchs,
or that the Negro Leagues were even a real league.
He said they're not even a real league.
Branch Rickey didn't even ask... He accused Dad of being...
And the Negro Leagues were ran by a bunch of gamblers.
I don't know where he got...
Well, there was one guy in the East Coast,
was in the number business, but that's the only guy
I ever heard of being into gambl...
But he used that mainly as an excuse,
so they wouldn't have to pay him.
But Branch Rickey never paid anything,
really, to anybody.
He was a very close-operating, cheap person.
He knew how the baseball business worked.
Here are these players that you have invested in
that you have trained, that you have developed.
Now, I want them to play on my Major League roster.
Here is what it should cost me.
But Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers,
and Branch Rickey did not pay the Monarchs for his contract.
And later, Branch Rickey signed Roy Campanella
and did not pay Tom Wilson
of the Baltimore Elite Giants for his contract.
And he signed Don Newcombe,
and he didn't pay Effa and Abe for his contract.
So there was this understanding
that, not only was integration happening,
but it was going to kill their businesses.
I never felt he was right to take those valuable players
and not give us a nickel for them.
I felt that was very wrong,
and we should have had some little compensation.
But we were in no position to protest, and he knew it.
So he just completely outmaneuvered us,
outsmarted us, or just plain raped us.
I don't know what you'd say or how you'd describe it.
Bob K: To say that Effa Manley couldn't stand Branch Rickey
might be an understatement.
She didn't care for Branch Rickey
because she saw what Branch was going to do,
and she was able to kind of fight him off.
But she knew she wasn't gonna be able to continue to hold
those other owners off once this thing did break loose.
As we say, there was blood in the water,
and the sharks were coming out.
At this point,
Jackie's establishing himself with the Dodgers
in the National League.
Bill Veeck, from Cleveland, had called and told Effa
that he wanted to sign Larry Doby,
and immediately,
I think Effa's probably just happy she got a call
because she didn't get a call
from Branch Rickey for Don Newcombe.
So already she understands,
okay, he is at least trying to do business with me.
And he makes it clear that he wants to sign Larry Doby.
And she says, "Okay, well, how much will you give me?"
So Bill Veeck,
the owner of the Cleveland Indians,
offered 10,000 dollars for Larry Doby's contract.
It wasn't a lot of money,
but it was a whole lot more than anybody else was paying.
And Effa said, "You know, Mr. Veeck,
if he were White and a free agent,
you could get 100,000 dollars for him."
And Veeck says, "Well, yeah, you're right.
I'll tell you what.
If he sticks with the team for a month,
I'll pay you another five."
I think that made her tremendously important.
A woman in a man's space, speaking up and running a team,
but also a woman in a man's space saying,
"Run me my money."
So Bill Veeck brings in Larry Doby.
He also will bring in Satchel Paige.
Paige is pretty old by that time,
but he comes in,
he sets attendance records in his first three games,
and he can still pitch.
Announcer 1: Lou Boudreau goes to the mound,
that's all for Christopher and it's gonna be Satchel Paige.
And here's the announcement
about the appearance of Satchel Paige. Listen.
Announcer 2: Satchel Paige!
And he will pitch in relief,
he will pitch in the World Series,
and the Indians will win.
That was the death knell of Negro League Baseball.
When they signed the Black players,
the people that had been coming
to Griffith Stadium in Washington to see us play,
and in Yankee Stadium to see us play,
now, they want to see Jackie play.
The interest in the Negro League
really fell off.
So they found out that they couldn't continue
to pay the salaries.
And, you know, all those favorite fans
now were going to see players that had just been called up.
Integration took place,
and I begged Abe to quit the next year
because we dropped another 20,000 dollars.
I mean, the fans deserted us
to go see the boys on the White team.
Deserted us like they say rats desert a ship.[chuckling]
Bob M: With the onset of integration
in the great American pastime,
the once-prosperous Negro National League
in the East folded in 1948.
Only the Negro American League in the Midwest was left
to hold down the fort of Black baseball.
So on the East Coast primarily
is where you saw that really quick downfall.
Effa called it "Jackie Robinson Country"
because where she was playing in Newark, like, you know,
her fans could just catch a train and go see Jackie.
When people have one option, or you know,
they don't have money to go to multiple games,
they're choosing to go see Jackie.
Why am I going to go see the segregated ballclub
that was born of Jim Crow
and represent segregation and all of these things,
when I can go see Jackie? He's the hope. He's the future.
One of the questions I get asked all the time
about integration is, "Layton, wasn't it wonderful
that when Jackie Robinson got called up,
that it opened up baseball for all the Black ballplayers?"
And I said, "If you talk to the ballplayers themselves,
the answer is no."
Is... If you were an impact ballplayer
like Larry Doby, or Roy Campanella,
or Don Newcombe, or a Jackie Robinson,
there was gonna be a chance
that you could play in organized baseball.
But for the average Negro League ballplayer, no.
I knew that everybody couldn't be the same
and be that at the same time.
It's a lack of opportunities, that's all.
But we had ballplayers
that could have played in the Major Leagues
when they first started playing.
But they didn't get the chance.
Willie Wells,
there ain't no baseball player in Major League Baseball,
no better ballplayer shortstop than Willie Wells.
Raymond Dandridge... ...Josh Gibson.
Josh Gibson was always in the conversation
about this vision some day
of Black players playing in the Major Leagues
because, by the mid-1930s,
he was considered the greatest hitter
in Black baseball,
and people who had seen him play would say, like,
"He's greater than Babe Ruth."
But in fact, Wendell Smith himself,
and some of the other top Black sportswriters,
had actually stopped advocating for Josh Gibson by the 1940s
because they thought he had too many demons.
According to the family,
Josh was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
And it took a toll on him, physically and mentally.
He lost his sense of who he was and control
and was found wandering around the streets of San Juan.
And he passed not long after that.
And it was a very, very sad ending for someone who,
anybody who saw him play,
said this was one of the greatest players
who ever played the game.
There were still attempts to keep going,
to keep playing. And even into the '50s,
there were some players that were being recruited.
Henry Aaron was playing on a Black team
when he was recruited,
and we saw all kinds of efforts to bring in more ticket sales,
like the signing of women to play games.
There's good baseball being played by Negro Leaguers,
and the league itself persists down to 1960.
But it's not anywhere near the quality of baseball played
when the Negro Leagues were at their height.
I don't know if it was apparent at first,
but I think over time the loss of the Negro Leagues
began to be more felt,
and that people began to understand
that the loss of the Negro Leagues
was something significant.
It was felt in many ways that were tangible.
You know, when we start talking about all of the people
that it takes to make a team run,
whether we're talking about bus drivers, or, you know,
people working concessions or taking tickets,
all of those people typically came
from within that Black community.
But then, there's also the intangible,
of in the midst of all of the stuff
that we have to deal with as Black people in this society,
this place where we can go,
where we can get dressed to the nines,
where we can hang out,
where we can root for our favorite players
and are free to just be us without the White gaze.
They lost that too.
What happened was starting in the '50s,
a lot of the Black folks,
who had the opportunity to leave those communities
to go to college, to rise within White professions,
did so, and they left
folks who were stuck in those communities
to be on their own
at a time when they were more vulnerable than ever,
as a result of the declining industries,
as a result of the devastating impact of urban renewal.
These housing projects and highway projects.
So the demise of the Negro Leagues
foreshadows a larger crisis
for Black America in those communities.
You look at just the Crawford Grill
and across the street is a Black barbershop.
And it's fascinating
after the integration of Major Leagues,
you see the deterioration.
It's just devastating to the Black community.
Bob K: When we talk about integration,
it was good morally, it was good socially,
and it moved us in ways
in which we probably never, ever dreamed possible.
But that progress came at a cost.
The enduring importance of the Negro Leagues is the fact
that we can do this thing on our own.
I'm not saying we should.
I'm not saying that we should go off in a corner
and, you know, build our own teams and leagues
and recreate Negro Leagues baseball.
But we can.
We know, and White baseball should know as well,
that we're capable 'cause we already did the thing.
Boom. Out toward straight center.
Willie Mays catches it, 450 feet.
Say, hey, Willie, was that a catch!
Would baseball be baseball today
without Willie Mays from the Birmingham Black Barons
or Ernie Banks from the Kansas City Monarchs?
The Negro Leagues brought a new dynamic to the game.
It made the game a better version of itself.
By the '60s and '70s,
guys who had not played in the Negro Leagues
come on the scene in what really was the heyday of Black baseball
in the Majors.
Hank Robinson jockeys the count
to three and two, before he gets his pitch
Players like Frank Robinson
excelled at every level of the game.
Like Rube Foster, he was a star player,
a manager, and a baseball executive.
Bob Gibson was the greatest Black pitcher
since Satchel Paige.
And Reggie Jackson, like Josh Gibson,
who is one of the most feared sluggers in baseball history.
Black and Latin players made it a very different game,
and with their success on the field,
there was no turning back.
Upton steals home!
Bob M: On April 8th, 1974,
Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record,
one of the most sacred in baseball,
hitting his 715th home run in the Major Leagues.
Swinging and there's a drive into left-center field,
that ball is out of here!
It's 715,
there is a new home run champion of all time,
and it's Henry Aaron!
Hank Aaron once said,
"My abilities are only limited by the lack of opportunity."
And once he got that opportunity,
he made an assault on Ruth's record.
Henry Aaron, the home run king of all time...
So let's keep in mind
that Babe Ruth never hit a home run off a Black pitcher.
His record was set in apartheid baseball,
which makes Hank Aaron's record more valuable.
His record was set
against the best pitchers on the planet.
Bob M: Following years of pressure from the public,
Satchel Paige became the first player
to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame
based on his record in the Negro Leagues.
I am the proudest man on Earth right today,
and I know my wife is.
Bob M: The following year,
he was joined by Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson,
and then "Cool Papa" Bell.
Many more would follow, including Rube Foster,
Effa Manley, and Cumberland Posey.
It's hard to do too much for pioneers.
I think, you know, we stand on their shoulders,
and we know it. They paved the way for us,
and we should have a lasting gratitude toward them.
Bob K: The Negro League players themselves,
they had no idea they were making history.
Man, they didn't care about making no history.
They just wanted to play ball. But the pride, the passion,
the courage that they demonstrated
in the face of adversity.
To overcome the adversity transcends race, transcends age,
transcends gender. And that's the real story.
It was in my blood.
It'’s still in my blood to be an umpire.
You call a player safe, it just get all over ya.
You call a player out, it just get all over ya.
It's just like a... in heaven.