Newspaper unknown, John Lofflin, February 26 – March 3, 1992

Point Blank
Black Baseball: Kansas City’s separate but glorious past

The old timers like to tell a story about a pitcher named John Donaldson.  Donaldson the Great, they call him.  Hurled three no-hitters in 30 days.  Struck out 99 in just four games.  Often logged 500 strikeouts a year.  He did all that against the best athletes the world had to offer between 1912 and 1920.  But you won’t find Donaldson the Great in the Baseball Hall of Fame for one reason; the hitters he faced each summer were black.

That doesn’t mean the owners of white major league baseball didn’t know where to find Donaldson, and once word of his prowess reached their ears, they were sorely tempted to sneak him around their own color line. Donaldson was dealing himself a hand of solitaire where the white owner’s telegram arrived.  On it, he read these words: “How black is he?”  In answer, Donaldson reached into the deck and pulled out the ace of spades.  That was all he had to say on the subject of white baseball.

It’s just the beginning of what Kansas City historian Phil S. Dixon has to say about black baseball.  Dixon has been studying black baseball since 1980, long before it was chic to do so.  Since then, he’s written two books on the subject.  One, The Ultimate Kansas City Baseball Trivia Quiz Book hit local stores this week.  The second, A Pictorial History of the Negro Leagues is currently being read by three major publishers.

Dixon’s trivia book offers 400 facts on modern Kansas City Royals baseball.  But it also offers 400 facts on the longer, perhaps more prestigious, history of black baseball in the city.  With the wealthy and coddled soon to arrive in Florida to stretch the kinks out of their million dollar arms and legs, it’s nice to pass a winter day listening to Dixon describe the adventures of a more heroic breed.  For instance, Dixon ticks off the accomplishments of four Negro League greats he thinks should be in the Hall of Fame.  The list begins with Donaldson, who struck out 30 in one 18-inning game, played outfield, and may have had 3,000 hits in his career.  Then there’s Hurley McNair, an outfielder who stood 5-foot-4, but also gathered 3,000 hits.  There’s Wilber “Bullet” Rogan, a Sumner High graduate, who joined the Negro League in 1920 at 31 years old and won more than 400 games before retiring in 1938, banging out two hits in his last game.  And there’s Willard Brown, the first black player to get a hit [home run] in white baseball, who still holds the record for single season home runs in Puerto Rican winter league (Reggie Jackson is second on the list), and had 115 home runs in the white minor leagues.  Dixon thinks Brown may have hit 400 to 500 home runs in Negro League career.

Putting a fine point on such numbers is Dixon’s job as a writer and scholar.  But good information is rare.  He found just two photographs of black players in the city’s white newspapers before 1945, one each in the Journal and the Kansas City Star.  “The Star, usually on the back page of the sports section, carried a box score of the black professional game and a brief write-up, usually less than a paragraph,” Dixon says.  The Journal carried slightly more, but the Call and the Rising Sun, local black newspapers, were the best sources.  And he relied heavily on oral history.

”I heard about the Kansas City Kansas Giants from Fred Langford, who was 94 at the time,” Dixon recalls.  “It was a winter day, perfect baseball interviewing weather.  He played for the Giants; he said they played at Riverside Park at Second and Franklin.”  Dixon couldn’t find a word on the park for years, then two weeks after Langford’s death and article surfaced.  Everything Langford told him “was right on the money,” he says.

Langford had described the Giant’s 54 game winning streak in 1909, the year they won 112 and lost only 16 and put Kansas City on the professional baseball map.  Later came the more well-known Monarchs, who won the Negro World Series in 1924 and played the white minor-league Kansas City Blues in city championships in 1921 and 1922.  The Blues won in 1921, the Monarchs won in 1922; three Monarch pitchers hit home runs.  “They played the city series until the Monarchs won, then they never played again,” Dixon says.  “People here had it all crossed up.  They expected the Blues to win.  But the Blues were a minor-league team and the Monarchs were a major-league team.”

People have a lot of the history of black baseball crossed up Dixon says.  First they have the spirit of the times wrong.

“White writers are always surprised when they interview former Negro League players that they’re no batter,” Dixon says.  “Black players were not begging to get into the major leagues.  They were making less than major leaguers, but more than minor leaguers….Black players couldn’t ever drink from the same drinking fountains as whites in those days.  They had a lot more important things to worry about than playing for white baseball teams.”

For instance, when the Blues played, black were relegated to the bleachers.  And when the great Monarchs catcher Frank Duncan went to Kansas City nightclubs to see his wife, Julia Lee, perform, he always to along a trumpet case, the only price of admittance for a black man in a white Jim Crow venue.

“I bring a different point of view (than white historians) to writing about black baseball,” Dixon says.  “It’s like the history of slavery, a former slave owner is going to write from a different point of view than a former slave.  It bothers me to see how badly history has been written about black baseball.  Dixon says he’s most bothered by a phrase he reads often in books about black baseball:  ‘They were great, but it’s too bad nobody saw them.’

“In 1929, the Monarchs drew 200,000 people,” Dixon says.  “Does that mean those 200,000 people were nobodies?  Well, my grandfather went out there and saw them play, and he was certainly somebody.”

 

Articles
Pride and Prejudice, Don Terry, Chicago Tribune, June 20, 2004
Short-lived Milwaukee Bears didn’t get much play, Dan Currau, Milwaukee Sentinel, April 14, 2003
Barnstorming was common place in the Negro Leagues, Justice B. Hill, MBL.com
Newspaper unknown, John Lofflin, February 26 – March 3, 1992
Publishers weekly, June 29, 1992, by Calvin Reid
The Sporting News, July 20, 1992, Steve Gietschier, Archivist of the Sporting News
LA Weekly, August 14-August 20, 1992, David Davis
Dayton, Ohio Daily News, August 16, 1992, by Mike Conklin, Chicago Tribune
Parade Magazine, August 30, 1992, by Herbert Kupferberg
USA Today Baseball Weekly, Dec. 30-Jan12, 1993, by David Plaut
Village Voice, January 1994, Jockbeat
Chicago, Tribune, Friday February 3, 1995, by Shirley Henderson
Phil Dixon, “The History of the Negro Baseball Leagues” Thursday, February 9, 1995, State of Illinois Center, 10 a.m.
Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1995 by Terry Armour
Chicago Defender, February 9, 1995: Negro League author to speak
Kansas City Public Library, May 2002