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“My Skin Is Against Me”: Early African American Baseball and Race Relations in Post-Civil War America, 1867-1896

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“My Skin Is Against Me”: Early African American Baseball and Race Relations in Post-Civil War America, 1867-1896 7 “My Skin is Against Me”: Early African American Baseball and Race Relations in Post-Civil War America, 1867-1896 4/3/2013 University of Florida Sarah E. Calise 1 | C a l i s e ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the continuous support from these people: my father, my mother, and my brother, who love me at my best and my worst; my dearest friends Laura and Caroline, who were writing thesis papers of their own yet were always there to provide constructive advice and a place to vent frustration; Dr. Steven Noll, who continuously encourages me to combine my love of baseball and history; and, of course, my advisor Dr. Jon Sensbach, who helped me through this grueling research and writing process, and who guided my paper to bring about its full potential. I would also like to thank the Society for American Baseball Research for granting me the 2012 Anthony A. Yoseloff scholarship, which enabled me to be in the presence of such amazing baseball historians, a few of which are featured in this paper: Dorothy Seymour Mills, Leslie Heaphy, and John Thorn. “You want to know what it’s like being colored? Well, it’s like going to bat with two strikes already called on you.” – Waring Cuney, 1937 Finally, I would like to dedicate this paper to the courageous men who came to the plate with two strikes already called on them, but hit home runs in the face of such prejudice. 2 | C a l i s e TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..3 Chapter One – Early Victories and Early Defeats………………………………………8 American and Its Pastime Prior to 1867………………………………………...8 The Early Victories and Early Defeats of the Philadelphia Pythians…………..12 Political Turmoil, Baseball Professionalism, and John “Bud” Fowler………...21 Chapter Two – Home Runs and Strikeouts: the Tumultuous 1880s……………………28 The Unstable Interlude…………………………………………………………28 The Influence of the Press in Early African American Baseball……………….29 The Home Runs and Strikeouts of Prominent Professionals…………………...32 Black Theorists and Black Baseball…………………………………………….44 Chapter Three – Two Out Rally: the Cuban Giants & Surviving Segregation…………48 “The Great Colored Base Ball Nine”: the Cuban Giants……………………….48 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………56 Appendix: Images……………………………………………………………………….58 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….63 3 | C a l i s e INTRODUCTION In 1895, the first black professional baseball player, John “Bud” Fowler, wrote about his disconcerting circumstance of not being able to join a team that year: “My skin is against me. If I had not been quite so black, I might have caught on as a Spaniard or something of that kind. The race prejudice is so strong that my black skin barred me.”1 By the mid-1890s, African Americans were all too familiar with Fowler’s struggle with prejudice and the separation of the races. The relatively fluid racial relations during post-Civil War America took a more divisive path toward the implementation of Jim Crow, in which African Americans of both the North and the South were forced to endure de facto and de jure inequalities following the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that determined separate was equal. Most tragically, there was an alternative path that the United States chose to abandon. Bud Fowler was not always barred from organized baseball. In fact, he enjoyed the fruits of playing on several prominent integrated professional teams since the late 1870s. Fowler experienced the fluidity of America’s racial relations firsthand while playing on these integrated teams; he witnessed the rise of grand opportunities for African Americans in the highest levels of organized baseball, and he also watched as those same opportunities gradually diminished across the country. African American participation in amateur, semi-professional, and professional baseball teams began almost immediately after the Civil War, and this sporting movement was most popular in New York, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding states. Indeed, the rise of African American participation in baseball paralleled the sport’s boom during and after the war, when the Union and Confederate soldiers helped spread the game across the country. The sport was so popular that many were already calling it the country’s “national pastime” by the mid-1860s, 1 As cited in Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 40. 4 | C a l i s e and, thus, its social and political significance was heightened as many believed that the sport of baseball could help reunite the war-torn country.2 With the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment and the early promise of greater racial equality, some African Americans sought out baseball for their own social and political gains in hopes of penetrating the mainstream society of America. As the country entered the phase of Radical Reconstruction in 1867, African Americans increasingly participated in amateur baseball—meaning they played for leisure, perhaps as a part of a fraternal organization, and did not get paid. In the early 1870s, baseball began professionalization with the success of the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the founding of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, comprised entirely of white players. The white professional leagues grew in popularity and participation, and the game became more organized throughout the decade. Although Radical Reconstruction ended in 1877, soon-to-be prominent African American players such as Bud Fowler were just starting their early amateur and semi-professional playing careers. In the 1880s, quite a few talented African Americans reached prominence on all-black and integrated professional teams, and this decade featured the greatest participation of black players in white professional leagues. In 1887, the International League—a minor league to the National League and American Association—established the color line in the top organized baseball leagues, which eventually led to the rejection of great players like Bud Fowler in 1890s Jim Crow America. The study of early African American baseball teams and players during post-Civil War America opens a window onto American race relations during the decades that led up to the application of legalized segregation. In the 1980s, Scholars C. Vann Woodward and Howard 2 George B. Kirsch, Baseball in the Blue and Gray: the National Pastime During the Civil War (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), x. 5 | C a l i s e Rabinowitz debated the extent of the fluidity of race relations during post-Civil War America before the advent of Jim Crow in the 1890s. Woodward published the first edition (there would eventually be four) of The Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, and his theories regarding the timing and rigidity of segregation in the southern United States have received much support and much criticism over the past decades. Woodward theorized that fluidity in racial relations existed as the country transitioned from Reconstruction in the 1870s to legalized segregation in the 1890s. Specifically in the 1880s, there was an “unstable interlude” of the “old heritage of slavery and the new…heritage of legal equality.”3 This period, Woodward stated, was a time of “experiment, testing, and uncertainty—quite different from the…rigid uniformity” of Jim Crow, and that the “most distinguishing factor in the complexity of social relations between the races was that of inconsistency. From 1870 to 1900, there was no generally accepted code of racial mores.”4 In 1988, however, historian Howard Rabinowitz disputed most of Woodward’s thesis contending that Woodward exaggerated the amount of fluidity and that his thesis was “much narrower than commonly believed.”5 Rabinowitz argued that Woodward’s evidence was limited to a few states in the South, and that it was limited to public conveyances. Overall, Rabinowitz theorized that “segregation emerged during Reconstruction,” and that it was “deeply ingrained in southern life in the immediate postwar years, if not before.”6 This paper will use African American participation in baseball as a unique way to view this long and significant debate in American racial history of the post-Civil War period. Essentially, this paper blends two divergent historiographies. Historians of race relations, such as 3 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow: A Commemorative Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 32. 4 Ibid., 33. 5 Howard Rabinowitz, “More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow,” The Journal of American History 75, no.3 (December 1988), 847. 6 Rabinowitz, 848. 6 | C a l i s e Woodward, have not generally utilized sports and popular culture to examine race in post-Civil War America. Instead, these historians tend to focus on the study of public accommodations and the failure of politics. Meanwhile, many baseball historians have not necessarily been in tune with the scholarship on race nor the debates about the openness of America society. Jerry Malloy, who employs Woodward’s arguments, is perhaps the only exception. When Woodward’s theory is applied to African American baseball participation, particularly in the North, then much of his argument seems quite sound. The period between the creation of one of the first all-black amateur teams to the creation of the first all-black professional team was characterized by relative fluidity in baseball’s social structure before the onslaught of segregation in the North and South of the 1890s. Examining the professional baseball careers of some of the best African American players—Bud Fowler, Frank Grant, and many others—one can understand this fluidity in racial relations. As Woodward stated, it was a period of inconsistency marked by both openness and intolerance; the United States, especially the North, had not fully decided on rigid racial segregation policies, whether they were de facto or de jure, until the 1890s.
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