Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1902-1931: The Negro National and Eastern Colored Leagues

Photographs

1. John Henry Lloyd was often referred to as the “Black Honus Wagner .” In 1911, Lloyd was named to succeed Sol White as the Lincoln Giants’ field manager, marking the start of his long career as one of the leading player-managers in the black game. 2. Philadelphia Giants with co-owner and player-manager Sol White (back row, second from the left). In 1907, White’s History of Colored Baseball attempted to make black professional baseball a legitimate profession. 3. In 1906, the Philadelphia Giants were the premier club in black baseball. Seated in the middle is the Giants’ co-owner, H. Walter Schlichter, and standing behind him on his left is co-owner and player-manager Sol White. Harry Smith (standing in the back row on the far right) rounded out the Giants’ management team. 4. The Lincoln Giants in their inaugural season of 1911. The Giants represented the last outstanding black club on which Sol White left his imprint. 5. C. W. “Colonel” Strothers (seated in the middle of the first row) ran the Harrisburg Giants as one of the top independent black clubs in the East. The Giants began as a sandlot team in 1891. In 1924, the Harrisburg Giants became a member of the Eastern Colored League. 6. The Leland Giants were the premier black club in the West in the opening decade of the twentieth century. In 1907, Frank Leland (seated in the front row) hired Andrew “Rube” Foster (standing, back row far left) to serve as player-manager. That same year, they defeated Donlin’s All-Stars, which served to heighten the Giants’ and Foster’s prestige among African American fans. Leland’s election as Cook County commissioner led to him establish a coalition among the leading black middle-class professionals in Chicago and form the Leland Giants Baseball and Amusement Association. 7. In 1915, Charles Isham “C. I.” Taylor (seated in the center of the second row) moved his club from West Baden, Indiana, to Indianapolis and renamed the team the ABCs. They challenged Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants for black baseball supremacy in the Midwest. 8. In 1912, Nat Strong assumed the ownership of the Brooklyn Royal Giants from John Connor. Strong’s alliance with Lincoln Giants’ magnate James J. Keenan enabled both men to gain a virtual stranglehold on eastern black baseball in New York. 9. The return to black baseball of John Connor (seated in the center) was the result of a partnership with Bacharach Giants’ owners Henry Tucker and Tom Jackson and Harlem café owner Baron Wilkins. In 1919, Connor secured a leasing agreement with Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner Charles Ebbets to schedule games in Ebbets Field when the National League club was on the road. The leasing agreement with Ebbets allowed the Bacharachs’ management team to sign top-level players away from the Brooklyn Royal Giants and Lincoln Giants and bypass Nat Strong’s booking agency for games in Gotham. 10. Rube Foster’s Chicago American Giants in 1920, the Negro National League’s opening season. 11. A type of the promotional materials that black baseball club owners used to promote their games. The Harrisburg Giants were scheduled to play against a local white semiprofessional club in Lititz, Pennsylvania. 12. Ed Bolden’s Hilldale club prior to the start of the 1924 Colored World Series. Hilldale would lose a tough series to J. L. Wilkinson’s Kansas City Monarchs. 13. A souvenir program from the 1924 Colored World Series. 14. The Hilldale Baseball and Exhibition Company promoted the club with the concept of “Clean Baseball.” In other words, the Hilldale players were to compete on the diamond on the basis of fair play and good sportsmanship and conduct themselves as gentlemen off the field. The fans were also expected to behave in a manner aligned with black middle-class values. 15. In 1926 and 1927, the Chicago American Giants won both the Negro National League pennant and the Colored World Series. Rube Foster was unable to celebrate his club’s success due to his nervous breakdown. In his absence, however, the American Giants continued to play “the Rube Foster way.” 16. Oscar Charleston was arguably black baseball’s premier...