Notes
Notes note: authors and titles for newspaper articles are not included. authors for such accounts were rarely listed, as most game descriptions were submitted by teams themselves . each paper then provided different titles for similar accounts. instead, dates and page numbers will direct anyone interested to the necessary sources. introduction 1. Insurance Map of Monroe and West Monroe, Louisiana, 1932 (new york: sanborn map Company, 1932), Composite, 18:28–30, 19:26; and “Property of the heirs of William Thomas; section 76, Township 18n, r4e” (maps), Plat book, ouachita Parish, book 2, page 2, 12, ouachita Parish Clerk of Court, ouachita, la. 2. New Orleans Item, 6 may 1919, 8. 3. Kansas City Call, 18 march 1932, 5b; and Atlanta World, 11 march 1932, 7; 20 march 1932, 7. 4. “The Golden years,” negro leagues baseball museum, Kansas City, mo. 5. michael lomax argues in his study of nineteenth-century black baseball entrepreneurship that the negro leagues as a “unifying element” of a community is a common and self-evident historical conclusion. but what makes it unifying? The actual feelings one could experience on a drive through the “booker T. Washington” district of 1932 monroe and the true constitution of that “unifying element” are difficult to know. lomax notes the common tendency to create uncritical, laudatory accounts of black baseball’s relationship to its constituent metropolitan area—a sort of fallback position, a cheat, in which the presence of a baseball team itself (particularly one with colorful or talented stars) begins as a “unifying element.” such studies then use that a priori assumption as evidence, rather than finding evidence to prove that their original “unifying element” even existed in the first place. black baseball histo- 178 / notes rians, he argues, are putting the cart before the horse. That isn’t to say that the cart doesn’t belong there at all. black baseball teams did serve as a “unifying element” for their communities. and the monroe monarchs served as a “unifying element” for theirs. The team’s relationship with both the black and white press, as well as its relationship with its league, helped build its status in the community. so too did that community’s desperation, its need for release and/or hope in troubled times. if hope was the thing, however, there needed to be something more than just relationships. historian harold seymour has argued that twentieth-century sport gave the black population an ephemeral but powerful opportunity for success. african americans made more permanent achievements in other fields, he notes, but athletics brought meaningful black successes to popular attention. and so, victories (however ephemeral ) mattered, too. They did, in fact, drive the development of those other makers of unity. Winning led to community interest, which led to increased newspaper coverage, which helped ensure the preservation of box scores, game write-ups, and opinion pieces. it offered no guarantees. but it made contemporary and historical survival possible. michael e. lomax, Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860–1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary (syracuse, ny: syracuse University Press, 2003), xv– xvi, xvii; and harold seymour, “blacks and sport: Depression and after,” harold and Dorothy seymour Papers, 1830–1998, box 31, Card 200, Collection no. 4809, Cornell University, ithaca, ny. Chapter 1 1. Monroe News-Star, 30 april 1919, 1; Monroe News-Star, 8 may 1919, 4; and New Orleans Times-Picayune, 12 may 1919, 5. 2. These numbers come from the count of the naaCP. similar counts by Tuskegee proved even higher for 1919. The different counts stem from different definitions about the nature of lynching. The naaCP of 1919 defined lynching as a mob of three or more persons, representing the intentions of an entire community. by the end of the decade, the naaCP would no longer require community support as a necessary element of lynching. The change in definition, notes Christopher Waldrep , was not the result of an improvement in white behavior. it was the politics of the continually changing definition of “lynching.” Waldrep describes the first four decades of the twentieth century as an arena in which various institutions fought to present their own definitions of the word to serve their own respective political ends. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (new york: Palgrave macmillan, 2002), 5–7, 127–45. 3. The reaction to the lynching came almost entirely from the press, the religious community, and random letter writers. no politician in state government recorded notes / 179 an official comment...
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