The American Indian Integration of Baseball (review)

The first baseball players of the twentieth century to hear "nigger" from the stands of Major League stadiums were not African-Americans but American Indians, according to Jeffrey Powers-Beck's monumental book, The American Indian Integration of Baseball. They also heard "back to the reservation," "dumb injun," "redskin," "war hoops," and other similar derogatory comments.

A non-Indian, the author is a professor of English and assistant dean of graduate studies at East Tennessee State University. The foreword to the book is written by Joseph B. Oxendine, a Lumbee Indian and the retired chancellor of North Carolina's Pembroke State University. Oxendine notes that most observers believe that the entry of Jackie Robinson into Major League baseball in 1947 marked the beginning of integration and racial issues in baseball. He further comments that anti-Indian behavior was in some instances bolder and more vocal than anti–African-American behavior.

This book presents by far the most extensive compilation ever assembled of American Indian baseball players during the period 1887–1945. Perhaps the first American Indian baseball player in the Major Leagues was James Madison Toy, of Sioux ancestry, who played for Cleveland in 1887, three years before the massacre of more than 300 Sioux by the 7th Calvary at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which ended the last of the century-long American Indian wars. Toy's Sioux ancestry was well disguised behind a handlebar mustache. Another Cleveland player, Louis Francis Sockalexis, a Penobscot, is properly credited by the author as being the pioneer who initiated the then-known American Indian integration of Major League baseball.

While the story of the later integration of Major League baseball by African-Americans is well documented, this book is the first to detail the racist stereotypes, foul epithets, and abuse from fans and players that courageous American Indian pioneers of integration endured during their baseball careers. Most baseball researchers would be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of American Indian baseball players. Surveying the 1887–1945 period, the author lists forty-seven Major League players by tribe and another eighty-five with possible American Indian ancestry. He compiled his listing from self-reporting of American Indian ancestry on the Ancestry blank on the Player Questionnaires in Cooperstown's library, Indian boarding school records, and repeated and convincing evidence from press accounts.

The author not only provides information about successful Indian Major League players but also includes interesting profiles of little-known players. Two early Hall-of-Famers are Indian pitchers Charles "Chief" Bender (White Earth Band of Chippewa) of the Philadelphia Athletics and outfielder Zack Wheat (Cherokee) of Brooklyn's National League club. Other well-known Indian players are catcher John "Chief " Meyers (Cahuilla) and outfielder Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox, Potawatomi, Kickapoo) of the New York Giants. Players who had only brief Major League careers but distinguished Minor League service include Cherokee pitchers Ben Tincup and Vallie Eaves.

Understandably, the book contains scant information about American Indians who have played in the Major Leagues after 1945. It is hoped that the author will extend his writings to the later years of the twentieth century and the present day to include profiles of such Hall of Fame players as Johnny Bench (Choctaw) and Willie Stargell (Seminole) and current pitchers Bobby Madritsch of the Seattle Mariners (Sioux) and Kyle Lohse of the Minnesota Twins (Nomlaki Wintun).