The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932 by Thomas Aiello (review)

In July 1932, the struggling Monroe Monarchs limped into Chicago. The showdown with the Chicago American Giants was the most-anticipated series of the season. Controversy had surrounded the close of the first half of black baseball’s pennant race: though the Monarchs had the better record at 31–7, prestigious national black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender had deemed the American Giants the winner. Of course, southern press coverage thought differently and did everything to court public opinion and make a case for Monroe’s champion black team. In Chicago, the pressure on the small-town southern club would be immense and the Monarchs were, at least on this occasion, unable to rise to the challenge.

Thomas Aiello’s The Kings of Casino Park is the story of Fred Stovall’s Monarchs, “who would become the only World Series team Louisiana would ever generate and the first from the American South” (1). Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1882, Stovall emerged as a black entrepreneur at a critical time in US history: the Great Depression. He benefited from the Texas-Louisiana oil and natural gas boom. While struggling to support his family and save money in Monroe, Louisiana, he built upon his experiences and knowledge base to establish the Stovall Drilling Company. By 1927, Stovall invested profits in the J. M. Supply Company, the first of several substantial business deals. However, baseball was his passion. By 1930, he had bought Casino Park—at a cost of seventy-five thousand dollars—for the benefit of Monroe’s black community. Casino Park had an adjacent pool, a dance pavilion, and casino for fans attending games at the baseball field. Stovall organized his team from the most athletic of his black employees. On May 11, 1930, the Monarchs played their first recorded game with the Newton Braves. While his business records no longer survive, it seems likely that the owner administered the Monarchs through the Stovall Drilling Company.

Given the outcome of this social drama, the Monarchs’ national and statewide notoriety, Thomas Aiello’s The Kings of Casino Park adds another chapter to the history of baseball in Louisiana. The postbellum history of organized black ball in Louisiana dates as early as 1868, when the New Orleans “Aromatics” captured the national imagination with their quaint moniker. In 1875, thirteen teams around the state held a baseball convention and formed the “Colored Leagues.” Monroe boasted African American clubs as well. In 1879, Monroe and Gum Swamp (Morehouse parish) crossed bats, the former winning by a score of 54–18. Gum Swamp returned the favor, “bulldozing” Monroe on its home ground. Stovall’s Monarchs recall Walter L. Cohen’s New Orleans Pinchbacks. Between 1888 and 1889, the Pinchbacks put Louisiana in the national spotlight. They traveled north and defeated strong “colored” clubs in St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. The New York Times clamored for a series between the Pinchbacks and Cuban Giants. Nothing new here: northern and southern black teams had been playing each another since the 1860s. While a comprehensive history of black baseball’s local, regional, and national successes and challenges at forming “Colored Leagues” remains to be written, Aiello’s social drama surrounding Negro League Baseball is worth considering.

The Monarchs, according to Aiello, served as two significant, simultaneous bridges: one linking the frayed edges of the two Negro National Leagues, the other linking the frayed self-conceptions of white and black citizens in violent, troubled Monroe, Louisiana. The Kings of Casino Park is important for the following reasons: (1) it introduces Fred Stovall, a black entrepreneur who supported a champion black ball club through his business interests (Henry Bridgewater, of the St. Louis Black Stockings, Harry Teenan Jones of the Chicago Gordons, and Cohen’s Pinchbacks are other postbellum exemplars); (2) it explores how print media held contradictory views of black baseball and...