The Negro Leagues: 100 years of baseball memories

Story by: Parth Upadhyaya

Russell Mosley can’t get the image out of his mind, no matter how hard he tries. It’s every bit as vivid now as it was over 60 years ago.

In 1955, Mosley was a shortstop with the Memphis Red Sox in his first year in the Negro Leagues. After the team’s game on the road against the Birmingham Black Barons was rained out, a few Red Sox players left their hotel to walk to a movie showing near downtown Birmingham, Alabama.

On their way, they glanced in a shop window; what looked like an embalmed body of a black man was hanging with a noose around its neck. A sign attached to the body read: “Don’t let this happen to you.”

“That was the first time I ever saw anything like that,” Mosley, 86, said. “And I think it took all of the wind out of us.”

And it helps explain why eight years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, the Negro Leagues still existed.

The Negro Leagues, which started in 1920 and continued through the early ‘60s, are celebrating the 100th anniversary of their establishment this year.

When Mosley graduated from St. Louis’ Lincoln High School, Robinson was in the twilight of a stellar career with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mosley says, at first, he, along with other young black baseball players in the U.S., were inspired.

“I said, ‘If he can do it, I can do it,’” he recalls now.

Mosley quickly learned it wasn’t that simple. In 1956, Robinson’s final year in the MLB, African Americans made up only 6.7% of major league rosters. And it took another three years for every Major League club to integrate, with the Boston Red Sox being the final team to do so in 1959.

But Negro League games were marquee events in the black community. This was no different in North Carolina — home to the Raleigh Tigers of the Negro American League.

Having spent time with the Raleigh Tigers and the Memphis Red Sox, Mosley had seen the harsh realities that came with being a person of color in the U.S. before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though there were hurdles they had to jump over to try to live comfortably, Mosley and many of his peers look at their time in the Negro Leagues as something they “enjoyed being a part of.”

These days, the Negro Leagues’ impact on baseball is often excluded from discussions of the history of the sport.

“The guys that are playing in the league right now barely know who the (Negro League) baseball players were,” Mosley said. “… It’s a forgotten history.”

‘What everybody wanted to do’

A few years following his hometown Boston Red Sox’s 2004 World Series win, Cam Perron was a young fan who began writing letters to his baseball heroes. When he realized the game’s biggest names weren’t responding, he started trying more obscure players.

Perron, now a 25-year-old researcher at the Center for Negro League Baseball Research (CNLBR), found names of Negro League players online. He wrote to them, and often quickly, they wrote back.

“I was sucked in by the fact that these guys played … and there was no recognition,” Perron said. “They had no baseball cards. They hadn’t really been recognized in any way. And I got pulled into that. How could I just let that go?”

Soon, Perron connected with Layton Revel, a historian who founded the CNLBR in 1990. According to its website, the CNLBR has “located over 500 players whose whereabouts were previously unknown or undocumented” over the past 16 years.

Perron has helped share the stories of players like Mosley, and left-fielder Sam Allen and catcher Ernest Fann — who both played for the Tigers, too.

The careers of Mosley and Allen overlapped in Raleigh in 1958, while Fann’s lone season for the team came in 1962. All three etched their names into the history of baseball. And all three dealt with the mistreatment that came with that.

“It was hard,” Allen, 83, said. “Because you were traveling. And we stayed on the bus — you’d sleep on the bus three nights, four nights a week. And the hotels you stayed in, they weren’t that great.”

Some of Raleigh’s players lived in a YMCA, others shared rooms in boarding houses.

The Tigers had to stay in black hotels and carefully choose restaurants that would serve them when on the road. Managers urged their players to avoid wandering in public spaces, in their own cities and elsewhere.

“When you get in a town, you go straight to the hotel,” Mosley said. “Most of the time they would tell you, ‘Stay in the hotel. Stay in this area. Don’t go running around the city.’”

To make matters worse, Negro League team owners — also black — would often shortchange their players. Tigers owner Arthur Dove was notorious for not paying players what they were owed.

Once, while on a trip was in 1958, the Tigers’ team bus broke down in Welch, West Virginia. The team stayed in a hotel, and Dove agreed to cover the tab as the bus was being repaired.

After almost two weeks, the hotel’s owner told players that Dove had taken the bus and left without paying. Over 250 miles from Raleigh with little to no money in their pockets, they were stranded, forced to hitchhike home.

“We got out there on the highway,” Allen recalled, “had suitcases, record players, jazz albums.”

Still, the love of baseball and the chance — no matter how slim it may have been — to one day play in the major leagues, was enough for young black ballplayers.

“That’s what everybody wanted to do,” Allen said. “That was your dream, to play in the majors.”

‘Fighting a power’

Even black players who were signed by major league organizations had to jump through hoops to get a legitimate chance to stick on rosters. Fann learned this first-hand.

After his only season with the Tigers in 1962, he was signed by the St. Louis Cardinals. An 18-year-old Fann began his MLB career in Brunswick, Georgia, with the Brunswick Cardinals, one of St. Louis’ minor league affiliates. A year later, he was traded to the then-Kansas City Athletics and placed on the Burlington Bees, a minor league affiliate of the Athletics in Burlington, Iowa.

The Bees’ owner housed the team in what Fann describes as a “nice trailer park.” Fann, on the other hand, had to live alone in a hotel. Experiencing racism outside of the team setting was one thing, but Fann had never before endured hatred in his own clubhouse.

“You were not supposed to say anything, no matter what (the manager) said,” Fann, 76, said. “I couldn’t sit on the bench with them. They didn’t want me on the bench.”

When a teammate once called him a racial slur and told him baseball was a “white man’s game,” Fann knocked him down. Soon, Fann was demoted to a lower-level Athletics affiliate in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Fann was moved from position to position with every club he played for in the majors — a strategy he believes prevented him from having sustained success. Injuries ultimately ended his career.

“They were really just kind of fighting a power that was very hard to push past,” Perron said. “Teams didn’t make it easy for you to advance.”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to think several other black baseball players’ major league careers ended prematurely in those early years of integration. Still, major league clubs often cherry-picked the best talent off Negro League teams. And fans followed these stars.

As a result, the Negro Leagues suffered and mostly died out by the early ‘60s.

With such a brief existence, many stories haven’t been told; much of the history has been buried. The work of Perron and Revel has unearthed at least some previously untold tales, though.

Through the CNLBR, they have helped discovered former players become eligible for the MLB’s pension plan for Negro League veterans. Players can qualify for the program by demonstrating proof of at least four years played in the Negro Leagues or a combined four years played in the Negro Leagues and major leagues. Mosley and Allen both receive pensions.

Since he was a high school freshman, Perron has also organized annual Negro League player reunions — which typically take place over Memorial Day Weekend in Birmingham.

“It’s created this platform for guys to come down and have this nice little weekend of recognition, activities, reminiscing,” he said.

This year’s reunion was especially significant because of the leagues’ centennial celebration. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has caused the CNLBR to halt planning with the uncertainty of whether the event will occur.

Mosley, Allen and Fann all seem to have made peace with the fact that most artifacts and records from their playing days aren’t properly archived. Mosley says that though he reflects on those years when he attends reunions and other Negro League events, it is still “something that happened in the past.”

But no matter how long ago that was, he and other former Negro Leaguers are grateful for whatever recognition they now receive. And 100 years after the establishment of the leagues, they look back at those memories with more fondness than sorrow.

“The Negro League was a blessing,” Allen said. “Because if it hadn’t been for a Negro League, there wouldn’t have been a Sam Allen.”