Category Archives: black history month

Beyond Jackie Robinson

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Faster than you can say “Jackie Robinson,” the first sports topic always cited during Black History Month is that Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Famer breaking baseball’s color line in 1947.

Naturally. At the time, baseball’s prominence in American society was uncontested—the NBA had been formed only the previous year; the NFL was small peanuts; only college football had any sort of national awareness—so Robinson’s breakthrough represented a vast public advance in civil rights.

But an evening listening to one of Evan Weiner’s wide-ranging excavations of historic nuggets regarding Black sports history adds crucial layers to the subject.  Weiner—who describes his career as “radio, a lot of radio, some TV, some pundit work”—lays out the numbskullery and scullduggery in the story of segregated sports.

Such as the dumb “belief”—based on ignorance—by Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis, in 1987, that Blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager.” (Campanis was summarily fired.) And the 1950s NFL edict that its teams could have “up to four Negro players [but] none could be quarterbacks, centers or middle linebackers”—theoretically “cerebral” positions.

Then there was the thoroughly undisguised racism that for years prevented the few Black players on white professional teams from service at whites-only restaurants and hotels. And the kind of double-dealing of George Preston Marshall, who owned the NFL’s Washington Redskins from 1932 to 1969 while barring all Blacks from his team and his Washington baseball counterpart, Clark Griffith, refusing to sign Blacks even as he profited from renting out his D.C. ballpark for Negro League games.

Weiner covered all this and provided other relevant tidbits during a recent 90-minute presentation beamed on Zoom to my Hofstra University sports journalism students—one of countless talks Weiner gives on radio, TV documentaries, libraries and others public forums. He also produces books and podcasts on varied human affairs from rock-n-roll, censorship and World War II.

Here’s one detail I hadn’t realized before Weiner’s talk: When Cleveland Rams owner Dan Reeves maneuvered the transfer of his team to Los Angeles in 1946, making the NFL the first professional coast-to-coast sports entertainment industry, a pre-condition to play at the publicly funded Los Angeles Coliseum was that the team be integrated.

Reeves therefore signed Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, two former UCLA football teammates of Jackie Robinson—the year before Robinson became baseball’s first Black player. In Cleveland, meanwhile, the new franchise in an upstart league, the Browns of the All-American Football Conference, also signed two Black players for the 1946 season, Bill Willis and Marion Motley.

Weiner noted how Baltimore manager John McGraw in 1901 had attempted—unsuccessfully—to sneak a light-skinned Black infielder, Charlie Grant, into the newly formed American League by identifying Grant as a Cherokee Indian named “Tokohama.” Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey objected and McGraw left Grant off his roster. And the so-called “Gentleman’s agreement,” in which baseball owners conspired not to offer contracts to Blacks, prevailed for almost a half-century.

Then there were tales from Weiner of resistance. By Lakers star Elgin Baylor who, in 1959, refused to play an NBA exhibition game in Charleston, W.Va., after Black players couldn’t get equal accommodations with their white teammates. (That led to a league rule against playing in states with such practices.)

And the refusal of Walter Beach, a Boston Patriots defensive back, to stay by himself in segregated living conditions during the team’s 1961 exhibition game in New Orleans. And the Black players joining Hall of Fame center Bill Russell of the Celtics in boycotting a game in Lexington, Ky., after being declined restaurant service in that city. And Black members of the Oakland Raiders protesting segregated seating at their scheduled Mobile, Ala., exhibition game against the Jets, forcing the game to be moved to Oakland.

Weiner’s interactions with key figures spiced his talk, particularly first-person recollections from the late Wally Triplett, who had been Penn State’s first Black player and in 1949 was the first Black drafted by an NFL team (the Detroit Lions). Triplett, Weiner reported, had befriended Jackie Robinson early in Robinson’s career and served as Robinson’s chauffeur, confidant and card-playing buddy, making a point of bringing Robinson to Triplett’s mother’s house for a home-cooked meal whenever the Dodgers were in town to play the Phillies.

One of Triplett’s former Penn State teammates, a fellow named Joe Tepsic, had been a Dodger rookie in 1946, when he played only 15 games and was hitless in five at-bats. The story was that the struggling Tepsic’s Dodgers’ mates wanted Tepsic demoted to the minors and replaced by a veteran pinch-hitter.

Jackie Robinson that season was spending his first season under Dodger contract with their top minor-league team in Montreal, “and while there was no indication that Brooklyn would have brought up Robinson if Tepsic had gone down to the minors,” Weiner said, “Triplett, who was a close friend of Tepsic, believed that Dodger manager Leo Durocher wanted that to happen.”

It didn’t. Until the next season. How’s that for a Black History Month morsel?

The non-Cuban Cubans who made black baseball history

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It’s Spring-like somewhere. And, really, this is an ideal time to conflate the passing of Black History Month with the approaching baseball season—even here in cold, cold Babylon Village, on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y.

Especially here. This is where—more than a century ago—a staff of waiters, bellhops and porters at a fading resort, the Argyle Hotel, formed America’s first black professional baseball team. That was the summer of 1885—62 years before Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Aug. 22, 1885 edition of Babylon’s South Side Signal reported that a game on the Argyle grounds, between the National Club of Farmingdale and the Athletics of Babylon, was won by “the employees at the Argyle Hotel,” 29-1.

Formed by Argyle headwaiter Frank Thompson, they became known as the Cuban Giants, so named by a white New Jersey promoter who soon bankrolled them for Harlem Globetrotter-style tours. The name may have been based on the racial realities of the day—that white crowds would sooner pay to see Latinos than blacks play ball. Or maybe the result of the sporting press, known at the time to euphemistically refer to blacks as Cuban, Spanish or Arabian. Or perhaps became the team’s manager, Stanislaus Kostka Govern, was a native of the Caribbean.

In his 1995 book, “Complete History of the Negro Leagues,” Mark Ribowsky wrote that, in spite of “reams of attention in the press….it takes a leap of the imagination to believe that anyone who came to see them perform was really conned” by the Cuban ploy.

Less clear is whether the players originally were paid (top salary: $18 a week) to provide entertainment for hotel guests or, in fact, had baseball as their primary jobs.

A 2005 book, “Out of the Shadows: African-American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson,” edited by Bill Kirwin, said Thompson recruited players from as far away as Washington and Philadelphia. And Jules Tygiel, the late historian of black baseball, wrote that the team toured the East in a private railroad car and consistently drew sellout crowds—and was such a success that there was a handful of imitators. The Cuban X Giants in New York, Page Fence Giants from Michigan, Lincoln Giants from Nebraska.

At the time, base ball (two words in the American vocabulary then) was becoming the nation’s No. 1 spectator sport, and the Cuban Giants were a powerhouse, winning all 10 games against white competition in 1885 and proclaimed the “world colored champions” of 1887 and 1888.

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

A story in the black Indianapolis Freeman newspaper soon reported that the Cuban Giants had beaten “the New Yorks” two straight games and that “the St. Louis Browns, Detroits and Chicagos, afflicted with Negro phobia,” declined challenges to play the Cuban Giants—“unable to bear the odium of being beaten by colored men,” the paper said.

By the 1890s, the Cuban Giants periodically counted on their roster such widely acclaimed players as Frank Grant, considered by baseball historian Robert Peterson to be the best black player of his era; Sol White, called by black sports historian Art Rust, Jr. the best long-ball hitter of his time; and Bud Fowler, memorialized in Cooperstown as the first black man to be paid by a white baseball team (and there were several for the barnstorming Fowler).

At the time, Babylon was past its peak as a booming resort destination triggered by the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road in 1867, when New York city’s summer crowds and other tourists made their way to nearby Fire Island. The Argyle, funded by a syndicate headed by LIRR president Austin Corbin and built on the former estate of railroad magnate Electus B. Litchfield, was the last of a dozen hotels in the village. Among the Argyle’s investors was the son of the Duke of Argyll; thus its name.

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

(Babylon Historical and Preservation Society)

But it never was more than one-third occupied, fell into disrepair by the 1890s—even as its employees began to rule the base ball world—and was razed in 1904. Some of its wood lives on in homes situated on the hotel’s old grounds, on the West bank of Argyle Lake—which had been a large mill pond during the resort’s existence.

In 2010, a plaque—remembering the Cuban Giants—was erected on the approximate site of the team’s playing field. There is a home plate next to the marker. That is covered by snow for now. But it’s Spring-like somewhere, just as sure as there is baseball history right here.

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