Commentary: African American Journalism and African American Journalists
Negro League Baseball Journalists
by Chitown Kev
After my previous column on San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick, I noticed that I had done two consecutive commentaries on the intersection of sports and race.
I’ve always been a sports fan. I recall having several shoeboxes full of baseball cards and in those days, I knew an obscene amount of the baseball stats on the back of those cards (in a parallel and alternate universe, I am certain that I am the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight). I knew an equally amount of obscene statistics for football (i.e. after the NFL expanded to 16 games for the 1978 season, the NFL adopted a formula, of sorts, of making schedules so I would occupy myself with figuring out who would play whom the next season). And, of course, there are the spiral notebooks full of my own predictions of the week’s college and professional football games where I measure my prognosticating skills against Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder.
And I enjoyed all of the sports punditry that was available at that time; my two favorites, of course, being Detroit Tigers radio sportscaster Ernie Harwell and University of Michigan football sportscaster Bob Ufer.
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I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never had much of an interest in Negro league baseball. I know of the best known players in those leagues’ history; Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Jackie Robinson..and that’s about it. I’ve seen the commemorative jerseys of Negro League teams, which have become fashionable in the last 20 or so years.
But beyond that...I know little or nothing.
And being the observer of not only the game itself but the punditry about the game, I began to wonder about the statisticians and the reporters of those times; the shoulders upon which Bryant Gumbel, Stephen A. Smith and Michael Wilbon stand.
Were there box scores of those games?
I was pretty sure that there wasn’t radio coverage of Negro league games, so anything that even resembled a call like The Shot Heard Around the World or Vin Scully's call on Kirk Gibson’s homerun to end Game 1 of the 1988 World Series (although I have a preference for Gibson’s 1984 World series-clinching homerun) would have been rendered in print.
What did these journalists and recorders of Negro league baseball do and how did they do it?
So off to the GoogleInfoBoomTube I went.
Jim Reisler’s Black Writers/Black Baseball: An Anthology of Articles from Black Sportswriters Who Covered the Negro Leagues is the standard reference on this essential topic in black sports journalism. While I was not able to locate a copy of this anthology at a library near me, there is preview of the book available at GoogleBooks. In his introduction, Mr. Reisler presents the picture of the working conditions of these sportswriters:
Black sportswriters had to be versatile. Because most black papers operated on slim budgets and even slimmer staffs, sportswriters were routinely pulled off their regular beats to cover other stories. Wendell Smith was simultaneously the Pittsburgh Courier’s city editor, assistant sports editor and sports editor. Romeo Dougherty and Dan Burley wrote sports and entertainment columns for The Amsterdam News. “It meant that you had to be aggressive and know a little bit about everything,” said Lacy. “By working for small papers with small staffs, we also covered beats that took us beyond sports and baseball. We had to be well-rounded writers.”
Typically, Lacy said, a black newspaper’s sports department consisted of two or three men, a couple of typewriters and a desk or two in the corner of a newsroom. Ed Harris reported more primitive conditions: “I was the sports department.” Still, they delivered an enormous volume of baseball coverage right on cue each April through October. “You just did the best you could,” said Lacy, “but it could be tough.”
Reisler p. 9
And, of course, included among those “working conditions” were the daily realities of Jim Crow:
When the writers did accompany their teams, they were subject to the same racial prejudice as the players. “They had white hotels and white restaurants,” said Leonard. “They had buses and we had to sit in the back. But it was something that we had been living with our whole lives, and baseball was only a part of it. Our time hadn’t come.”
Sam Lacy mirrored those sentiments with stories of how teams barred him from press boxes throughout the South. His columns about traveling with Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers during spring training tell of one rat-trap flea-bag hotel after another across town from the hotel housing white players. lacy detailed the daily racial humiliation in the pages of the Afro-American, drawing inspiration from his friendship with Robinson from the support of white Dodgers beat writers.
Reisler p.8
Here are a fewof the bios that I have found on these pioneers of black sports journalism, along with the paper that they wrote for.
Sam Lacy, The Baltimore Afro-American
Samuel Harold “Sam” Lacy was born on October 23, 1903, the son of Samuel Erskine Lacy, a legal researcher and Rose Lacy, a full-blooded Shinnecock Native American. His family moved to Washington, D.C. when Sam was young and his father was an avid fan of the Washington Senators baseball team (the Senators played just five blocks from the Lacy’s home). Sam was very precocious and would often run errands for the players and shagged fly balls for them during batting practice.
Unfortunately, Sam saw early, and up close, how pervasive racism was in the south when his father was spat upon by one of the Senators players during a parade for the team. “Back then, there was always a parade of players to the ballpark on Opening Day,”Sam would later recall. “Fans like my father would line up for hours to watch their heroes pass by. And so there he was, age 79, out there cheering with the rest of them, calling all the players by name, just happy to be there. And then it happened. One of the white players—I won’t say which one—just gave him this nasty look and, as he passed by, spat right in his face. Right in that nice old man’s face. That hurt my father terribly. And you know, as big a fan as he had been, he never went to another game as long as he lived, which was seven more years.” (Gaius Chamberlain)
Wendell Smith was born on March 23, 1914 and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. His father worked as a chef for automobile tycoon Henry Ford. Wendell was an excellent athlete, starring as an All-City baseball player as the only Black student at Southeastern high school would later played baseball for an American Legion team. He attended West Virginia State College, a historically black public college in Institute, West Virginia, where he was the sports editor of the school newspaper as well as playing on the school’s baseball team.
After graduating in 1937, he began working for the Pittsburgh Courier, a popular newspaper within the Black community. He started out as a sports writer, but was named the sports editor a year later. He covered many teams, including the Homestead Grays (who played most of their games in Pittsburgh but later played half in Washington, D.C.) and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, both of baseball’s Negro Leagues. While in his position with the Courier, he applied for membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America but was denied because the Courier was not one of the white-owned newspapers that was of the “credibility” necessary for membership. Undeterred, Smith cast a large presence from his position, calling attention to the blight that segregation put onto Major League baseball, by denying the fans the opportunity to see some of the greatest players in the land, who happened to be Black. (Gaius Chamberlain)
Frank Albert Young was born John Lake Caution, Jr. on October 19, 1884 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the eldest of four children of John Lake Caution and Annie C. (Collins) Caution. The elder Caution, descended from Haitian immigrants, was originally from Washington County, Maryland and worked in a lumber mill in Williamsport. Annie Caution's mother was Julia C. Collins, who in 1865, produced the first serialized novel written by an African-American woman, Curse of Caste, or the Slave Bride[5][6] The family lived at 342 Front Street in Williamsport.[7][8]
In November 1889, Annie Collins Caution died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-seven, leaving four young children aged between one and five. In June 1892, John Caution was fatally injured at an accident at the mill where he worked. Orphaned, the four children were taken to Cambridge, Massachusetts by their father's brother and sister-in-law, Cornelius and Emma (Blake) Caution; upon her death seven months later, all four were placed in a local orphanage. The two eldest, John Lake and Belva Lockwood Caution, were adopted by an African-American couple, William F. and Margaret E. (Green) Overton, of West Medford, Massachusetts[9] where they lived until 1900 when John, known as John Overton, ran away from home, changing his name to Frank Albert Young.[10]
Under that name he worked at a number of jobs until he got work as a Pullman porter. By 1905, he was working as a dining car waiter for the Chicago and Northern Railway when he married eighteen-year-old Adaline Harrison in Chicago; they would have two children, a son and a daughter. The marriage was not successful, and in 1918, he married native Chicagoan Cora K. Bowman (1893–1960), who survived him.
The constraints of time, space, and (admittedly) lack of research prevent me from writing much more. For example, I have barely scratched the surface of reading the columns written by so many of the giants in black sports-writing. I only wish that I had done a project like this 40 years ago...but then there wouldn’t be the fun I’m having in making up for lost time, right?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A sense of place allows both shows to tell authentic stories that revolve around multidimensional characters that bear no resemblance to the caricatures we are so used to seeing. The Root: With Atlanta and Queen Sugar, TV Gets a Dose of Real Southern Blackness.
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In name, the black South has shown up on television quite often in recent years. NBC’s sleeper hit comedy The Carmichael Show is set in Charlotte, N.C. Tyler Perry’s numerous series mostly take place in and around Atlanta. One could even argue that Perry’s success has been a gateway for more Atlanta on the small screen. House of Payne preceded the reality shows The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta as well as more respectable fare like Being Mary Jane andSurvivor’s Remorse.
But none of these shows are wholly invested in black Southern identity. Atlanta and Queen Sugarare, but not in a preachy or politically advancing manner. Instead, both shows are centered in a sense of place. And that specificity helps anchor each narrative, though they differ substantially. Having location as a bonus character enables both shows to dig deep and tell authentic stories that revolve around multidimensional characters that bear no resemblance to the caricatures we are so used to seeing. Consequently, these people feel not only like real people but like people you actually know or could be.
FX’s Atlanta, created by and starring Donald Glover, whose family moved to nearby Stone Mountain, Ga., when he was a kid, is probably not what most people, even his own fans, could have imagined. Even though Glover is also a rapper known as Childish Gambino, his FX show is largely a result of his work playing community college student and onetime-hotshot high school jock Troy Barnes on the long-running, quirky series Community, which debuted on NBC back in 2009.
Earn, Glover’s character, is living way beneath his Princeton potential and has run out of options until an underground single by his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), who goes by Paper Boi, offers him new hope. The journey to manage his cousin’s budding career is far from a blinged-out tale of wannabe Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta vixens, VIP sections and expensive jewelry. Instead, it gets down and dirty.
It’s distinctively black and Southern. And that comes courtesy of the all-black writers who are brand-new to television, with the reported exception of Glover. They refreshingly abandon the disposable formula that has plagued far too many black-cast TV comedies. Atlanta digs deeper, going darker than most, while maintaining the weird and quirky vibe for which Glover is known.
Almost equally important, Atlanta challenges the concept of urban being just Northeastern, as in New York or Philadelphia, or Midwestern, as in Chicago or Detroit. Even though early Southern rappers like Memphis, Tenn., icons 8Ball & MJG and, later, Atlanta’s T.I., Jeezy and, now, Future have rapped and even boasted about the South’s mean streets, the perception of the South from the outside is still more about the KKK than an AK. For many of us, the hood is still the promised-land-turned-ghettos of places like Philadelphia, Newark, N.J., and Los Angeles. For some, Atlanta remains a haven, a way out of the grind of urban life. Maybe Atlanta is arguably a better existence for transplants than natives, but it is the hardships natives face that Atlanta addresses most.
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As he runs for president of the United States, a liberal democratic constitutional republic, Trump can’t hide how impressed he is with dictators, especially when they are also white/European nationalist. Slate: Another Reason Trump Loves Putin.
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We don’t have a firm answer to why Trump is so taken with authoritarians. At most, we know that he is preoccupied with dominance and “strength,” is obsessed with opulence and projected wealth, and sees life as a contest defined by “winners” and “losers.” But this edges into speculation and amateur psychoanalysis. What we can say for certain is that Trump’s personal admiration for Putin, at least, sits side by side with his material ties to Putin and assorted Russian oligarchs, from former campaign manager Paul Manafort—who worked to elect a Putin ally in Ukraine—to the strong evidence that Trump’s businesses received substantial funding from Russian elites.
Still, you don’t need to spin a web of connections between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin to get why Trump sees some advantage in praising the latter. To start, there’s already a language of Putin admiration on the mainstream right, where the Russian president is contrasted as a supposedly masculine alternative to the presumably effete Barack Obama. Take Sarah Palin’s slam from a few years ago. “Look, people are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.”
From there, it is just a short step to the more aggressive Trump campaign admiration of Putin, especially with Trump’s relationship to white nationalism. Trump and his team swim in the fever swamps of the racist right. Trump’s “campaign CEO,” Stephen Bannon, ran a website that acts as a haven for the youngest generation of white supremacists. Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., often tweets and retweets voices from the conspiratorial and white nationalist right, voicing a hard line on undocumented immigrants and the Muslim ban.
Within those fever swamps, there is real admiration for Putin as a “defender” of “Western civilization” against Muslims and multiculturalism. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s counterpart in anti-immigrant demagoguery, Nigel Farage of the U.K. Independence Party, also praises Putin as a talented “operator.”
With Trump’s attacks on immigrants and Muslims, his belligerence, and his long history of poor management and aggressive scapegoating, it seems that this is what we can look forward to under a Trump administration: a “great” America, under a new regime of kleptocratic authoritarian nationalism.
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In her 1975 Choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf, feminist author and activist Ntozake Shange demanded—through her character lady in brown—that “somebody/anybody sing a Black girl’s song.” Here we Black women are, some 40 years later, still fighting to be seen, to be recognized for all we give to this nation (and the world!) by way of our loving, sacrificial battles for Black lives, our endless contributions to Black culture, and especially our effortless beauty—which is constantly and savagely co-opted every damn day.
What we have learned, and certainly what Ntozake Shange was trying to teach us all those years ago, is that we have to be willing to sing our own songs, to ourselves and one another. And there aren’t many sisters to who sing to us in the ways that educator, cultural critic, producer and activist Dr. Yaba Blay does.
Dr. Blay loves us Black girls how we deserved to be loved.
Whether she is talking the politics of colorism in our collective communities, teaching our young, gifted and Black as the Daniel T. Blue Endowed Chair of Political Science at North Carolina Central University, or filling our social media feeds with the kinds of gorgeous images of Black womanhood often overlooked in the mainstream media and beauty industry, Blay’s love for Black women is bone marrow deep.
The ultimate Black girl lover has penned a new love letter to Black women through her original video series Professional Black Girl, which seeks to, “celebrate everyday Black womanhood, and to smash racist and ‘respectable’ expectations of how they should ‘behave.'” For the series, Blay interviewed 15 Black girls and women (who range in age from 2 to 52) asking each participant to talk about what makes them, and all Black women, professional Black girls—Black girls who take their style, beauty and cultural expression of Blackness to expert levels.
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For Scott Sheppard, a creator of a new play called “Underground Railroad Game,” the real game it’s based on was one of those childhood experiences that seem normal at the time, but weird, even horrifying, in retrospect.
Playing it was meant to be educational for Mr. Sheppard, now 32, and his fellow fifth graders in 1990s Hanover, Pa., a historically minded town just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, near Gettysburg.
For a unit on the Civil War, teachers split the students, who were overwhelmingly white, into two teams: Union soldiers, whose task in the game was to smuggle as many slaves — represented by dolls — as possible to freedom in Canada, and Confederate soldiers, charged with recapturing the dolls as they made their way north.
“Basically the Confederate soldiers were patrolling the hallways and looking around between classes or at lunch,” Mr. Sheppard said. “The Union kids were looking for opportunities to sneak the slaves in their book bags or in their pockets so that they could move them to the next safe house.”
Whichever side amassed the most points by the end of the unit won the war.
Beginning performances on Tuesday, Sept. 13, at Ars Nova, “Underground Railroad Game” — a squirm-inducing, comic two-hander about the legacy of slavery in America, sex included — is the creation of Mr. Sheppard and Jennifer Kidwell with their Philadelphia-based theater company, Lightning Rod Special. (Toby Zinman, a theater critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer,called the play a “brilliant theatrical commentary on contemporary race relations.”)
Directed by Taibi Magar, the show’s New York premiere comes at a moment when the Underground Railroad has returned to the cultural conversation (think Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad” and Ben H. Winters’s novel “Underground Airlines”), partly because of the 150th anniversary last year of the end of the Civil War.
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Solange Knowles Writes In her own Blog About Her Experience in White Spaces After Being Harassed at a Kraftwerk Concert. SAINT HERON: AND DO YOU BELONG? I DO
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It’s the same one that says to your friend, “BOY…. go on over there and hand me my bag” at the airport, assuming he’s a porter.
It’s the same one that tells you, “m’am, go into that other line over there” when you are checking in at the airport at the first class counter before you even open up your mouth.
It’s the same one that yells and screams at you and your mother in your sleep when you’re on the train from Milan to Basel “give me your passport NOW.”You look around to see if anyone else is being requested this same thing only to see a kind Italian woman actually confront the agents on your behalf and ask why you are being treated this way.
It’s the same tone that the officer has when she tells you your neighborhood is blocked for residents only as you and your friends drive home from a Mardi Gras parade, when you have a residents tag on your car. You’ve been in the car line for 10 minutes and watched them let every one else pass without stopping them at all.
It usually does not include “please.” It does not include “will you.” It does not include “would you mind,” for you must not even be worth wasting their mouths forming these respectable words. Although, you usually see them used seconds before or after you.
You don’t feel that most of the people in these incidents do not like black people, but simply are a product of their white supremacy and are exercising it on you without caution, care, or thought.
Many times the tone just simply says, “I do not feel you belong here.”
Imagine.
Telling your son and his friend Rasheed about a band you love and one that played a pivotal role in the history of hip-hop. Something that as a family you all feel very connected to.
Imagine, although the kids are interested, they are still 11, unfamiliar, and would rather be spending their Friday night differently. You and your husband are always talking to your son about expansion and being open to other things and experiences, so you guys make the Kraftwerk concert a family Friday night.
You get there about 10 minutes late, but lucky for you, as soon as you walk to your box seats, the song that you just played for your son in the car is on! It’s a song his uncle sampled, ” The Hall of Mirrors.” You haven’t even sat down yet because you just walked to your seat and you’re so excited to dance to this DANCE MUSIC SONG.
Simultaneously, a much older black venue attendant comes over to your son and his friend and yells “No electronic cigarettes allowed, you need to stop doing that now!”
You are too into the groove and let your husband handle it and tell the attendant that the children are 11 years old, and it’s actually the two grown white men in front of you guys who were smoking them.
You are annoyed and feel it’s extremely problematic that someone would challenge their innocence, but determined to stay positive and your husband has handled this accordingly.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH