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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Monthly Archives: April 2016

Charleston’s personal scrapbook and photo album

24 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Biography

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Anna Charleston Bradley, Katherine Charleston, Larry Lester, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Oscar Charleston, Raymond Doswell

In Kansas City on Friday I had the great pleasures of, first, having breakfast with pioneering Negro Leagues historian Larry Lester and profiting from his insight and wisdom; and, second, inspecting the Oscar Charleston scrapbook, photo album, and other items that Lester obtained from Oscar’s niece Anna Charleston Bradley some years ago.

The items–which I am fairly certain passed from Oscar to his sister Katherine before being given to Anna–are at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Dr. Raymond Doswell, below, made them available for me, added his own insights while I looked them over and took photos, and then took me to lunch at Chappell’s.

Thanks so much to Larry and Ray. These items are pure gold for the Charleston researcher–or really anyone researching the Negro Leagues. They provide a window into Charleston’s interior world and contain his personal photos of other players and life in Cuba in the 1920s.

Doswell and Beer

The Indianapolis Star announces Charleston’s debut

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Indianapolis ABCs

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Indianapolis ABCs, Oscar Charleston

Found, today, the Indianapolis Star‘s April 9, 2015, announcement of Oscar Charleston’s signing by the Indianapolis ABCs. Charleston, “a crack southpaw,” would make his debut on Sunday, April 11, as an 18-year-old against the Indianapolis Reserves.

Charleston “had just arrived in the state,” reported the Star. That makes sense. He had received his honorable discharge from the Army on March 20.

“Charleston has had considerable experience in the semi-professional ranks, being a member of the Twenty-fourth U.S. Infantry for the past three seasons.”

Not stated, but perhaps known by some of the paper’s black readers, was that he was a local boy, having lived only blocks away from Northwestern Park for most of his boyhood.

Let April 11 henceforth be known as Oscar Charleston Day.

 Charleston to debut cropped

The Ironies of Jackie Robinson Day

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Uncategorized

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Buck Leonard, integration, Jackie Robinson, Jackie Robinson Day, Jules Tygiel

Jackie Robinson Day is five days from now. On April 15, 1947, Jackie played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Needless to say, this was a very good thing for baseball and for America.

But as is often the case with good things, there were ironic consequences. Almost overnight, once Jackie was donning a Dodgers uniform everyday black baseball became a source of embarrassment rather than pride for the African American community.

“When Jackie Robinson began playing with the Dodgers, everybody forgot about us,” wrote Buck Leonard, a former star for the Homestead Grays and one of the greatest Negro League hitters of all time. “Some of us got good salaries right on to ‘49 and ‘50, but most of them ended after the war in 1945. Salaries wasn’t the only thing that went down. So did attendance at black baseball games. We couldn’t draw flies. Then, when they started taking blacks into organized baseball, that was just the end of it.”

What happened? Prior to integration, especially when such a thing seemed impossible, black baseball was a symbol of black self-help, excellence, and professionalism. But after integration, it was simply a painful reminder of all that blacks had to endure under segregation. It became a symbol and reminder of blacks’ purported inferiority. Who wouldn’t want to forget about all that?

The historian Jules Tygiel concluded in Baseball’s Great Experiment, the best book about Robinson and the breaking of baseball’s color line, “The side effects of integration included the destruction of a significant cultural entity and way of life. At one time the Negro Leagues had constituted one of the largest primarily black-owned and operated enterprises in the nation. With its demise, as Charles Epstein notes, ‘The possibility is strong that fewer blacks make their living from professional baseball than at any previous time in this century.’”

That certainly wasn’t what anyone had intended. It’s an open question whether it was inevitable.

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