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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Tag Archives: Branch Rickey

The New York Daily News

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Brown Dodgers

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baseball integration, Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Daily News, Oscar Charleston, United States League

ran an excerpt from Oscar Charleston yesterday, in which I discuss Oscar’s role scouting for Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Presumably the article provided readers with a welcome interlude between stories about headless corpses and dogs driving cars.

By spring 1945 two years had passed as Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, deliberately searched, to no avail, for the first black man to sign for his team.

Part of the problem, he believed, was that it was hard for his white scouts to show up at Negro League games without arousing suspicion. It was even harder for them to get accurate inside knowledge about the character and background of any given player. Oscar Charleston and a new black baseball circuit called the United States League (USL) provided Rickey with a solution to this twofold dilemma.

More here . . .

Monte Irvin, R.I.P.

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Brown Dodgers

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Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson, Monte Irvin, Oscar Charleston

Nearly a year ago, I began to try to get in touch with former Giants great Monte Irvin. I was, of course, interested in talking to him about his memories of Oscar Charleston. Unfortunately, his health was already in serious decline. Today comes the sad news that he has died. May he rest in peace.

In his memoir, Nice Guys Finish First, Irvin wrote about Charleston and his role in helping Branch Rickey’s Dodgers scout black players–including, perhaps, himself:

“I had already gone to Puerto Rico when I heard that Jackie had signed with the Dodgers. I had gone down there to get back into shape shortly after I was discharged from the Army on September 1, 1945. Branch Rickey announced that he had signed Jackie on October 23rd of the same year. I was very happy for him. I wasn’t jealous of Jackie’s success, but I was envious. I thought, Gee whiz, why couldn’t that be me?

“Most people don’t know that Oscar Charleston was involved in the process of finding a player for Rickey to sign. Oscar was very smart and an astute baseball person. When they had their meetings, he was telling them who was out there, who was signable, and who would probably be able to make it. Oscar was probably working directly under Clyde Sukeforth. Clyde couldn’t have picked a better man to help him than Oscar, and Rickey couldn’t have picked a better man than Jackie Robinson.”

Managing the Brown Dodgers

03 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Brown Dodgers, Managing Career

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Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, Heritage Auction, Oscar Charleston, United States League

As this check shows, Oscar Charleston was paid $500 per month to manage the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers of the short-lived United States League in 1945. Usually referred to as the brainchild of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Branch Rickey, the league had another moving force in former Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee, for whom Charleston played in the 1930s.

This check was sold at auction for more than $35,000 in 2010. See this Heritage Auction page for more info.

Charleston Brown Dodgers check

Seven reasons to care about Charleston

28 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Branch Rickey, color line, Connie Morgan, Indianapolis Clowns, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Mamie Johnson, Native American, Neil Lanctot, Oscar Charleston, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Tiger Woods

Why should anyone care about Oscar Charleston? Seven reasons:

First, Charleston achieved the highest level of excellence within his field. For black Americans in the pre-integration era, a transcendent star like Charleston served as an exemplar, if not the exemplar, of what virtue and excellence looked like with respect to the practices of baseball. Charleston’s mastery of those practices represented the apex of the black baseball tradition’s development. It revealed what was possible for the black player to achieve, and by extension what was possible for black flourishing more generally. To powerfully influence the black imagination, Charleston didn’t have to fight for black liberation or play in the white major leagues. He simply had to symbolize black equality, if not superiority, through his achievements on the diamond. And that is precisely what he did.

Second, Charleston was a great manager. One poll of former Negro Leaguers ranked him as the best, and virtually all black baseball historians agree he was one of a handful of truly great managers in the game. He not only managed after his career was over, he was a manager while he played, as was the style at the time. Among the teams he led were the 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the greatest teams of all time, black or white.

Third—and no one that I know of has ever made this point before—Charleston was probably the first black scout to work for a major league team. The Dodgers’ Branch Rickey hired Charleston sometime in 1945 or 1946 to help him identify and research black players who might be good prospects for breaking major league baseball’s color line. And (as historian Neil Lanctot pointed out to me) it was Charleston who convinced the Dodgers to sign future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella.

Fourth, Charleston was allegedly part Sioux Indian. If true, this makes him one of the three greatest Native American athletes in history, along with Jim Thorpe and Tiger Woods. And honestly, I’m not certain that Thorpe and Woods were greater.

Fifth, Charleston managed and mentored two of the three women to play professional baseball in the Negro Leagues. This was one of the Indianapolis’s Clowns’ tactics for getting fans to the park in the post-Jackie Robinson era. Charleston took his job seriously, putting Connie Morgan and Mamie Johnson through drills in winter-time Philadelphia to prepare them for the season. Mamie Johnson recalled to me on the phone that Charleston was “a beautiful person.”

Sixth, Charleston was perhaps the most respected man in the Negro Leagues because of his fierce commitment to his craft. He played hard—and, earlier, in his career, with a terrifying mean streak. In a word, he was a badass (but not a berserker). Charleston illustrated for the black community the toughness necessary to make it in an unjust world.

And finally, seventh, Charleston served a critical imaginative need within the black community by being more representative than either the theatrical Satchel Paige or the college-educated Jackie Robinson. To other Negro Leaguers and to black America at large, the temperamentally flawed blue-collar Charleston was much more clearly an everyman, one of them. That was worth a lot.

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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

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