Tag Archives: Satchel Paige

Oscar, race, and that story about the wrestler

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

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In 1920, when the first Negro National League was formed, Chicago Defender journalist Dave Wyatt predicted that “in the near future . . . Oscar Charleston will have to run bases protected by agile sons from all climes.” Oscar had taken note of that prophesy, pasting it in his personal scrapbook.[i] Sixteen years later, still waiting for Wyatt’s prediction to come true, he was happy to lend his name to the cause of racial equality.

In August 1936, the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper, began an effort to life baseball’s color ban. Given the paper’s (correctly) suspected loyalty to Moscow and the sensitive geopolitics of the time, the Daily Worker was hardly an ideal vehicle for the fight for racial justice in America. Nevertheless, the NAACP, the Chicago Defender, and others, including white sportswriters Dan Parker and Jimmy Powers, rallied to its banner.

The Defender of August 29, 1936, ran head shots of Martin Dihigo and Oscar Charleston with a caption that read, “Charleston, Satchel Paige, and other baseball stars barred from the major leagues have shown by their fine sportsmanship on and off the field that they are well worthy of recognition. That they are barred because of their color has been admitted by the powers that be in baseball and a move is being made to wipe out this practice.”[ii] The Daily Worker’s initiative had been “hailed” by players, said the Defender, including Johnny Taylor, Frank Forbes, Silvi Garcia, Dihigo, and Charleston. Whether all or any of these players knew this effort was associated with communism is an open question. Charleston, after all, was a Republican.

Plus, unlike most revolutionaries, Oscar had a lively sense of humor. Cool Papa Bell recalled a waitress who said the restaurant didn’t “serve niggers” getting the response, “That’s fine, I don’t plan to order one.”[iii] A well-worn line, but significant that Bell attributed it to Oscar. And as frustrated as he must have been by Jim Crow, Charleston retailed the following anecdote to Lewis Dial of the New York Age:

Oscar Charleston, manager of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, tells a funny story on Clarence Palm, catcher of the Black Yankees. A Colored all-star team was playing a white all-star club down in Mexico; both groups were from the United States. Palm was at bat and a big white Texan named Pipgras was pitching. Pipgras threw a couple of fast ones at Palm’s head which angered the colored boy, who walked out to the mound and beleaguered the white lad. Palm called him a big cracker and told him that he was not in the United States now but down in Mexico, and another pitch like those would cause the cracker to have his head punched. When the Colored team returned to the States, Palm was the first man off the train, and who should be standing on the station platform but Pipgras. The colored boy quickly gathered his wits and realized he was again in Texas. Charleston said Palm went over to the white pitcher, tipping his hat, and said ‘Good morning Mr. Pipgras, how are you this morning? Do you still have that fast bucking curve?[iv]

 

Oscar was himself happy to push back against white men who took liberties, even when he was in the South. But on one occasion, at least, he decided that standing his ground wouldn’t be a wise decision. It has often been repeated over the years, as a way of illustrating his ornery toughness, that Charleston once threatened to throw a professional wrestler from a train. That is true. But the point of the story, as told (probably) by Oscar himself, is that he was a fool for doing so.

It seems that Oscar was traveling by rail to Harrisburg sometime in the early 1930s when he took a seat opposite a burly white man. After Oscar sat down, the man looked up and told him that he would have to move, as he was saving the seat for someone else. Oscar, perhaps sensing racism at play, flatly refused to comply, telling the man that if he didn’t let him have the seat one of them was getting thrown out the window. At that, the man gave a hearty laugh. Before anything else could happen, a railroad employee leaned in and asked Oscar if he knew who the man was. When Oscar said no, the employee told him it was Jim Londos, one of the most popular—and chiseled—professional wrestlers in the country. Oscar, taking another look at The Golden Greek, decided to find a different seat.[v]

 

 

[i] Dave Wyatt, “Sweeping Educational Campaign in Baseball.” Article in ocs.

[ii] Chicago Defender, August 29, 1936, 13.

[iii] Bankes, The Pittsburgh Crawfords, 58.

[iv] Lewis R. Dial, “The Sport Dial,” New York Age, September 12, 1936, 9.

[v] Chester Washington, “Ches’ Sez: Rap’s Homer Beats Grays,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 3, 1935, A4. Harry Beale told the same story, at less length, in the same issue of the Courier (PAGE), so he and Washington must have gotten it at the same time.

Hank Greenberg on Charleston

17 Sunday Jul 2016

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In the literature of the Negro Leagues, it’s common to come across claims that so-and-so prominent white baseball player or manager said such-and-such about not-so-prominent black baseball player or manager. In the case of Oscar Charleston, Dizzy Dean and John McGraw are often said to have offered high praise for his abilities.

Usually, it’s really hard to find original, first-hand quotes from these white figures about the black player in question. The quotes are simply repeated, and inevitably garbled, by writer after writer, memoirist after memoirist. McGraw, especially, commented on about every Negro Leaguer there was, at one point or another, if the literature is to be believed.

I’ve hunted for years for a good McGraw-on-Charleston source, without success. But here, at least, is a pretty good, if second-hand, source providing the great Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg‘s thoughts on Charleston. It’s from 1940, when Charleston’s playing career was all but over and Greenberg was at his peak (he won the AL MVP in 1940). The source is Al Moses, a respected African American columnist.

Greenberg on Charleston

Just when Greenberg would have seen Charleston at the plate is unclear; he could have played against him in an exhibition, or he could have seen him play in New York, where Hank grew up.

Note the pairing of Oscar with Paige. Today we are often led to believe that during the Negro Leagues’ heyday Paige and Gibson towered over everyone else in the popular mind. This simply wasn’t the case. Paige was a uniquely powerful drawing card because of his charisma and theatrics, not to mention his ability, but Charleston was as popular and highly regarded among African American fans and sportswriters as anyone.

Bill James and Oscar Charleston, II

28 Sunday Feb 2016

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As Black History Month winds down, a little bit more from Bill James on Oscar Charleston.

In the second edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract, James rated Charleston as the best Negro League player in 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1925, and as one of the two best players (along with Cristobal Torriente) from 1917 through 1919. Charleston, in other words, was James’s retrospective Negro Leagues MVP for up to seven years. Josh Gibson was James’s Negro Leagues MVP choice for five years, Buck Leonard for four, John Henry Lloyd for four, and the Cuban Torriente for up to four.

Charleston was named by James as having had the “best power/speed combination” of any player in the Negro Leagues. He was one of six players who could lay claim to the title of “most aggressive baserunner.” Charleston also made James’s Negro League Gold Glove team.

MVP-level hitting, power, speed, baserunning, fielding. Not a bad combination. Good enough to make Charleston, in James’s estimation, the best center fielder in Negro League history. And with respect to two more highly celebrated New York center fielders, well, “Charleston, in a sense, put Mays and Mantle together. He combined the grace, athleticism, and all-around skills of Mays with the upper body strength of Mantle, plus he was a left-handed hitter.”

In sum, along with Josh Gibson at the plate and Satchel Paige on the mound, Oscar Charleston was for James one of three Negro Leaguers who could stake a credible claim to being the best ever at their positions.

Paige, Gibson, and Charleston played together for the 1932–36 Pittsburgh Crawfords. Not only did Charleston man first base for that team; he was also the manager.

What Bill James Said

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

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It’s Black History Month. One of these days perhaps Oscar Charleston will be one of the figures routinely remembered and celebrated in February. That’s surely not the case now–but it’s no fault of Bill James, whose ranking of Oscar Charleston as the fourth greatest player of all time in his New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract first brought Charleston to my—and I suspect quite a few others’—attention.

Bill James HBA

When he created it at the beginning of this millennium, James knew that his list of the top 100 players of all time would be controversial for having included twelve Negro League players. Of the six other top-100 lists he consulted, five excluded Negro Leaguers entirely. The sixth, produced by The Sporting News in 1998, included only five Negro Leaguers, and of these five—Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, and Charleston—Charleston was ranked last, 67th on the entire list.

Was James wrong to include more than twice as many Negro Leaguers on his list as had The Sporting News? Had he succumbed to sentimental muddleheadedness? It seemed unlikely, he argued. After all, thirty-four of his white players were born during the same time frame, 1867—1918, as his twelve Negro Leaguers. If anything, he reasoned, he was being too hard on the Negro League veterans. Consider: over the course of five years (1947—51), the Negro Leagues produced Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks. “If those leagues could produce five players like that in seven years, what about the previous forty?” asked James.

We might add that it’s not as if the Negro Leagues were competing against other sports for the best black athletic talent. Other than boxing and possibly track and field, which didn’t employ many athletes to begin with, baseball was often literally the only game in town for the aspiring black athlete of the 1900s through the 1940s.

But what about Charleston, specifically? After all, The Sporting News had ranked him 67th, behind four other Negro Leaguers. James chalked this up to ignorance; Charleston simply didn’t get any ink. There were no biographies of Charleston when James made his list, and there still aren’t—versus a dozen or so of Paige and a handful of Gibson. Charleston, to James’s knowledge, had never appeared on a single magazine cover. His anonymity accounted for why he was rated lower or not at all by other sources, not a considered, informed process whereby the other listmakers had simply come to a different opinion of Charleston’s accomplishments and abilities.

Besides, wrote James,

It’s not like one person saw Oscar Charleston play and said that he was the greatest player ever. Lots of people said he was the greatest player they ever saw. John McGraw, who knew something about baseball, reportedly said that. . . . His statistical record, such as it is, would not discourage you from believing that this was true. I don’t think I’m a soft touch or easily persuaded; I believe I’m fairly skeptical. I just don’t see any reason not to believe that this man was as good as anybody who ever played the game.

Seven reasons to care about Charleston

28 Monday Dec 2015

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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.

Charleston the (relatively) obscure

27 Sunday Dec 2015

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Why has Oscar Charleston remained so obscure, even among hardcore baseball fans?

That is probably the first question someone who claims that Charleston is baseball’s greatest forgotten player must answer.

There are several reasons.

First, Charleston died relatively young, at the age of 57. Within black baseball circles, he had been regarded as a living legend for years, but within those same circles the Negro Leagues, in which Charleston was still active at the end of his life, had become regarded as an embarrassing reminder of the ugly, segregated past. In the postwar years, almost no one, black writers included, was in a mood to celebrate yesterday’s Negro League stars. Quite understandably, they were focused on today’s heroes of integration—Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Don Newcombe—and on the injustices and obstacles that remained.

It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that historians trained their sights on the Negro Leagues. By the time the history of black baseball took off with seminal works such as Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White (1970) and Donn Rogosin’s Invisible Men (1983) were published, Charleston was long gone. Most of the Negro League veterans whom researchers interviewed had encountered Charleston only at the very end of his playing and managerial career. He stands larger than life in these reflections, many of them second-hand, but also shrouded in the mist of a fast-receding history.

Similarly, by the 1990s, when a new generation of statistics-savvy baseball scholars arose to show beyond doubt just how competitive and deep was the talent in black prewar baseball, Charleston had been dead for decades. Buck O’Neill, who played and managed against Charleston, was “right on time” in the 1990s and 2000s as the conscientious, compelling voice of black baseball, but Charleston never had his media moment.

Second, Charleston left behind little in the way of a paper trail. He could read and write, but there is no Charleston memoir—unlike, say, those of Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin, Quincy Trouppe, and Buck Leonard. There are no Charleston diaries, and so far as I can tell only a couple of known extant letters. He was quoted in the papers from time to time, and he gave a few radio interviews, but the interviews seem to be lost to history, and he wasn’t quotable like Paige. The record is such that in some cases we can probably have as much historical confidence in attributing words to Jesus as we can Charleston.

Finally, though he was twice married, Charleston seems to have left no descendants (I’d be so happy to be corrected about this!). No family members have publicly tended his flame. There has been no obvious person for sportswriters or historians to approach for the Oscar Charleston Story. And so that story has rarely been told. Legends and anecdotes—some contradictory, some dubious, some probably true—have risen up in that story’s stead. Few have bothered to subject these scattered fragments of memory to the test of sober historical analysis or to integrate them into a larger narrative.

And so Charleston remains unknown to most baseball fans, let alone most sports fans, and let alone students of black or American history. He is a ghost who resists historical enfleshment.