the negro southern league

Reviewed by Tim Morris, University of Texas at Arlington

24 october 2015 archive

William J. Plott, eminent historian of black baseball (and past president of the Sport Literature Association), gives the definitive history of the Negro Southern League in his new book from McFarland.

The Negro Southern League, like its all-white counterpart the (unmarked) Southern League, was a minor league in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. My only awareness of it came from a couple of teams that, given the fluidness of the era, surfaced from time to time in one of the Negro major leagues. The Birmingham Black Barons are the best known, but there's also the weirdly named Atlanta Black Crackers. These teams are famous enough that you can buy retro, indeed apocryphal, team gear. You can buy a Black Cracker hoodie. There are numerous reasons why I'm not going to, but you can.

By contrast, teams like the Montgomery Grey Sox, the Chattanooga Choo Choos, the Evansville Reichert Giants, the Claybrook Tigers, and the Jackson Senators are far more obscure. Except that you can also buy a Montgomery Grey Sox hoodie. Is there anything you can't buy gear for? I guess what I'm trying to say is that a putative hoodie-buyer who chooses the San Francisco Giants probably knows something about Willie Mays or Barry Bonds or Madison Bumgarner. Anyone getting gear for these eighty-year-old Negro minor-league teams is likely to know nothing about the team they're advertising except that the name sounds cool and it's not the usual junk.

Plott has reconstructed rosters, statistics, and standings for the three-decade life of the Negro Southern League – to the extent possible, and it's often very partially possible. He has also tracked down all kinds of stray facts. There are many lacunae in the records of the league, and sometimes they correspond to lacunae in the operations of the league, which shut down and reopened several times in its history. Indeed, there are often no official records at all, leaving Plott to assemble a history from unsystematic newspaper accounts (and those newspapers and their archives are in turn tenuous). Plott's intellectual and organizational feat of producing coherent history out of this welter of facts is extremely impressive.

The Negro Southern League is what one might term a narrative reference book. It's in prose, with a few illustrations and some charts and tables and appendices, but you can't really read it straight through, and I'll make no pretence of having done so. It is structured chronologically, like an old-style print sports encyclopedia, and it's easy to navigate. Along with minutiae, the book provides anecdotes, and those anecdotes are naturally the most reader-friendly portions. Large-scale historical analysis or interpretation gets somewhat lost among a plethora of details, however.

We do get a sense of a lively, entertaining pastime. Segregation/Depression times in the South were no fun on a global scale, but people reacted to the overall political and social despair with subversion and jouissance. Trickster characters abound, like catcher "Red" Charleston of the Nashville Elite Giants, who would yell to a man on first with one out, while a pop was in the air, "Run Boy, there's two gone!" (87). Promotions were livelier than our current bobblehead and garden-gnome nights, and a good deal more practical. In Monroe, Louisiana, the Monarchs celebrated their 1933 home opener against the Little Rock stars with some fowl play:

A coop of chickens was to be turned loose with the birds belonging to whoever could catch them. (107)

The Stars, not to be out-promoted, dropped five dollars in nickels from an airplane before their own home opener against the Monarchs, followed by fifty loaves of bread (107).

Legendary players like Turkey Stearnes, Satchel Paige, and Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe appear briefly in these pages on their ways to higher levels of the Negro Leagues. But the focus is on the workaday and quickly fading records of ordinary players and teams that live again after many decades within the covers of this book. The Negro Southern League will be a must acquisition for amateur or professional baseball historians, library collections, and anyone interested in Southern and African-American history. It is an essential part of the record of American sport.

to the top of this page