The Baltimore Elite Giants: Sport and Society in the Age of Negro League Baseball

by Bob Luke

The true story of the Baltimore Elite Giants. Robert Peterson Award, Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference One of the best-known teams in the old Negro Leagues, the Elite Giants of Baltimore featured some of the outstanding African American players of the day. Sociologist and baseball writer Bob Luke narrates the untold story of the team and its interaction with the city and its people during the long years of segregation. To convey a sense of the action on the field and the major events in the team’s history, Luke highlights important games, relives the standout performances of individual players, and discusses key decisions made by management. He introduces the team’s eventual major league Roy Campanella, who went on to a ten-year Hall of Fame career with the Brooklyn Dodgers; Joe Black, the first African American pitcher to win a World Series game; and James "Junior" Gilliam, a player and coach with the Dodgers for twenty-five years. Luke also describes the often contentious relationship between the team and major league baseball before, during, and after the integration of the major leagues. The Elite Giants did more than provide entertainment for Baltimore’s black residents; the team and its star players broke the color barrier in the major leagues, giving hope to an African American community still oppressed by Jim Crow. In recounting the history of the Elite Giants, Luke reveals how the team, its personalities, and its fans raised public awareness of the larger issues faced by blacks in segregation-era Baltimore. Based on interviews with former players and Baltimore residents, articles from the black press of the time, and archival documents, and illustrated with previously unpublished photographs, The Baltimore Elite Giants recounts a barrier-breaking team’s successes, failures, and eventual demise.

Genres: Baseball, History, Sports

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 24, 2009

Reviews

[Paul of Bethesda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Baltimore Elite Giants played baseball from 1938 to 1950, representing Maryland’s largest city in two different African American leagues during the segregation era. Fans knew that the word “Elite” in the team’s name was pronounced “EEE-light,” with the accent on the first syllable. While this franchise had previously played in Nashville, Cleveland, Columbus, and Washington, the team found its true home in Baltimore, and Bob Luke tells their story well in his 2009 book The Baltimore Elite Giants.

Luke, an author based in Garrett Park, Maryland, has made the Negro Leagues of segregation times his area of focus – meaning that he brings to this study of Sport and Society in the Age of Negro League Baseball (the book's subtitle) a great deal of time, study, and prior knowledge.

The Elite Giants were not Baltimore’s only African American baseball team, or even the city’s first. The Baltimore Black Sox began play in 1916, and won an American Negro League pennant for the city in 1929. But as Luke chronicles, the Elite Giants came to Baltimore at just the right time to find a supportive home among the city’s African American community. It was the time when the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor of West Baltimore was at its most vibrant – home to many prosperous black-owned businesses, and to a thriving performing-arts district where artists like Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington frequently played. As Luke puts it, “Baltimore, with its large and growing black population and large black middle class, was just the kind of city [team owner Thomas] Wilson needed for his baseball team” (p. 23).

Operating a Negro Leagues baseball team in segregation days was anything but easy. Everything from finding the team a place to play on the one hand, to meeting payroll for players and other employees on the other hand, could be a challenge. Indeed, just getting recognition for the fine work that a team like the Baltimore Elite Giants was doing could be difficult. In 1936, when the Elites were still playing in Washington, D.C., team owner Wilson “invited [President] Franklin Roosevelt to throw out the first ball of the Washington Elites’ 1936 season in Griffith Stadium but received a reply that FDR was too busy” (p. 75) – even though President Roosevelt did find time to toss out the first ball for the Opening Day debut of the major-league Washington Senators later that same year.

But within a year after the Elites made their move to Baltimore, they brought their new home city a championship. Luke sets down in a succinct, sportswriterly manner the process by which the Elite Giants won the Negro National League pennant over the Homestead [Pennsylvania] Grays in 1939: “The game was scoreless over six innings. In the seventh, [Burnis “Wild Bill”] Wright doubled off Roy Partlow. [Bill] Hoskins singled Wright home. [Roy] Campanella sent Hoskins home with a single after Hoskins had advanced to second on an error. Then [pitcher Jonas] Gaines loaded the bases with Grays….Player-manager [Felton] Snow brought Willie “Bubber” Hubert out of the bullpen to pitch to Henry Spearman, who hit a weak pop-up. Hubert proceeded to set the Grays down in order in the ninth” (p. 50). At a time when members of Baltimore’s African American community faced severe discrimination in a still-segregated city, the Elite Giants gave black Baltimoreans something to cheer about.

As Major League Baseball moved toward integration, the era of the Negro Leagues moved toward its end, and Luke captures well that time of change. Jackie Robinson’s integration of the major leagues in 1947, when he first took the field as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, is of course a well-known story. What may not be as well-known, for readers from outside the Baltimore area, is that an important and difficult part of the saga of baseball’s integration took place in Baltimore.

In 1946, one year before Robinson began play for Brooklyn, he suited up for the Montreal Royals of baseball’s International League, a top-flight minor league. The Montreal fans, in a city where Québécois citizens had their own history of facing discrimination from a cultural majority, took Robinson and his family to their hearts. But Baltimore was the only Southern city in the IL, and Robinson faced a harsh reception from white Baltimore fans on his first visit there in a Royals uniform: an attempted player boycott of the game by the host Orioles, loud racial abuse shouted from the stands all game long, and a mob of angry whites collecting around the visiting-team dressing room until dispersed by police.

Jackie Robinson was, to be sure, welcomed and celebrated by Baltimore's African American community; but the memory of the hateful behavior of those white fans stayed with him. Robinson later told legendary sportswriter Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American that “Baltimore was worse” than anything else that he faced in his ascent toward the major leagues. Robinson added that “The nasty things Baltimore people threw at me hardened me….I knew I was coming into the South and I suppose I was preparing for just about anything, but that Baltimore, holy gee…” (p. 101). For me as a Marylander, it is painful to contemplate how some Baltimoreans treated Jackie Robinson.

The Elite Giants won another championship for Baltimore in 1949; but as the major leagues integrated with increasing speed, it was clear that Negro Leagues baseball was passing into history. Richard D. Powell, whose ties to the Elite Giants went back to the team’s beginnings in Baltimore, tried heroically to negotiate some dates for the team to play in Oriole Park, home of the minor-league Orioles; but the Baltimore Park Board turned him down, stating that “We haven’t reached the point where the Elites represent the city of Baltimore as by custom the Orioles do” (p. 125). The Baltimore Elite Giants passed into history in 1950, but their legacy has never faded from the city’s collective memory -- or from the history of Major League Baseball, as Hall of Fame major-league players like Roy Campanella got their start with the Elite Giants.

The Baltimore Elite Giants is well-illustrated, with photos of Elites personnel and memorabilia, along with a Baltimore Transit Company map on which one can mark different sites associated with the team’s history. Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press of Baltimore, in accordance with the press’s long-time focus on Central Maryland regional history, Luke’s The Baltimore Elite Giants provides scholars of African American history, and baseball fans, with a helpful look back at this historically important baseball team.

[Jim Gold · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chronicle of the Negro League team in Baltimore from the late 1930's to the early 1950's. A weakness of the book is uninteresting play by play accounts of long forgotten games. One learns to quickly skim over these paragraphs. A strength is the sense the book gives of the role baseball played in the Baltimore African-American community social life during this period. The interactions between the various business people involved in operating the team and the players is more compelling than the game accounts.
The best part of the book comes in the last few chapters which focuses on the integration of major league baseball and the resulting demise of the Negro Leagues. The reminisces and various perspectives of those who lived through this period on what was gained and what was lost is fascinating. I was surprised to learn that future major league stars Roy Campanella, Joe Black and Junior Gilliam spent many years playing for the elites.
I started working in Baltimore in 1989 and was surprised by how much the man-made geography seems to have changed from the 40's, in part from highways being built and neighborhoods upended.

[Barb Flory · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting material but not well written.

[Daryl Grigsby]

this book was a great analysis of how black entreprenuers and athletes overcame lack of capitall, outright racism, a smaller and poorer fan base; and other obstacles to create a vital and viable black business which became a foundation of pride and culture in black Baltimore.