Peter Dreier / Research & Analysis / Players
The
New A League of Their Own Takes on Jim Crow–Era Racism
in
Women’s Baseball
By
Peter dreier
Jacobin
august
30, 2022
https://jacobin.com/2022/08/league-of-their-own-black-women
The
new TV show A League of
Their Own, about the true story of the WWII-era women’s baseball
league,
captures its racial segregation — with a central character based on
trailblazing black women players who were forced to play in the male
Negro
Leagues instead.
Chanté
Adams stars as Max Chapman in
the new TV series A League of Their Own. (Amazon Prime
Video)
In
the new Amazon TV
series A League of Their Own, Maxine “Max” Chapman (Chanté
Adams),
a talented pitcher with a wicked fastball, shows up in Chicago at the
tryouts
for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in its
1943
inaugural season. The players are impressed when she throws the ball
from the
outfield into the stands behind home plate, but one of the coaches
tells her,
“We’re not going to have colored girls playing with our girls.”
That
happened to the
teenage Mamie “Peanut” Johnson at an AAGPBL tryout in Alexandria,
Virginia, in
1952. The AAGPBL, which lasted from 1943 to 1954, never had a black
player,
even after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier with the
Brooklyn
Dodgers in 1947. (A few light-skinned Latinas who “passed” as white
were
permitted to play, as depicted in the Amazon series).
Prohibited
from
playing in the AAGPBL, three African American women — Johnson, Toni
Stone, and
Connie Morgan — played in the otherwise all-male Negro Leagues. In the
TV
series, the character of Chapman is an amalgam of these three female
trailblazers.
Like
Penny Marshall’s
Hollywood version of A League of Their Own — which
starred
Geena Davis, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell and is the most popular
baseball
movie of all time — the eight-part TV series focuses on the Rockford
(Illinois)
Peaches, one of four teams in the AAGPBL’s first season in 1943.
But
the 1992 film
skirted the issue of the league’s racial segregation. The only
reference to
that reality is a fifteen-second scene in which a ball rolls away from
the
playing field during a Peaches practice. A black woman picks it up and
fires it
back to the Peaches’ catcher played by Davis. The throw is so hard that
the
Davis character has to rub her hand to ease the pain. She stares at the
black
woman, who smiles back knowingly, as if to say, “I belong on that
field, too,”
before walking away.
The
TV series, which
recently premiered on Amazon and costars Abbi Jacobson, who also
cocreated the
show, directly confronts the issue of baseball’s racial segregation.
Chapman is
a central character throughout the series, highlighting the many
obstacles
racism puts in her way, on and off the baseball field.
The
AAGPBL’s founder,
Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate who also owned the Chicago
Cubs,
figured that baseball fans might buy tickets to see women play the game
while
many of their favorite major league stars were in the military during
World War
II.
The
Hollywood version
also ignored the reality that many of the AAGPBL’s best ballplayers
were
lesbians. League executives insisted that the teams avoid the
perception that
any players were gay. The league handbook required players to radiate
the
“highest ideals of womanhood” and “dress, act, and carry themselves as
befits
the feminine sex.” The AAGPBL expected players to “Play like a man,
look like a
lady” — or, as player Lois Youngen put it, “Look like Betty Grable and
play
ball like Joe DiMaggio.”
Team
chaperones
closely monitored the players’ clothes, hairstyles, and social
activities. The
new TV series puts the players’ sexuality front and center, depicting
their
off-the-field lives as young women experiencing their first taste of
independence and portraying their frustrations at the league’s efforts
to control
their activities and appearances.
“Why
do you think
they’re doing all this, Carson?” one player says to another while they
endure
the league-mandated charm school classes. “It’s to make sure we don’t
look like
a bunch of queers. That’s what all of this is.”
Enduring
a Double Burden
Banned
from the AAGPBL
because of her race, Chapman tries to get a job at a local factory in
Rockford,
which produces screws for the war effort and is eager to hire women
workers,
although reluctant to hire black women. She pushes her way into a job,
which
she wants because the company has a baseball team, the Screws, open
only to its
employees — part of a large wave of corporate-sponsored teams during
the war.
The
Screws manager
reluctantly gives her a tryout, but she blows her chance by pitching
wildly.
She begins to lose hope of ever playing organized baseball.
But
in the show’s
seventh episode, a barnstorming black team, Red Wright’s All Stars,
comes to
Rockford to play the Screws. When the All-Stars’ sole female player, a
pitcher
named Esther (Andia Winslow), gets injured, she urges the manager to
let
Chapman take her place. (We later learn that Esther, a lesbian who had
a brief
fling with Chapman at a gay party the night before, faked her injury to
give
Chapman a shot). Chapman pitches brilliantly, and the All Stars offers
her a
place on the team.
After
1947, as major
and minor league teams slowly hired black players, black fans began
losing
interest in the Negro Leagues. The Negro National League (NNL) folded
in 1948.
Its rival, the Negro American League (NAL), continued but struggled
with low
attendance. By 1953, only four teams remained. NAL team owners began
looking
for ways to rejuvenate the league’s appeal.
Syd
Pollock, owner of
the Indianapolis Clowns, was a brilliant promoter. The Clowns played
first-rate
baseball, but they also engaged in various theatrics to draw customers.
The
games included comic acts that fed on racist stereotypes, similar to
the play
of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team.
Some
players found it
demeaning, but they put up with it because they needed the jobs, and
the
theatrics brought in the fans. Not only did the Clowns win the NAL
pennant in
1950, 1951, 1952, and 1954, but it was also the league’s most
profitable club.
Despite
that success,
Pollock knew that the future of the league was in doubt. So he hit on
the idea
of hiring a woman to play for the Clowns. In 1952, after the Clowns’
star
player, Henry Aaron, signed a contract with the Boston Braves (who
later
relocated to Milwaukee, then Atlanta), Pollock sought to find a woman
to join
the team.
Born
in 1921, Marcenia
Lyle Stone — known as Toni — grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her
parents
emphasized education, not sports, but she was determined to excel in
athletics.
She played on her Catholic school’s boys’ baseball team then played
softball on
an all-girl high school team. Starting at fifteen, inspired by her
exposure to
barnstorming Negro League teams, she played for all-male semipro black
teams in
Saint Paul and San Francisco before joining the New Orleans Creoles
between
1949 and 1952.
Pollock’s
scouts found
Stone playing second base for the Creoles. After the Clowns signed her
to a
contract for the 1953 season, Pollock claimed that “this is no
publicity
stunt,” but he clearly recruited Stone to help boost attendance.
Pollock
tried to get
Stone to wear a skirt like the AAGPBL players, but she refused. She
wore the
regular men’s uniform. Pollock heavily publicized her arrival. Her
image was
included on scorecards, flyers, and other materials to promote the
games.
Toni
Stone, of the
Negro League’s Indianapolis Clowns, in spring 1953. (Transcendental
Graphics /
Getty Images)
Pollock’s
strategy
worked. With Stone in the lineup, the Clowns began drawing crowds
larger than
at any time since the late 1940s, including an opening game against the
Kansas
City Monarchs that brought 17,205 fans to the ballpark. Some exhibition
games drew
even larger numbers, including an increasing number of female fans.
But
some fans weren’t
pleased having a woman on the field. “Why don’t you go home and fix
your
husband some biscuits?” one yelled at her.
The
records of Negro
League games are incomplete, so it is impossible to say how well Stone
performed on the field. Stone was a good ballplayer, but most observers
at the
time said she was not up to Negro League standards. The Clowns
typically put
her in the game for the first two or three innings before replacing
her. Many
opposing pitchers gave her a break by only throwing fastballs.
In
response to the
publicity surrounding Stone, the Clowns received many letters from
coaches and
athletes promoting the talents of other black women seeking a chance to
play in
the Negro Leagues. Pollock wasn’t interested in fielding an all-women’s
team,
but he was open to adding one or two more women.
Johnson,
born in South
Carolina in 1935, began playing baseball after her family moved to Long
Branch,
New Jersey. She was the only girl, and the only black person, on the
Police
Athletic League team, helping them win two division championships. When
she was
twelve, her family moved to Washington, DC, and she began playing for a
local
black, all-male team, the Saint Cyprians. After graduating from high
school,
and after she was rebuffed by the AAGPBL, she continued to play for the
Saint
Cyprians on weekends while working at an ice cream shop.
At
the end of the 1953
season, Pollock hired Johnson — a five-foot-four, 120-pound pitcher —
to play
in the Clowns’ off-season exhibition games and then added her to the
roster for
the 1954 season. Based on existing statistics, she had a
thirty-three-to-eight
win-loss record during her years with the Clowns and was a solid hitter
with a
.270 batting average.
Women
in the Negro Leagues
Born
in 1935, Connie
Morgan joined an all-black women’s softball team, the North
Philadelphia Honey
Drippers, at age fourteen. At John Bartram High School in Philadelphia,
she
excelled in several sports, graduating in 1952 before enrolling in the
William
Penn Business School in that city. While in business school, the
nineteen-year-old Morgan read an article in the local newspaper about
the
Clowns hiring African-American women.
She
wrote a letter to
Pollock seeking a tryout and was invited to a Clowns’ exhibition game
with the
Baltimore Orioles in 1954. Pollock and his coaches were impressed with
Morgan’s
athletic skills and signed her to a contract. That season, batting
third in the
Clowns’ lineup, she hit approximately .300 in forty-nine games.
But
Pollock was also
impressed with Morgan’s appearance. She had light skin, a curvy figure,
and
curled hair, which seemed more “feminine” to management than Stone and
Johnson,
who also had darker skin. Pollock viewed Morgan as more marketable,
hired her
to a two-year contract in 1954, and made sure that she, more than
Stone, was
included in publicity events, including a photo of Morgan with Jackie
Robinson.
Pollock
put that image
on the team’s official scorecard. The Baltimore Afro-American ran
two photos of Morgan — one in her uniform, another wearing a white
dress and
gloves — with the caption: “Miss Connie Morgan: The baseball player and
the
lady.”
Angered
by the Clowns’
favoritism toward Morgan — who also played second base — Stone asked
Pollock to
trade her. He sold her contract to the Kansas City Monarchs before the
start of
the 1954 season.
As
result, three women
played on Negro League rosters that year. They each had to endure
catcalls,
physical harassment, sexual advances, pitches thrown at them when they
batted,
and ridicule from their male players on their own and opposing teams.
Pollock
and the team’s business manager reminded the male players that the
women were a
drawing card that put fans in the seats and helped pay their salaries.
Occasionally
the women
exacted revenge. Johnson threw fastballs at opposing players who
ridiculed her.
Stone once swung a bat at a teammate who sexually harassed her.
Ironically,
Sam Lacy,
Doc Young, and Wendell Smith — three prominent black sportswriters for
black
newspapers who had been in the forefront of the movement
for the racial integration of Major
League Baseball —
opposed the
entry of women in the Negro Leagues.
“Negro
baseball has
collapsed to the extent it must tie itself to a woman’s apron strings
in order
to survive,” wrote Smith soon after Stone joined the Clowns.
But
not all black
newspapers shared that sentiment. In 1954, the Kansas City–based Call referred
to Stone as “the female Jackie Robinson” who would “break down the
prejudice
against women players in the N.A.L.” Referring to Stone and
Morgan,
the Call wrote: “These two ladies prove that we no
longer can
refer to them as the weaker sex.”
A
New Generation of Women Ballplayers
By
1954, however,
attendance declined, as the novelty wore off and more Negro League
stars
embarked for minor and major league teams. The NAL folded, but the
Clowns and
Monarchs continued to operate as barnstorming teams, traveling around
the
country playing local semipro teams and occasional exhibition games
against
teams composed of white major leaguers during the off-season, similar
to the
one Max joins in A League of Their Own. The 1976 film The
Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, starring James
Earl
Jones, Richard Pryor, and Billy Dee Williams,” depicts the hardships
and joys
of those barnstorming black teams.
At
the end of the 1954
season, Stone left the Negro Leagues. She took care of her ailing
husband and
worked as a personal care assistant in San Francisco, but she was eager
to stay
connected to the sport she loved. She coached a Little League team
sponsored by
Saint Francis Cathedral, played in pickup games with local men’s teams,
and
joined a league of lesbian teams in the Bay Area.
Morgan
quit the Clowns
around the same time, after only one season, and returned to William
Penn
Business School in Philadelphia, completing the program in 1955. She
went to
work for the AFL-CIO, the labor union federation, in her hometown,
retiring in
1974.
Johnson
quit the Negro
Leagues in 1955, obtained a nursing degree from North Carolina State
A&T
University, and worked at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC,
for
several decades.
During
their brief
careers in the Negro Leagues, the black press covered their activities,
but the
white media — which generally ignored the Negro Leagues anyway — paid
almost no
attention to these three black female sports pioneers.
Robert
Peterson’s 1970
book Only the Ball Was White sparked renewed interest
in the
Negro Leagues, leading to a growing number of films, books, and oral
history
projects about black baseball. The film A League of Their Own triggered
an upsurge of interest in women’s role in baseball, inspiring books and
documentary films. The result was growing attention to Stone, Johnson,
and
Morgan.
Stone
was elected to
the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1993, and Saint Paul dedicated a
baseball
field to her four years later. Martha Ackmann’s biography of
Stone, Curveball,
was published in 2010, and an off-Broadway play based on her life, Toni
Stone, opened in 2019. Morgan was elected to the Pennsylvania
Sports Hall
of Fame in 1995. Stone and Morgan both died in 1996.
After
retiring from
her nursing career, Johnson coached youth baseball and helped run a
store of
Negro League memorabilia. In 1996, President Bill Clinton and Hillary
Clinton
honored Johnson at a White House ceremony. In 1999, Columbia, South
Carolina,
Mayor Bob Coble presented Johnson with a proclamation. In 2002,
Michelle Green
published a children’s book about Johnson, A Strong Right Arm.
In
2005, Washington, DC, Mayor Anthony Williams invited her to join him at
the
first game of the Washington Nationals. That year, Brown University
premiered a
one-woman play about her life, called Change Up.
In
2012, Johnson was
introduced to eleven-year-old Mo’ne Davis, an African-American pitcher
for a
Philadelphia-based team, the Anderson Monarchs, who were in Virginia as
part of
a nationwide bus tour to visit civil rights and baseball sites.
Mamie
“Peanut” Johnson with Little League pitcher Mo’ne Davis in
2014. (Howard Simmons / NY Daily News via Getty Images)
Two
years later, the
seventy-eight-year-old Johnson was invited to attend the opening game
of the
Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where she
watched
Davis, by then thirteen years old, pitch the first shutout by a girl in
a
championship game.
“That’s
me when I was
her age — the size, the way she throws, everything,” Johnson said at
the time.
“I never, ever thought I would witness this.” Johnson died in 2017 at
eighty-two.
Like
Stone, Johnson,
and Morgan had done for the Negro Leagues, Davis generated excitement
for
Little League baseball. In 2014, she was the first Little League player
to
appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Mark
Hyman, assistant
professor of sports management at George Washington
University, told the New
York Times that Davis was “the
most talked-about baseball player on earth right now.” According
to the Times, when Davis pitched in the Little League
World
Series, ratings increased for ABC and ESPN, which broadcast the games.
Davis
exemplified a
new generation of women (and black women) ballplayers. After Little
League,
Davis played varsity soccer and basketball at Spring Side Chestnut
Hill
and led the varsity softball team to a state championship. At Hampton
University, a historically African-American institution, she switched
from
pitching to playing infield. In 2020, her freshman year, she hit .333.
COVID-19
forced cancellation of her sophomore baseball season, but this year, as
a
junior, she hit .218.
After
the AAGPBL
After
the AAGPBL
folded in 1954, there were few opportunities for girls and women to
play
baseball. That changed after Congress passed Title IX in
1972. Little
League, which had banned girls since it began in 1939, revised its
charter in
1974 to allow girls to play. Girls’ participation in Little League was
boosted in
1976 when actress Tatum O’Neal starred as the only girl on her Little
League
team in the film The Bad News Bears.
Since
then, the number
of girls and women participating in sports, from childhood through the
professional ranks, has skyrocketed. The number of high school girls
playing
softball grew from 110,140 to 362,038 between 1982 and 2018, while the
number
playing in college increased from 7,465 to 20,316. These numbers
don’t
include the growing number of women participating in college club
sports and
in amateur and professional leagues around the country. Women’s
Professional
Fastpitch, a pro softball league that began play this year, is the
latest.
In
1996, Justine
Siegal started Baseball for All (BFA), a nonprofit organization, now
supported
by Major League Baseball, to encourage girls to pursue baseball (not
softball)
beyond Little League. Last month, BFA held its seventh national
tournament for
four hundred girls from six to sixteen at Bell Bank Park in Mesa,
Arizona.
More
and more colleges
are sponsoring women’s baseball teams. In addition, this spring, eight
women
are expected to play on otherwise all-male college teams — an all-time
peak.
Kelsie
Whitmore of the Staten Island FerryHawks bats during
their game against the Lancaster Barnstormers on August 27, 2022, in
New York,
New York. (Al Bello / Getty Images)
Some
women have even
played professional minor league baseball. Ila Borders — the first
woman to
receive a scholarship for men’s college baseball — played in several
professional minor leagues from 1997 to 2000. She stayed in the closet
until
after she left baseball.
Kelsie
Whitmore was
the only female on her high school baseball team in Temecula,
California. She
played softball for Cal State–Fullerton and led the US Women’s Baseball
team to
a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 2015 and 2019. This season,
the
twenty-four-year-old Whitmore is the only woman player on an all-male
professional baseball roster. She’s currently pitching and
playing outfield for the Staten Island FerryHawks
in the independent Atlantic League, one or two rungs below the majors.
The
only woman to play
in the professional major leagues so far has been Genevieve “Ginny”
Baker, an
African-American pitcher for the San Diego Padres on the fictional Fox
television series Pitch, broadcast in 2016 and canceled
after one
season. Hopefully she won’t be the last.