Peter Dreier / Research & Analysis / Players

Frank Sykes: Baseball Rebel

By Peter Dreier and Robert Elias

Excerpted from Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)

Baseball rebels often make a mark on their sport, speaking out against injustice when others remain silent, ignoring the wrath of their managers, owners, and fans. Some ballplayers take even greater risks beyond the game. Such was  the case for Frank Sykes, who embroiled himself in one of America’s most controversial criminal trials.

Sykes was born in Decatur, Alabama, in 1892, the son of former slaves. He

grew up playing baseball with his five brothers. Sykes graduated from Morehouse College, the historically Black school in Atlanta and then attended medical school at Howard University in Washington, DC Although he also played at Morehouse, Sykes was a standout baseball and basketball player at Howard, and as a pitcher he never lost a game. In 1914, while continuing his studies to become a dentist, Sykes was signed by the New York Lincoln Giants. He pitched in the 1917 Negro League’s World Series, and played for the Lincoln Giants through 1919, a year after his medical school graduation.

Sykes went on to pitch for several other Negro League teams, including the

Philadelphia Giants, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Hilldale Daisies, and the

Baltimore Black Sox. For the latter team, for which he played between 1920 and 1926, he had a 13–3 season in 1921 and a 30–6 season in 1922, during which he pitched a no-hitter against the Atlantic City Bachrach Giants. It was said that Sykes was “a pitcher hitters did not want to face.” Tutored by Rube Foster, Sykes learned to stop trying to blow pitches by batters and rather to vary speeds and location, about which Foster observed, “Well, college, I see you’re learning some sense.”1

Besides winning games, Sykes also helped improve economic conditions

for his fellow ballplayers. During the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression,  Black teams took their players off fixed wages and adopted the “co-plan,” in which the owners received 25 to 30 percent of each game’s net profits and the players had to share the rest. Sykes organized other players to demand that team owners pay all players fixed salaries. When his Baltimore Black Sox played a Major League All-Star team, he protested that Blacks were receiving lower pay than the whites. While playing ball, Sykes also maintained his dental practice in Baltimore until 1927, when he ended his thirteen-year Negro League career and moved his office and family back to his hometown of Decatur, Alabama.

In March 1931, after a fight broke out on a Southern Railroad freight train

in Jackson County, Alabama headed for Chattanooga, Tennessee, police

arrested nine Black teenagers, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, on a minor charge. When deputies questioned two white women, Ruby Bates and  Victoria Price, they accused the young men of raping them while onboard the train. The nine teenagers—Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Andrew and Leroy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, and Eugene Williams—were transferred to the local county seat, Scottsboro, to await trial. They quickly became known as the “Scottsboro Boys.” After a week-long trial, eight of the teenagers were convicted and sentenced to death, triggering a nationwide protest movement.

The trial was an outrageous miscarriage of justice. The local newspapers

proclaimed the teenagers’ guilt even before the trial began. The defense attorney at the trial had no criminal law experience and was inebriated. The convictions and sentences were reached by an all-white jury. Teenagers were tried as adults. They had been falsely accused, but even if they had committed the crime, they would have been victims of a racist criminal justice system. In the South, capital punishment for rape was reserved exclusively for Black men.

As it turned out, the alleged victims had been drinking and had been

involved sexually with some white boys on the train. Concerned about being arrested for prostitution and coerced by the white sheriff’s deputies to lie, they accused the Black teenagers in order to deflect attention from themselves. In a letter later written by Ruby Bates, she admitted that the Black young men had not raped her or her friend.

The International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal wing of the American

Communist Party, took on the case, hoping it would galvanize public opinion against racism. The Communist Party and other leftists also mobilized a movement to “free the Scottsboro Boys,” organizing rallies, speeches, parades, and a letter-writing campaign to protest the verdict. Despite this effort, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven of the defendants, granting Williams a new trial because he was a minor at the time of his conviction.

In November 1932, the US Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. Alabama that

the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel, which violated their right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. It ordered a new trial. That trial took place in the circuit court in Decatur, fifty miles west of Scottsboro and Frank Sykes’s hometown.

Decatur was not alone among Southern towns in excluding Blacks from

the jury rolls. In response, Sykes led a movement to protest this injustice,

even though such initiatives could threaten his livelihood and even his life.



“Action, not words, counted most with him and he wasted neither,” said

journalist Bill Gibson about Sykes.2 Preparing for the new trial, Samuel Leibowitz, a prominent New York attorney who had taken on the case, claimed that Blacks were systematically excluded from juries. He called Sykes to testify, and Sykes revealed a list of two hundred Black citizens in Decatur who were qualified to serve on a jury but hadn’t been called.

The challenge of providing the Scottsboro Boys a strong defense increased

when the indictments were split and separate retrials were pursued for the different defendants. Patterson and Norris were again convicted and sentenced to death in 1933; the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed those verdicts in 1934.

Thinking back, Sykes couldn’t understand how the whites on the jury—some of whom he knew—could convict obviously innocent Black young men and still “call themselves Christians. I supposed they didn’t think any more of a Negro than they did a dog.”3 In 1935, however, the US Supreme Court again overturned the convictions in the landmark case of Norris v. Alabama. Influenced by Sykes’s testimony, the Supreme Court agreed that excluding Black citizens from the jury (which the lower court had done again) was discrimination and a violation of Constitution.

Unfortunately, the Alabama courts wouldn’t relent, and they pursued

several more trials against the young men. During one of them, Sykes

housed Black journalists for Northern newspapers who were reporting on

the case and shifted them from home to home when they were threatened

with violence. Sykes himself was targeted by white racists and was involved in a high-speed chase to avoid a car full of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members. When the KKK burned a cross on his front lawn, Sykes felt he had to protect his family, and they returned to Baltimore in 1937. He resumed his dental practice there and  died in 1986 at the age of ninety-four.

While charges were dropped against several of the Scottsboro Boys after

six years of wrongful imprisonment, Norris was again sent to death row,

Andrew Wright was sentenced to ninety-nine years, and Patterson and

Weems received seventy-five years each. The US Supreme Court declined to review those convictions despite persistent evidence of racism. Those sentences were eventually reduced, but the trials persisted into the early 1950s. Despite the continuing injustice in these cases, the resistance by Sykes to all-white juries contributed significantly to the emerging “due process revolution” of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sykes knew what was at stake in the Scottsboro trials for himself and all

African Americans, and with a growing national and international audience

watching, he stepped up to help reform American criminal justice amidst a

seriously hostile environment. His son, Larry Sykes, later observed, “Even

though his money [livelihood] was generated in the Southern cotton economy as a dentist, my father knew he had a responsibility to testify.”4 “You can bet,” observer Bill Gibson recounted, that Sykes’s actions “took more nerve than it required for him to set down the Bachrach Giants [in his no-hitter] in 1922.”5

Notes

1. John B. Holway,  “Frank ‘Doc’ Sykes as Told to John Holway.” The National Pastime

Museum, July 8, 2013.

2. Quoted in Lawrence Hogan, The Forgotten History of African American Baseball. Westport, CT:

Praeger, 2014,  122.

3. Holway, “Frank ‘Doc’ Sykes.”

4. Deangelo McDaniel, “Scottsboro Boys Record,” The Decatur Daily, September 30, 2007, http://archive.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/070930/scottsboro

.shtml.

5. Quoted in Hogan, Forgotten History, 125.