Baseball Integration Before Jackie Robinson In North Dakota

  Things don't happen in a vacuum - something happened before........

‘Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line ’ by Tom Dunkel

By Steven V. Roberts, Published: April 7

The cover photo for “Color Blind” shows an integrated baseball team, five white players and six African Americans. One of the whites casually rests his hand on the shoulder of a black teammate. But the “B” on their caps does not stand for Boston or even Brooklyn. They played in Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, and the photo dates to 1935, 12 years before Jackie Robinson started dismantling baseball’s racial barriers.
As told by Tom Dunkel, the story of how this team came to be — and won the national semipro championship — is a delightful read. Baseball has deep roots in the dusty plains of the Dakotas. Gen. George Custer was based at Fort Lincoln, just outside Bismarck, before losing a decisive road game to Sitting Bull and his Sioux All-Stars at the Little Big Horn in 1876. One of the 268 soldiers to die that day was Pvt. William Davis, third baseman for the post baseball team.
The major leagues assumed their current form in 1901, but in the decades that followed “the House of Baseball” (in historian Harold Seymour’s phrase) had many mansions. With no multiplexes or Netflixes to fill up leisure time, “industrial and recreational leagues flourished,” writes Dunkel, a freelance writer who lives in Washington. “Indian reservations had baseball teams. Employees of coal companies, trolley car manufacturers, police departments, funeral homes, and local Communist parties took to the field together in off-hours.” Baseball became the “weapon of choice for grudge matches between rival towns,” and Bismarck’s fiercest foe was Jamestown, 100 miles to the east.
After Jamestown started signing players from the Negro Leagues in 1932, Bismarck’s manager, an auto dealer and audacious gambler named Neil Churchill, wanted his own gang of “mercenaries.” He asked Abe Saperstein, a Chicago sports promoter best known for creating the Harlem Globetrotters, to recommend the “the greatest colored pitcher in baseball today.” That’s easy, came the reply: Leroy “Satchel” Paige. In fact he’s probably “the best pitcher, period.” But you can’t get him, Saperstein insisted — he has a contract with the Pittsburgh Crawfords. I’ll try anyway, replied Churchill, give me a contact number. Paige, it so happens, resented the owner of the Crawfords and “wanted out of Pittsburgh, the sooner the better.” For $300 or $400 a month plus a used Chrysler, Churchill “convinced baseball’s fastest gun to head west.”
It’s fair to say that Paige and his black teammates stood out in Bismarck. According to the 1930 census, there were exactly 377 “Negroes” in the entire state, and only 46 lived in the capital. The black players were barred from the city’s best hotels, and Churchill had to warn Paige not to be seen “riding white girls around in broad daylight.” But pitching is different from sleeping or dating. On Labor Day of 1933, almost 4,000 fans showed up to watch Satch strike out 15 Jamestown batters and drive in all three runs as Bismarck won 3 to 2. Vengeance was theirs.
Paige had an arm of high-tensile steel but “the heart of a wild stallion” and never stayed put for long. He skipped the 1934 season in Bismarck but returned the next year, perhaps because of Dorothy Running-Deer, whose father raised rattlesnakes and brewed a powerful anti-venom remedy based on a “secret Sioux recipe.” Satch “rubbed a few drops into his right biceps [and] nerve endings that he didn’t know he had screamed for relief.” But he became devoted to the stuff, kneading it into his muscles after every game and never suffering a sore arm. Good thing. When Bismarck swept to the semipro championship in Wichita that summer, Paige won four games, striking out 66 batters in 39 innings.
A triumph, yes, but with a bitter aftertaste. Even though Paige made the majors in 1948, he was already in his 40s. During his best years, his brilliant talent was shadowed and suffocated by racism, and his black teammates played their whole careers in poorly paid obscurity. A major league scout who watched the games in Wichita lamented, “We wish we could find a chemical to bleach some of those colored boys. We could take some of those players up to the majors and win a pennant with ’em.” Paige said of the Bismarck squad: “That was the best team I ever saw. The best players I ever played with. But who ever heard of them?”
At times Dunkel tries too hard to be cute and comes off as annoying. “There is no big bang theory of baseball,” he writes, “It evolved like the blues and the miniskirt.” Really? Baseball is like a miniskirt? And calling Paige “the prize inside the Cracker Jack box of baseball” sounds more like a foul tip than a double off the wall.
Still, this is a tale worth telling. As Satch said, no one has ever heard of that summer in Bismarck, when blacks and whites played and won together. Now they have.

Steven V. Roberts , who teaches journalism and politics at George Washington University, is writing a new book about immigrant athletes.
COLOR BLIND The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line By Tom Dunkel Atlantic Monthly. 345 pp. $25

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/color-blind-the-forgotten-team-that-broke-baseballs-color-line--by-tom-dunkel/2013/04/07/98bf6878-8a5d-11e2-a051-6810d606108d_story.html

1935 Bismarck team was one of the best

January 20, 2007 6:00 pm

The 1935 Bismarck semipro baseball team featured two players now in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame and a host of African-American all-stars. It is believed to have been the best semipro team of all time.
In 1934, Bismarck finished with a record of 61-18. However, the owner and manager of the team, Neil Churchill, was not satisfied.
In 1935, he signed the key players from his 1934 team, which included pitcher Barney Morris; catcher Quincy Trouppe; infielders Red Haley, Beef Ringhofer, Joe Desiderato, and Harold Massman; and outfielders Bill Morlan, Bob McCarney and Mike Goetz.
He signed pitcher Satchel Paige, who had appeared in nine games for the Bismarck team in 1933. Churchill also signed Vernon "Moose" Johnson and Charlie Bates, two sluggers with the Western League.
The last key member to join the Bismarck team was Axel "Al" Leary, a young, power-hitting shortstop from Great Falls, Mont.
Pitchers Paige and Morris got off to a terrific start, but Morris began to experience elbow problems in June. With a schedule that included almost a game a day, it became too much to expect Paige to pitch all the time.
To bolster his club, Churchill signed pitcher-catcher Ted "Double-Duty" Radcliffe and infielder Danny Oberholzer, the stars of the Jamestown team in 1934.
Wanting even greater pitching depth, Churchill pulled off a coup when the powerful Kansas City Monarchs came to Bismarck in late July. The star pitcher on the team was Hilton Smith, considered by many the second best African-American pitcher of the time.
When the Monarchs left Bismarck, Smith remained as part of the Bismarck team. With a pitching staff of Paige, Radcliffe, Morris and Smith, Bismarck was almost invincible, winning 28 of 29 games. To improve the team even more, in early August, Churchill signed outfielder Art Hancock, the best player on the Valley City team.
One event in 1935 helped solidify Bismarck's position of the best semipro team in the nation. Newspaperman Raymond "Hap" Dumont was busy organizing the first National Semipro Championship tournament to be held in Wichita, Kan., beginning on Aug. 14.
Dumont sent out invitations to the best teams in the nation. One of the earliest invitations was sent to Churchill, and he quickly accepted. Churchill then upped the number of games that Bismarck would play against quality teams so that his players would be in top form.
Churchill signed two more players for the tournament in Wichita: Chet Brewer and Ed Hendee. Brewer was a premier pitcher for the Kansas City Monarchs who had also been, the ace of the staff for the semipro team in Crookston, Minn., two years earlier. Hendee was a veteran infielder of the Mississippi Valley League who won the batting crown in 1929.
Bismarck was not the only team in the tournament stocking up on key players. Most of the teams enlisted former major league ballplayers or stars from the minor or Negro leagues.
Bismarck played its first game on Aug. 15 as Paige faced the Monroe Monarchs from Louisiana. Paige got in trouble early, and Bismarck trailed 3-2 going into the seventh inning. Bismarck scored four runs and won 6-4. Game two was against the hometown Wichita Waterworks. Bismarck won 8-4.
Paige returned to pitch game three against the United Fuel team from Denver. He limited them to one run and drove in two runs himself for a 4-1 victory. In game four against Shelby, N.C., Brewer pitched a two-hitter winning 7-1. Game five was against the best offensive team in the tournament, the Halliburton Cementers from Duncan, Okla., who were averaging 13 runs a game against their opponents. Paige held their potent offense to one run and struck out 16 batters winning 3-1. Game six against the Omaha V-8s turned into a slugfest for the Bismarck team, who won 15-6.
In game seven, Bismarck once again faced the Halliburton team, who had moved up through the loser's bracket. However, Bismarck's major offensive weapon did not show up. Moose Johnson had gotten drunk the night before and was later found passed out in the street. Regardless, Bismarck won 5-2 and Paige was again the winning pitcher as Bismarck won the tournament.
Many of the players came back to Bismarck in 1936, but the team was not the same without Paige. Bismarck returned to Wichita and won the first five games, but lost game six to Halliburton because Bismarck's star pitcher was too drunk to be effective.
All of the African-Americans on the 1935 Bismarck team went on to become all-stars in the Negro Leagues and likely would have been outstanding players in the major leagues.
Paige and Trouppe eventually made it to the majors but were well past their prime. Churchill returned to his auto dealership and was elected mayor of Bismarck in 1939.
(Written by Curt Eriksmoen and edited by Jan Eriksmoen. Reach the Eriksmoens at cjeriksmoen@;cableone.net)

http://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/bismarck-team-was-one-of-the-best/article_aaeb34e5-8ba3-5737-bacf-8d4bb2d1564a.html


1935 Bismarck Semipros.
Front row, l-r: Joe Desiderato, Axel Leary, Neil Churchill, Danny Oberholzer, Ed Hendee.
Back row, l-r: Hilton Smith, Red Haley, Barney Morris, Satchel Paige, Moose Johnson, Quincy Trouppe, Double Duty Radcliffe.


And for a lot more great information, check a great source of info rarely told -

North Dakota Integrated Baseball History

http://www.pitchblackbaseball.com/northdakotabaseball.html