Phil Dixon's American Baseball Chronicles Great Teams: the 1931 Homestead Grays, Volume I

By Phil S. Dixon

The "Greatest Baseball team of all-time" easily describes the 1931 Homestead Grays. They remain a team never to be forgotten—a team that rates with the greatest teams in all of baseball history.

Organized in 1910, baseball’s Homestead Grays of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—an exclusively African-American team—held claim to a regional championship and also a legitimate claim to baseball’s World Championship. The Grays’ well-known leader was Hall of Famer Cumberland “Cum” Posey. His 1931 Grays featured among others; Hall of Fame third baseman Jud Wilson, Hall of Fame infielder Oscar Charleston, a Hall of Fame catcher in Josh Gibson and two Hall of Fame pitchers in Willie Foster and Joseph “Smokey Joe” Williams—a total of five legendary players.

Paced by young Josh Gibson, age 18 and the most powerful home run hitter in baseball, Posey’s 1931 Homestead Grays finished with a magnificent 143-29-2 record. This is their story told here for the first time.

Included within the text are written accounts for every game from the Homestead Grays’ entire 1931 schedule of nearly 175 contest, with scores, attendance figures and player biographies. The work includes score and locations on more than 300 additional games played by the Kansas City Monarchs, Hilldale, Baltimore’s Black Sox, the Cuban House of David, New York’s Harlem Stars and other African-American teams in operation during that same 1931 season.

The comparative scores and their related histories are a resourceful and entertaining aid for further analysis and assessment on the participation of African-American athletes in baseball as best represented from the perspective of a single championship season.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2009
• ISBN: 9781664153356

Phil S. Dixon

Author Phil S. Dixon is a pioneer in the study of Negro League baseball history. For the past thirty years he has recorded the African-American baseball experience with a vast array of skill and accuracy. Creative, innovative and detailed, Dixon has researched baseball history and documented the careers of Negro Baseball’s greatest players. Widely regarded for his expertise on baseball, Dixon has authored seven previous books. He has won the prestigious Casey Award for the Best Baseball Book of 1992, and a SABR MacMillan Award for his excellence in baseball research. Formerly an Assistant Director in the Public Relations Department of the Kansas City Royals American League baseball team, he currently serves on the Board of Governors for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, an organization which he co-founded in 1990, and actively lectures on baseball topics. Phil S. Dixon was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and currently resides in Belton, Missouri, with wife Kerry and their three children, Joseph, Erika and Phillip. Dixon can be reached at www.Americanbaseballchronicles.com

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Copyright © 2009 by Phil S. Dixon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 01/25/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

583331

Dedicated to

my daughter

Erika Elizabeth Dixon-Mendence

And Negro League great, Ted Double Duty Radcliffe

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Newspaper Sources

Pittsburgh’s Agents Of Terror

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

1931 Grays Roster

Homestead Grays’ 1931 Pitching Breakdown

1931 Homestead Grays’ schedule

Grays’ multi-hit games, 1931

Acknowledgements

Without help from an array of enthusiastic and dedicated individuals, a work of this magnitude would not have reached the marketplace. This is my feeble attempt at recognizing some well deserving and highly qualified players, researchers and writers, as well as a few strategic organizations, for participating in the development of this pioneering effort.

Primarly, I wish to thank some original pioneers for their irreplaceable commitment to publish box scores as they were occurring in 1931. Armed with little more than pure love for our national pastime, and a desire to see their hometown teams defeat Posey’s Homestead Grays, they preserved for generations a legacy that books never published and magazines simply overlooked. While I’m on the issue of eye witness accounts, it is a delight to acknowledge Ted Double Duty Radcliffe.

Radcliffe, for a period of some twenty-five years, provided me with inspiration and information about his famous Homestead Grays’ teammates. Much of what Radcliffe recalled coincided with information I obtained in earlier interviews with Ted Page and Sam Streeter. My frequent conversations with these individuals proved to be priceless. Thus, it is equally important that I recognize Charlie Walker’s and Cumberland Cum Posey’s pioneering efforts.

Considerable respect is extended to the Grays’ management team of Walker and Posey. Their well documented coverage of Pittsburgh’s Homestead Grays games allowed me to follow the teams day-by-day activities without much difficulty. Important primary scouce documentation was also accessible in the newspaper columns of African-American sports writers.

African-American sports writers detailed accounts of Grays’ daily events, solved numerous puzzles. Randy Dixon’s column, "Randy Says" in the Philadelphia Tribune provided all sorts of interesting facts. The same was true for Chester L. Washington’s "Sport Spurts" feature in Pittsburgh’s Courier. Bill Gibson’s "Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya" columns in Baltimore’s Afro-American were also a wealth of essential information.

A hearty thank you, also, is extended to the modern day scavengers of baseball history. Thank you John Holway, for helping with research on 1931’s Baltimore Black Sox and other games played by Homestead’s Grays that same season. I also thank Calobe Jackson for his untiring hours of research at Pennsylvania’s State Library in Harrisburg.

There were other unsung heroes that provided hard documentation for this project, individuals that make careers out of doing the work at libraries and historical societies that many researchers cannot. This is a partial list of the people whom assisted from the beginning of my project. Representing Ohio are the following institutions: The Rodman Public Library of Alliance; Deborah M. Papa, Fine Arts Librarian at Akron’s Summit County Public Library; Cindie Hayes of the Magazines & Newspapers Division of Columbus’ Metropolitan Library; John E. Haas and Elizabeth Nelson, Archivist at Ohio’s Historical Society in Columbus; Betty L. DeMent of the Genealogy Department at Portsmouth’s Public Library; Brenda S. Charny, Director of East Palestine’s Memorial Public Library; Kristin Weiss, Reference Librarian at the Muskingum County Library System in Zanesville; and the Reuben McMillan Free Library Association of Youngstown.

The state of New York was equally responsive as correspondences were answered from the following locations: The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in Buffalo; the Niagara Falls Public Library; and the Chautauqua Cattaraugus Library System in Jamestown.

Because the Grays’ were located in Pennsylvania, it was only natural that much of the information in this text derived from that state. Among those who provided research information were; Mary Ann Paulin of the B.F. Jones Memorial Library in Aliquippa; the Shenango Valley Community Library of Sharon; Sonia L. Keiper, Reference Librarian of Altoona’s Area Public Library; Audrey L. Fetters of the Weir Room at Butler’s Public Library; Mary Malysko, Director of the Andrew Carnegie Free Library; Dale Kondratic of the John K. Tener Library in Charleroi; Clarion’s Free Public Library; Christine Rice, Library Director of Coraopolis’ Memorial Library; Mary E. Karnes, of Elizabethtown; Sylvia M. Coast, of Franklin’s Public Library; David Stanley, at Dauphin-County’s Library System; East Shore Area Library of Harrisburg; Phillip Crnkovich, of Lancaster’s County Library; Cynthia McLane, of McKeesport’s Heritage Center; the Carnegie Free Library of McKeesport; Alex S. Weinbaum, Head Database and Newspaper Center at the Free Library of Philadelphia; Josephine Semanshik of the Portage Public Library; Bob Sandow, Programs Coordinator of West Overton Museums in Scottsdale; David L. Klees of the Pennsylvania Department of Education State Library of Pennsylvania; and J. Bucksor, at the Buhl-Henderson Community Library in Sharon.

There were a few scheduled dates in Maryland and through the efforts of Mary F. Murray, Librarian in the Western Maryland Room of Washington’s County Free Library in Hagerstown, much of what we found in that state appears in this publication. The same could be said for West Virginia where Rama Karamcheti, Reference Librarian at the Ohio County Public Library in Wheeling; along with Michael Ridderbusch, and Christine M. Kreiser, Historians at West Virginia’s Division of Culture and History; and Lindsay Roseberry of the Parkersburg and Wood County Public Library, collected an endless stream of box scores and supporting records.

Though the actual game was never located, St. Catharines’ Public Library in St. Catharines, Ontario, gave one of the most diligent searches ever, as did the Public Library in St. Louis, Missouri, for games that we failed to find in their daily newspapers.

College librarians rounded out our research efforts namely: Joyce Harwell, Lending Supervisor at Pennsylvania’s State University; and Pam Williams, Head of the Reference Department at Frostburg State’s University Library.

The following newspaper resources were also helpful. I would like to thank Linda DiSanta, a Librarian at Beaver’s County Times; and Robert N. Bracey of the Record Argus newspaper in Greenville.

Catherine Mead, Head of Reference at the State Library of Ohio; Lou Rauco of the State Library of Pennsylvania; Katherine Moser, Reference Librarian at the Wilmington Library in Delaware, along with Addie Beck, Research Secretary at the Blair County Genealogical Society in Hollidaysburgh, Pennsylvania, were equally as diligent in searching out information in their respective areas of expertise.

For fulfilling over a decade of interlibrary loan requests, I salute Brenda Hunnicutt, at the Kansas City, Missouri, Public Library. Because of her work, I obtained inner library loan copies of 1931’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cleveland Press, Pittsburgh Press, Baltimore Afro-American and other important newspapers on microfilm. It is good to know a professional like Brenda when you need research materials—especially when you need them immediately.

For the photographic portion of this work I must thank Vic Harris’ son Ronald, (now deceased), for the use of his father’s photographs. Raymond Doswell, of Kansas City’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum earned an immense gratitude for the use of photographs which derived from that institution.

Books and web sites became supplemental sources of data for this project. James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, The Encyclopedia of Minor League baseball, edited by Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, provided some of the data contained herewithin to build player’s biographies. Supplementary research was taken from the following web sites; www.nlbpa.com, www.clpgh.org, wwwmapquest.com, www.thediamondangle.com, www.northbysouth.kenyon.edu, and Americanbaseballchronicles.com.

In addition, I must thank Charlene Love, a former Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, resident now residing in Los Angeles, for her many years of encouragement. Equally inspiring were the remaining Negro League players and my many friends and supporters. They kept me motivated for more than twenty years and inspired me to continue researching during countless lean and controversial times.

As always, I would like to personally thank my wife Dr. Kerry, and my children for their support through these many years of baseball research. This publication benefited immensely from Kerry’s editing expertise, as have previous works.

Above all, I would like to thank Jesus Christ for giving me the inspiration, strength and creativity to not only start, but to complete, this important slice of American sports history.

This project is indeed one of a kind. It is also the initial volume of an in-depth series of publications about the greatest baseball teams in African-American sports history. In short, this work not only gives you the numbers, but the stories behind the numbers. The final result is a publication that allows readers to intimately connect, taking most for the first time ever, on tour with one of baseball’s mightiest teams, the 1931 Homestead Grays.

Surely if I have forgotten anyone—it seems that this always happens—please forgive me. Again, I thank you all for your shear dedication in preserving for generations yet born, a very comprehensive history of 1931’s Pittsburgh Homestead Grays.

Enjoy the ride.

Phil S. Dixon

September, 2009

Preface

Baseball’s Homestead Grays of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an idea conceived in the demanding spirit of community pride and sports recreation. In 1910, Homestead, a steel mill community located outside Pittsburgh in an area known as the Hill District formed a baseball team from workers at a local U.S. Steel mill in hopes of finding weekend recreation. Initially named the Murdock Grays, in 1912 they adopted the name Homestead Grays. As the Grays’ took on additional competition and encountered stronger antagonism new men were recruited to its roster. The addition of new and more talented athletes resulted in many more games won. As the years proceeded, individuals came and went, but the winning tradition remained.

The Grays’ well-known leader was Cumberland Cum Posey. Posey, a former football and basketball star, was employed as a rail way mail man when he approached the Grays, in 1912, seeking an opportunity to participate on the team. That same year, Charlie Walker, a lad who wasn’t good enough to play for the regular team, caught on as a Grays’ batboy. Within a short time Walker started to assist in Pittsburgh’s financial affairs. Posey was simultaneously taking more on field responsibility.

Walker made the best of all his opportunities. His general love for baseball, along with his pleasing personality, had its effect upon the whole team. As a consequence, when club officials were elected for 1913’s season Walker, the bat boy, was elected team President. Posey, almost as soon as he joined the Grays, began to take on the added role of scheduling games.

In 1915, a dispute over Pennsylvania’s Blue laws, one of which prohibited the playing of professional baseball on Sunday, split the Grays’ existing administration. When the former team captain stepped aside Posey filled the breach and was elected the new team captain. In 1916 Posey was given full leadership of the Grays’ on field activities. Operating without the benefit of a league, Posey and Walker challenged the leading teams within the region. In the early years, scheduling was a source of extreme difficulty as the Homestead Grays were often confused with the Homestead Giants of Hot Springs, Virginia. The Grays continued to operate on the co-operative plan, although players were not signed to contracts.

Walker, in his recollections of the lean years, recalled, I think of the days when the receipts weren’t five dollars. [A] tough spot to be in when each man wanted at least a dollar and a half. Ironically, in 1921, Walker presented the first contract, one for himself, which called for a definite salary from the Grays.

In succeeding years a great deal of money was spent on athletes. The hiring of such men as Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, Smokey Joe Williams, John Beckwith, Sam Streeter, Martin Dihigo, Lefty Williams, Jap Washington, Vic Harris, Chaney White, Rev Cannady, Bud Brown and others too numerous to list, took the Grays to the pinnacle of success.

Taking profits, far-and-away higher than most, Posey and Walker refuse to join any league. As one of the premier teams in the east, both the Eastern Colored League and the Negro National League tried, without success, to entice the Grays into their circuits. When these efforts failed, Negro National League officials attempted to circumvent the Grays altogether and backed a new Pittsburgh team, the Keystones, in 1922. Alexander McDonald Williams, an immigrant from Barbados, was owner Pittsburgh’s new Keystones. After one season, though, the Keystones folded.

In spite of the challenge put forth by Williams’ Keystones, the Grays, lead by Posey and Walker, remained a top regional attraction. Always seeking to raise the teams visibility, Pittsburgh’s Homestead Grays succumbed to outside pressures in 1929 and took a berth in the short-lived American Negro League. Because of Pittsburgh’s convoluted allegiance to league play, it returned to independent play for the 1930 and 1931 seasons.

In 1930, after defeating Jim Keenan’s Lincoln Giants of New York in a historic series of ten matches, Pittsburgh’s Homestead Grays claimed their first ever Negro Worlds’ Championship title. In the west St. Louis’ Negro National League Stars continued to reign as champions.

Having won all eastern honors in 1930, Posey set out in 1931 to completely revise his roster. Gone were such luminaries as Judy Johnson, Chaney White, Daltie Cooper, William Ross and Buck Ewing. Seeking to solidify his Worlds Championship title, Posey assembled a team that featured among others, Jud Wilson, Ted Page, Willie Foster and Ted Double Duty Radcliffe. The revamped Grays defeated all eastern and western teams in head-to-head competition.

By 1932 links in the Grays’ dynasty began to dissipate. Among the most critical was Posey’s partnership with Barney Dreyfuss, owner of Pittsburgh’s National League Pirates. To protect their territory from rival Negro National League and the Eastern Colored teams, Dreyfuss let Posey act as the exclusive agent for African-American teams seeking to use Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. That agreement terminated with Dreyfuss’ death in February 1932. Hot on the heels of this event was an announcement by William Augustus Gus Greenlee in regards to the building of Greenlee Field, located at 2500 Bedford Avenue, in the Hill District. The park was built for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and other rival teams seeking to visit Pittsburgh. The new stadium seated seventy-five hundred fans.

Greenlee, a Pittsburgh numbers banker turned sportsman and financier of Crawford Grill, sunk a small fortune into a local semi-professional team named the Crawfords. In order to protect that investment he stocked his team with the best players money could buy. Ultimately Greenlee destroyed the 1931 Homestead Grays, by paying the highest salaries ever given to African-American baseball stars. With the nation in the midst of a depression, it was an offer few men could ignore.

By the spring of 1932 Greenlee’s plan to raid Pittsburgh’s Grays of their most talented stars was fully activated. He succeeded in grabbing Oscar Charleston, an acquisition that was followed by the signing of Josh Gibson and Ted Radcliffe. Before the end of Greenlee’s 1932 crusade Ted Page, Jake Stevens and Jud Wilson were added to the Crawfords stable of stars. In the process, Posey’s Grays of 1931 stumbled from the pinnacle of baseball’s elite. It would be some years before the Grays truly returned to form.

In honor of 1931’s Homestead Grays, a team that finished the season with a brilliant 143-29-2 record, Phil Dixon’s American Baseball Chronicles salutes this team as one of baseball’s all time supreme.

Newspaper Sources

Considering there were few radios, and that television was in its infancy, it is easy to understand why our research was so totally dependent on newspapers and personal interviews. In 1931, references of African-American baseball teams appeared regularly in most urban publications. Many cities also featured minority publications with their own baseball coverage. Out east, Posey’s Homestead Grays, Baltimore’s Black Sox, Hilldale, Pittsburgh’s Crawfords, and various teams around New York proliferated throughout the baseball coverage. Utilizing these sources, roughly 145 Homestead Grays’ box scores were located from 1931’s historic season. Statistics from more than 145, of the more than 170 dates scheduled by the Homestead Grays, provided an array of intriguing details. These box scores and their supporting articles are the best source of available information remaining from that historic season of 1931.

In some cases, a newspaper’s coverage consisted of nothing more than a box score. On other occasions, lengthy articles that pandered to a particular city’s negative stereotypes of African-Americans thrived. At other times the newspaper coverage was congenial and complementing. Regardless of how generous, it was obvious that many topics went unreported. Rarely, if ever, were newspapers concerned with such liberal issues as segregated hotels, segregated restaurants, and segregation of public transportation or access to government funds or facilities. It was not odd, also, that integration of either the National and American Leagues seldom pricked their conscience. In reality, though, the ability of the talented African-American athlete was no longer debatable and still, the argument raged on. In 1931 the Homestead Grays had already taken that argument to a new level.

The following breakdown highlights the newspaper coverage received by Posey’s Homestead Grays in their historic season of 1931. We have further identified information as it related to games against other African-American opponents, championship contest, box scores, tie encounters and losses.

COVERAGE OF GAMES PLAYED

AGAINST OTHER AFRICAN-AMERICAN TEAMS

In an October 10, 1931 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, Cum Posey summarized the Grays’ seasonal totals against rival African-American teams. Posey credited his Grays with a record of 33-18 in 51 games played. Impressive totals none-the-less, and yet, Posey’s account failed to list at least thirteen additional African-American battles by his Grays. If added, it would bring the total number of games played to 64, and of that total the Grays’ won 42, lost 19 with one tie. There are two African-American matches for which no results were found.

In 1931, Baltimore’s Black Sox were the Homestead Grays’ most formidable African-American opponent. All totaled the Grays and Black Sox played twenty-five games.

The first to sixth meetings of this series were played as a cluster of dates in Wheeling, Pittsburgh, Sharon and Charleroi in early July. The opening competition in Wheeling, West Virginia, on July 3, was fully covered in Wheeling’s Intelligencer newspaper. Games two and three were part of a double header in Pittsburgh for which coverage appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph and Philadelphia Tribune newspapers. Games four and five, another double header, were played in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and were covered by the Sharon Herald newspaper. That initial cluster of games ended on July 6, in Charleroi, where both the Charleroi Mail and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gave full accounts of the festivities. Accounts of at least two of the six game series also appeared in Pittsburgh’s Courier newspaper.

Games seven and eight of the Grays/Black Sox series occurred on July 12, as part of a double header at Baltimore’s Maryland Park. Coverage of the games which appeared in Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette are totally different than the box scores that appeared in Baltimore’s Afro-American. The Gazette listed only one pitcher as having pitched the first game of the double header while the Afro-American’s play-by-play listed three pitchers as having appeared in the game. As a bone of contention, and with few exceptions, I always used the game’s first-hand account because it was written nearest to the actual event. In this case totals were taken from the Afro-American’s play-by-play. The Grays, in losing game one and winning the night-cap, kept the annual series at a four-four deadlock in games won.

The next cluster of games, six in all, began on August 16, in Washington, D.C. and proceeded to Harrisburg, Akron, Youngstown and Pittsburgh. When that series ended the Grays had taken a decisive eight to six advantage in games won. A box score of the game in Washington appeared in Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette as did the game at Harrisburg. The encounter in Akron was covered, with at-bats, in Akron’s Beacon Journal. The game at Youngstown, Ohio, was equally represented in Youngstown’s Vindicator and Post-Gazette newspapers. The final two games were part of a double header at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. The only known account of these games was the printed box score that appeared in Pittsburgh’s Sun Telegraph newspaper.

There were printed box scores of all the Grays/Black Sox games prior to September, fourteen total. An attempt to locate the series’ final eleven games produced all sorts of inconsistencies and numerous missing box scores.

The third and final cluster of Homestead Grays’ and Baltimore Black Sox’s games opened on September 19, in Cleveland, Ohio, and continued into Clarksburg, Parkersburg and Clarion before ending in Pittsburgh on September 26. According to an article written by Posey, the Black Sox were beaten nine of eleven games in eight days. Our research confirmed that at least eleven games were played, possibly twelve, in eight days. Pittsburgh’s Grays won seven while losing two, and tying one. Two games are yet to reveal results. Only