The Stars Shone on Philadelphia: The 1934 Negro National League Champions

By Bill Nowlin and Rebecca T. Alpert

In 1934, Ed Bolden's Philadelphia Stars joined the new Negro National League II (NNL2), which had been founded one year earlier. After fending off their intrastate-rivals, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Stars claimed the NNL2's second-half championship and faced the first-half champions for the title. They defeated the Chicago American Giants to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Society for American Baseball Research
• Release date: Jul 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960819048

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BERNARD BLACKWELL

BY MARGARET M. GRIPSHOVER

During the Philadelphia Stars’ 1934 championship season, a pitcher named Blackwell poured himself a cup of coffee but didn’t stick around for a refill. Blackwell has been described as a fringe player who pitched briefly with the Stars that year, but that his playing time was severely restricted.¹ His only documented appearance with the Stars took place in Philadelphia on July 6, 1934.² Blackwell was described as a Holmesburg high lad, and he shared pitching duties with another prep athlete named Clifford Irons, who was a first-rate twirler from suburban Bryn Mawr.³ On that day, the Stars and their two rookie hurlers defeated the Mitchell Athletic Association of Philadelphia in a nonleague tilt by a score of 6-2.⁴ Neither Blackwell nor Irons was ever seen in a Stars’ uniform again.

Who was this mysterious Blackwell whose given name never appeared in newspaper accounts of his games? There was only one person who lived in Philadelphia who fit Blackwell’s description in terms of age, location, and baseball participation. That person was Bernard Harvey Blackwell. He was born in Philadelphia in 1916. When he pitched for the Stars in 1934, he was 18 years old and fresh out of high school. Blackwell attended a high school in Philadelphia, but the name of the school is unknown. Although one newspaper described him as a Holmesburg high student, no such school existed. Holmesburg is a community located approximately 10 miles northeast of Philadelphia, but Blackwell did not live there. He spent nearly his entire life closer to the northeast Philadelphia neighborhood of Frankford, roughly six miles from downtown. Frankford was home to several amateur baseball teams that provided Blackwell with an opportunity to play. Blackwell’s World War II draft card supplies some additional evidence to support the theory that he was the same Blackwell who had a fleeting career with the Stars. His draft card described him as nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 150 pounds, a suitable conformation for a pitcher.

After his one-game performance for the Stars, Blackwell’s baseball career continued for two more years. He played for the Frankford Giants, a well-respected local team that shared its name with its neighborhood. Blackwell’s results were mixed. In May 1935 he twirled for the fast-stepping Frankford Giants in a 5-3 victory over the Philadelphia Ukrainians.⁵ A few weeks later, however, he was pummeled by Lou Kirner’s North Phillies, 12-2.⁶ In the next game, the Frankford Arrows belittled the Giants, 8-3, using Blackwell’s pitches for target practice, a circumstance that resulted in his demotion to relief and utility duties.⁷ Blackwell’s baseball career ended on a sour note on July 19, 1936, when his Frankford Giants were cut down to size by the Mt. Holly Relief Athletic Association, 16-3.⁸ After the loss to Mt. Holly, Blackwell’s name did not appear in any additional game reports for the Frankford Giants or any other Philadelphia area team.

After his brief foray into amateur and professional baseball, Blackwell married and served in the US Navy during World War II. He followed in his father’s footsteps as a postal clerk and mail carrier, a similar career path that once was taken by the Philadelphia Stars’ owner, Ed Bolden.⁹ Bernard Blackwell married Mary E. Ruffin about the time when he played his final games for the Frankford Giants. The Blackwells had no children. Bernard Blackwell died in Philadelphia in 1985 and was buried in the Beverly National Cemetery in Burlington, New Jersey.

SOURCES

Unless otherwise indicated, all Negro League statistics and records were sourced from Seamheads.com.

Ancestry.com was used to access census, birth, death, marriage, military, immigration, and other genealogical and public records.

NOTES

1 James A. Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1994), 88.

2 Philly Stars Garner Two During Week, Baltimore Afro American , July 14, 1934: 19.

3 Philly Stars Garner Two During Week.

4 Philly Stars Garner Two During Week.

5 Frankford Giants Win, Philadelphia Inquirer , May 28, 1935: 25.

6 North Phils Top Frankford Giants, Philadelphia Inquirer , June 16, 1935: 42.

7 Frankford Arrows Win Series Opener, Philadelphia Inquirer , July 28, 1935: 36; Beth-Allens to Close Their Season Today, Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call , September 16, 1936: 16.

8 Relief A.A. Nine Laces Frankford Giants, 16-3, Camden (New Jersey) Courier-Post , July 20, 1936: 18.

9 Neil Lanctot, Fair Dealing & Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910-1932 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 17.

AMEAL BROOKS

BY MARGARET M. GRIPSHOVER

Ameal Brooks played for semipro and Negro League teams from the late 1920s to 1950. He was known primarily for his work as a versatile catcher and outfielder, his clouting abilities at the plate, and an affinity for alcohol, which may explain his habit of jumping from team to team, sometimes in midseason. For more than 20 years, he was known by many names, suited up for numerous teams, and was adept at multiple defensive positions. His life on and off the field is often difficult to document in part because of the many spelling variations for his given name, Ameal. In some cases, Brooks was mistakenly identified as one of three different persons. Ameal Brooks, Alex Brooks, and Alvin Brooks were once thought to be three separate individuals, when in truth, they were all the same person – Ameal Brooks.¹ Brooks’s given name took many other forms including Arnold, Eamel, Emil, Emanuel, and Emmanuel.² On more than one occasion, his name appeared in print in a form that bore no relation at all to Ameal, such as Clarence, Frank, John, Joseph, Manny, and Ralph.³ In addition to his shapeshifting first name, he was also bestowed with various nicknames including Ardi-Milla (or Ardmilla), Macon, and Bucket Brooks.⁴ With more than a dozen variations of his given name, and the relative common occurrence of his surname, it is not surprising that researchers and record-keepers have frequently confused Brooks with other players or believed that Alex and Ameal Brooks were two different persons. They were not. They were one-and-the-same.

Over the course of his long career, Brooks wore the uniforms of at least 19 semipro and/or Negro League nines including the Chicago Union Giants, Chicago Royal Giants, Chicago American Giants, Texas Colored Giants, Chicago Colored Athletics, Foster’s Cleveland Cubs, Columbus Blue Birds, Homestead Grays, Philadelphia Stars, Cleveland Red Sox, Brooklyn Royal Giants, New York Black Yankees, Cincinnati Ethiopian Clowns, New York Cubans, North All Stars, Jacksonville Eagles, Newark Eagles, Milwaukee Tigers, and the Harlem Globetrotters baseball team. He also played winter league ball in Venezuela and Puerto Rico.⁵ Of the many teams on his résumé, he was most frequently in the lineups for the New York Black Yankees, Brooklyn Royal Giants, and the New York Cubans. Of these three, he stepped up to the plate most often for the New York Cubans.

Catcher Ameal Brooks

Brooks batted left-handed and threw right. He had early success as a catcher but was just as adept at patrolling the outfield or defending the infield, most frequently at third base. On a few rare occasions, at the beginning and end of his career, he could even be pressed into service on the pitcher’s mound.⁶ Brooks was known for being fleet of foot as an outfielder and on the basepaths, and for his power at the plate. During his time in the Negro Leagues, Brooks accrued a respectable .259 career batting average and banged out 54 extra-base hits, 14 of which were home runs. And he likely clouted even more extra-base hits in nonleague games.

Ameal Brooks was born on June 3, 1907, in New Orleans.⁷ His father, Joseph Horace Joe Brooks, was born in Mississippi in 1884, and his mother, Sarah Williams Brooks, was from Louisiana. Brooks had six siblings, only two of whom lived to adulthood. Three of his siblings were born in Louisiana. His eldest sibling, John Westley Brooks, was born in 1905 in Wilson, Louisiana. Two other brothers were born in Shreveport, Louisiana; both died in infancy. By 1918, the Brooks family had left Shreveport for Chicago, joining the Great Migration of African Americans who moved from the South to Northern cities in the early twentieth century.⁸ Brooks’s three youngest siblings were born in Chicago, including his only sister, Gladys Irene Brooks, who was born in 1918. In 1923 tragedy struck twice in the Brooks household. Ameal Brooks’s mother, Sarah, gave birth to a stillborn son, and within five months his mother was also dead.

Little is known about the circumstances of Brooks’s childhood, but the available evidence suggests that it was a difficult one. The Brooks family lived in the South Side of Chicago, where his father worked as a hostler at the nearby New York Central Railroad yards. By 1920, Brooks’s parents took two foster children into the family’s home. During that same time, Ameal Brooks was living at the Chicago Parental School, a residential facility for troubled and truant children.⁹ By mid-1923, his father, Joseph, had buried three children and his wife. In 1933 Joseph married Eva Tracy Russell, with whom he had one son, Brooks’s half-brother, Richard Brooks, who was born in Chicago in 1934. Although some genealogical sources and researchers claim that John Christopher Beckwith was Ameal Brooks’s half-brother, no verifiable evidence of such a familial relationship exists.¹⁰ When Beckwith was born, in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1900, the Brooks family was living in Louisiana. But by the time his father remarried, Ameal Brooks was long gone from the family household and had embarked on what would become a nearly 25-yearlong career in baseball.

Brooks likely began his baseball career in the late 1920s with various iterations of the Chicago Royal Giants, Union Giants, and Chicago American Giants. As early as 1926, a pitcher named Brooks was a member of the barnstorming Chicago Royal Giants.¹¹ Given that he lived in Chicago and played for the Royal Giants in subsequent years, it is reasonable to assume the pitcher was Ameal Brooks. He did not appear in any game reports for the Chicago Royal Giants in 1927, but he resurfaced in the summer of 1928 as a catcher described as a former member of the Chicago Union Giants.¹² In the spring of 1929, Brooks made his Negro League debut as a backstop for the Chicago American Giants. Early in the season, he had the distinction of claiming the second-highest batting average in the Negro National League (NNL), a sizzling .667.¹³ As impressive as that may sound, consider that in 1929, Brooks had just three plate appearances in two games with the Chicago American Giants.

Brooks’s brief tenure with the American Giants ended in early June. Within a few weeks, he was signed as a catcher for the Texas Colored Giants, a barnstorming team composed mainly of players from Chicago and owned by a Canadian promoter, Rod Whitman of Lafleche, Saskatchewan, who lived nowhere near Texas.¹⁴ The team was billed as real ball players and natural comedians who were recruited from the pick of players in the Chicago colored league.¹⁵ They also made the far-fetched claim that they were the 1928 champions of the Southern States, but it made for good promotional copy.¹⁶ Brooks spent most of the summer of 1929 traveling with the Texas Colored Giants to Canadian cities including Edmonton, Regina, Moose Jaw, and Saskatoon, and gaining valuable experience along the way.¹⁷ Brooks, described as the team’s peppy center fielder and catcher, was one of the stars of the show and lit up scoreboards by stealing bases and clouting extra-base hits, including some thunderous home runs.¹⁸ In a sense, the summer of 1929 was Brooks’s apprenticeship, and it prepared him for what was to become his peripatetic life as a Negro League ballplayer.

The Texas Colored Giants took the road again in 1930 but without Brooks on their roster. Although Brooks and the Texas Colored Giants crossed paths during their travels, during the summer of 1930, he wore the uniform of the Chicago Colored Athletics. The Athletics’ booking agent was Abe Saperstein, who promised potential opponents that these dusky boys, with their comical ways natural to their race, will provide you with an excellent game of entertainment for your fans.¹⁹ The Athletics toured the Midwest before heading for Canada, following a path blazed for them by the Texas Colored Giants, and staged contests with local nines in Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary, and, on occasion, with the Texas Colored Giants themselves.²⁰ Brooks had a terrific summer with the Athletics – behind and at the plate. In early June, he went on a home-run tear, knocking the horsehide out of the park on a regular basis. On June 9, the Athletics lost the valuable services of Brooks, their catcher, in the seventh when he caught his foot on the bag at second and sprained his ankle.²¹ He was out of the lineup for more than three weeks, but upon his return, Brooks picked up where he left off and hit two home runs in a losing effort against the Texas Colored Giants in Edmonton.²² But Brooks, who was nursing an injured leg, was eventually replaced behind the plate by the end of July.²³ In late August, after 120 games in less than three months, the Texas Colored Giants headed back to the Midwest for their final games of the season, without Brooks in the lineup.²⁴ He did not appear in another semipro or Negro League game until 1932.

After a year off from baseball, Brooks regained his form. He started the 1932 season with the short-lived barnstorming Rube Foster’s Chicago Memorial Giants, a team that was reconstituted as Foster’s Cleveland Cubs.²⁵ During their tour of the South in the spring of 1932, Brooks was noted as one of Cleveland’s top performers and home-run hitters.²⁶ By early June, he was signed by the Chicago American Giants (also known as Cole’s American Giants) as the backup for starting catcher John Hines. Brooks was one of six catchers used by Chicago that year.²⁷ Despite their inability to decide on a starting backstop, the American Giants were the Southern Negro League champions in 1932. Brooks played in at least 11 games for Chicago and batted .281. William Dizzy Dismukes, in the Pittsburgh Courier, named Brooks and his Chicago teammate Kermit Dial as hot prospects for 1933, having flashed signs of becoming stars during the 1932 season.²⁸ Dismukes’ prediction held somewhat true for Brooks, but not for Dial, who played only two more seasons for Negro League teams. Perhaps Dismukes’ focus on Brooks and Dial in his newspaper column had more to do with self-promotion than for his enthusiasm for specific players. In the spring of 1933, Dismukes became the manager of the Columbus Blue Birds, that featured many former Chicago players, including Brooks and Dial.

Brooks began the 1933 season with the Columbus Blue Birds but finished it with a different team, the Homestead Grays. When he was with the Blue Birds, Brooks was the starting catcher and an occasional outfielder. He was having a good year before Columbus collapsed in late July and was repackaged as the Cleveland Giants and Akron Grays, two independent traveling squads that were thought to be a more lucrative alternative for the teams’ owners.²⁹ In his final game with the Blue Birds, on July 23, 1933, Brooks capped off his tenure with Columbus with a triple and homer in a doubleheader defeat of the Detroit Stars.³⁰ Although the Blue Birds dispersed their flock and flew the Negro National League coop in the summer of 1933, Brooks made the most of his scrambled season in the form of long friendship with teammate Leroy Morney. After the Columbus team folded, Brooks and Morney migrated to the Homestead Grays to finish out the 1933 season, playing three and eight games respectively for the Grays. They later reunited as members of the 1938 New York Black Yankees, and in the summer of 1938 Morney served as one of the witnesses for Brooks’s marriage to Mary Myers.

In the minds of the Homestead Grays’ management, Brooks and Morney were set to return to the club in the spring of 1934. Much to Cum Posey’s consternation, however, the two men, along with the Grays’ outstanding left fielder, Vic Harris, jumped to other teams.³¹ Brooks signed with the Cleveland Red Sox while Morney and Harris joined up with the Grays’ crosstown rivals, the Pittsburgh Crawfords. It was an interesting season for Brooks. He started the year with a team that finished in last place in the NNL2 and ended it with the Philadelphia Stars, the 1934 Negro League champions. Brooks was Cleveland’s backup catcher to starter Dennis Gilchrist, who played with Brooks on the 1933 Columbus Blue Birds. But the Red Sox, like the Blue Birds, did not last a full season in the NNL2.³² Cleveland’s record of 3-22 in league play placed them deep in the cellar. Brooks had more RBIs (5) than the team had total wins (4) in 1934. And Brooks had an equally abysmal record in Cleveland with a paltry .189 batting average, although three of his seven hits in 12 games he played for Cleveland were for extra