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Advance Praise for Sport and the Color Line:
Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth-Century America
“This brilliant collection appears at a crucial moment in history as scholars,
journalists, activists, and politicians grapple with the persistence of racialized
thinking in American culture. The timely essays resonate with W.E.B.Du Bois’s
prediction that the “color line” would be the defining problem of contemporary
society. Miller and Wiggins have judiciously selected key interpretive analyses
that collectively demonstrate how African Americans’ historical involvement in
sport has been neither a tragedy nor triumphant as popularly portrayed; but
rather, a more complex, contradictory culmination of efforts on behalf of
grassroots activists, civil rights crusaders, athletes, folk heroes, journalists,
educators, politicians, and villains. This book is a must for all individual and
institutional libraries. Anyone interested in a critical history of African American
sport must buy this book.”
S.W.Pope, De Montfort University, Author, Patriotic Games: Sporting
Tradi-tions in the American Imagination.
“Miller and Wiggins bring together a noted collection of authors. Each uses
sports to document the complexities of twentieth-century race relations in the
United States. The articles analyze from a range of perspectives the changing
contours of the color line in sports and society at large. Anyone wishing to
understand the legacy of racism in the twenty-first century should read this
thoughtful and well-edited set of articles.”
Jay Coakley, Sociology Department, University of Colorado
“The editors have done a masterful job of assembling the influential voices of
the past with newer scholarship that addresses gender and class as well as racial
issues. The selections elucidate the central role and meanings of sport in the
struggle for emancipation. This is an engaging text and a welcome addition to the
scholarly literature.”
Gerald R.Gems, President, North American Society for Sport History
“Sport and the Color Line is one of the most informative, comprehensive and
in-sightful sport history anthologies critiquing the African American sport
experience at the high school, college, and professional levels. Nationally
acclaimed scholars such as Dr. Harry Edwards, Rob Ruck, Donald Spivey, David
Wiggins, Thomas Smith, and Susan Cahn provide an in-depth analysis of the
intersection of race, gender, social class, and sport during the era of Jim Crow
and post desegregation of American sports.”
Dana D.Brooks is Dean and Professor of Physical Education at West
Virginia University and co-editor of Racism in College Athletics: The African
American Athlete's Experience.
SPORT AND THE COLOR LINE
SPORT AND THE COLOR
LINE
Black Athletes and Race Relations
in Twentieth-Century America
edited by

Patrick B.Miller and

David K.Wiggins

Routledge
New York & London
 Published in 2004 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co.uk
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Copyright © 2004 by Taylor and Francis Books, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or utilized in any form or by any
electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or any
other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sport and the color line : black athletes and race relations in 20th
century America/Patrick B.Miller & David K.Wiggins, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94610-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-94611-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Racism in sports—United States—History—20th century. 2. African
American athletes—History—20th century. 3. Discrimination in
sports—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States—Race
relations—History—20thcentury. I. Miller, Patrick B. II. Wiggins,
David Kenneth, 1951–
GV706.32.S73 2003
796 .089 96073–dc21
2003014009

ISBN 0-203-49745-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57718-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

 CONTENTS

Preface vii
Introduction ix

I SPORT AND COMMUNITY IN THE ERA OF JIM CROW

1 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 3
Rob Ruck
2 BLACK ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE NATIONAL 30
PASTIME The Rise of Semiprofessional Baseball in Black
Chicago, 1890–1915
Michael E.Lomax
3 YEAR OF THE COMET Jack Johnson versus Jim Jeffries, July 4, 53
1910
Randy Roberts
4 “A GENERAL UNDERSTANDING” Organized Baseball and 74
Black Professional Baseball, 1900–1930
Neil Lanctot
5 “WE WERE LADIES, WE JUST PLAYED LIKE BOYS” 99
African-American Womanhood and Competitive Basketball at
Bennett College, 1928–1942
Rita Liberti
6 A SPECIAL TYPE OF DISCIPLINE Manhood and Community 120
in African-American Institutions, 1923–1957
Pamela Grundy

II THE ORDEAL OF DESEGREGATION

7 JOE LOUIS: AMERICAN FOLK HERO 148
William H.Wiggins, Jr.
8 “END JIM CROW IN SPORTS” The Leonard Bates Controversy 172
and Protest at New York University, 1940–1941
Donald Spivey
vi

9 JACKIE ROBINSON “A Lone Negro” in Major League Baseball 196

Jules Tygiel
10 MORE THAN A GAME The Political Meaning of High School 223
Basketball in Indianapolis
Richard B.Pierce
11 “CINDERELLAS” OF SPORT Black Women in Track and Field 247
Susan Cahn
12 JIM CROW IN THE GYMNASIUM The Integration of College 274
Basketball in the American South
Charles H.Martin
13 CIVIL RIGHTS ON THE GRIDIRON The Kennedy 296
Administration and the Desegregation of the Washington
Redskins
Thomas G.Smith

III IMAGES OF THE BLACK ATHLETE AND THE RACIAL POLITICS

OF SPORT
14 EDWIN BANCROFT HENDERSON, AFRICAN-AMERICAN 318
ATHLETES, AND THE WRITING OF SPORT HISTORY
David K.Wiggins
15 THE GREATEST Muhammad Ali’s Confounding Character 340
David W.Zang
16 THE SPORTS SPECTACLE, MICHAEL JORDAN, AND NIKE 358
Douglas Kellner
17 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM Racialist 383
Responses to Black Athletic Achievement
Patrick B.Miller
18 CRISIS OF BLACK ATHLETES AT THE OUTSET OF THE 405
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Harry Edwards

Further Reading 412

Contributors 427
Permissions Acknowledgments 431
Index 433
 PREFACE

ULTIMATELY, THIS BOOK is about the long and arduous struggle to relegate
Jim Crow to the sidelines in American sport during the course of the twentieth
century. It thus chronicles an earlier era when segregation prevailed in national
pastimes and when black people, South and North, created their own athletic
institutions even as they made every effort to challenge racism on the playing
fields and beyond. To show how sport became a distinctive element within the
larger civil rights movement would be to illuminate the complex processes of
desegregation: political acumen and hard work characterized the experiences of
racial reformers in sport, but their story cannot be told without reference to the
terrible uncertainty that they faced at every turn. The performances of black
athletes also inform this volume, although the larger project of the pieces
assembled here is to discuss the meanings of athletic triumph and travail—to
underscore the significance of sport in reinforcing black pride and reshaping the
culture and consciousness of the nation. Clearly, the ways that black bodies in
motion have been assessed—and reevaluated over time—is a topic that speaks to
broader concerns about race relations, identity, and power in the recent American
past.
It is no simple task to highlight the importance of sport in community
formation, integrationist strategies, and cultural representation in the troubled
history of race relations in the United States. Numerous themes and cases have
been treated by scholars in a variety of fields, from history and sociology to
folklore and media studies. So we needed to be selective. The contributors we
chose for this volume have been expansive in their approaches to the role of
sport in society, and we are grateful that many of them have revised and updated
their pieces for Sport and the Color Line. Beyond their efforts, we are assisted in
tracking down images to fit the articles by Lee Brumbaugh of the Nevada
Historical Society, Wayne Wilson of the Amateur Athletic Foundation in Los
Angeles, and Steve Gietshier of The Sporting News. Colleagues and friends,
most notably Paul Spickard, provided essential background information and
ideas about the framing of the issues treated here. Others, including Klaus
Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt of the University of Bayreuth in Germany,
provided an ideal intellectual setting for the final acts of editing this volume.
viii

At Northeastern Illinois University, J.Matt Byerly spent considerable time

creating the design for first draft of the cover of this volume. At Routledge, we were
encouraged from the outset of our project by Karen Wolny and assisted time and
again by Jaclyn Bergeron. Daniel Montero did stellar work as our copyeditor,
and Nicole Ellis showed both patience and perseverance in moving our
manuscript through the production process. Lamentably, we could not include all
the scholarship that surveys the African American experience in sport, but we
have been highly impressed by our readings of late. For the future, we anticipate
rich new studies of the role of athletic achievement in the larger campaign for
equality and opportunity in the United States and even more sophisticated
interrogations of modern media images of black athletic performance.
PBM, Isla Vista, California
DKW, Fairfax, Virginia
 INTRODUCTION

Athletics is the universal language. By and through it we hope to

foster a better and more fraternal spirit between the races in
America and so to destroy prejudices; to learn and to be taught; to
facilitate a universal brotherhood.
—Howard University Hilltop, April 29,1924

By applauding [Jackie] Robinson, a man did not feel that he

was taking a stand on school integration, or on open
housing…. But…to disregard color even for an instant, is to
step away from the old prejudices, the old hatred. That is
not a path on which many double back.
Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (1973)
THE YEAR 2003 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of
W.E.B.Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, a work of both lamentation and prophesy
best remembered for its assertion that “the color line” would be the problem of
the twentieth century. Intolerance and inequality pervaded the racial landscape at
the turn of the last century, and it would be difficult to overstate the ruthlessness
used to reinforce white supremacy. Du Bois was not alone in alluding to the
lynching of black men and the sexual violence against African-American women
as everyday acts of terrorism. Racial activists, South and North, could also map
the contours of segregation—in education, housing, and employment, as well as
on trains and in hotels and restaurants—as matters of custom even where they
were not fortified by the laws of the land.
Yet at the same time, black Americans were enormously energetic on their own
behalf. Just as they protested the incivility and barbarism that revealed the depth
of racism nationwide, they also found ways to engage with mainstream
institutions. Many racial reformers carefully studied the Constitution, the
Congressional Record, and the history of American jurisprudence, constantly
invoking the principles of equality and opportunity— whenever they appeared in
official statements—to challenge Jim Crow segregation and to condemn the
betrayal of the ideal of democracy in the United States. Between the era of
Emancipation and what has been called the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s,
x

moreover, African-American leaders exalted higher education not only as a

mechanism of economic mobility, but also as a means of asserting their claims to
first-class citizenship. Significantly, too, they enlisted their accomplishments as
competitors in national pastimes in the larger civil rights crusade—to prove
equality on the playing fields as well as in broader fields of endeavor. Nearly
half a century after Du Bois’s pronouncement, Jackie Robinson would display
his remarkable athletic skills in “baseball’s great experiment.” For many
Americans, black and white alike, the desegregation of major league baseball
represented the most important symbolic breakthrough in race relations before
the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v.Board of Education.
The history of “muscular assimilationism” was never a simple story, however.
And it certainly did not end in 1947 when Robinson first donned a Brooklyn
Dodgers uniform. Today, virtually no one denies that the opening of mainstream
American sport to the full participation of African Americans—as well as of
other people of color and, of course, of all American women—has been a slow
and often wrenching process. Since the civil rights era, historians have explored
in detail the many ways African Americans deployed sporting achievement to
inspire race pride and to prevail upon the dominant culture to fully abide by the
doctrines of fair play and sportsmanship. More recently, scholars in a variety of
fields have also addressed the African-American experience in sport with regard
to the image of the black body, the intersection of race, gender, and social
location in popular consciousness, and the global marketing of black sports icons.
For the last two decades, the most powerful people internationally—it might be
said—have been American presidents. But the most recognizable have been
Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. To much of the rest of the world, sports
have defined race relations in the United States—for better and for worse.
Tellingly, an increasing number of cultural critics mark the very different life
trajectories of star athletes and the mass of African-American youth in terms of
the paradoxes, or other problematic dimensions, of the quest for sporting
celebrity. And these observations should not only encourage us to place sport
into broader contexts, but also to examine more carefully the relationship
between the history of athletics and race relations during the twentieth century.
Today’s editorials and commentary might suggest that when we read the sports
pages and consider race relations one hundred years after Du Bois’s manifesto,
we should also ponder substantial questions about social justice for the future of
the entire nation.
The articles gathered in this book survey diverse issues and ideas with regard
to the history of race relations in American sport. They include biographies of
major figures and depictions of key events, yet even as they form an expansive
narrative of the black athletic experience itself, these essays are devoted to the
meanings of sport for many African Americans as well as for the larger history
of desegregation and racial reform. The chronicle of athletic travail and triumph
is a long one, stunning in its complications. Here it is important to note that there
were forerunners to the black champions of the twentieth century as well as early
 xi

attempts to link participation in sports to larger social concerns. As far back as

1810, Tom Molineaux was hailed as a black hero in the boxing ring, though the
fame of this American ex-slave was gained not in his homeland but in England.
In the aftermath of slavery, black Americans strove to participate in emerging
national pastimes, and a number of athletes such as the jockey Isaac Murphy and
baseball players like Moses Fleetwood Walker distinguished themselves at the
highest levels of their sports. Yet perhaps because of the increasing success of
African-American athletes, white hostility to their pioneering efforts grew into
rigidly exclusionary practices. The process was complex and the circumstances
varied from place to place, yet ultimately Jim Crow would preside over major
league baseball franchises, racetracks, and most boxing venues for many years to
come.
After the turn of the century, as the essays in the first section demonstrate,
both the exploits of great athletes and the creation of new sporting associations
helped create a sense of community among black Americans and fashion a more
expansive notion of race pride. The ingenuity of both entrepreneurs and racial
activists in the urban North created popular African-American baseball
franchises and basketball squads as well as an increasing number of playing fields
and gymnasiums in cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago, where blacks had begun
to settle in increasing numbers. Meanwhile, educators at historically black
colleges and universities (HBCUs), located principally in the South, encouraged
the development of intercollegiate athletics, for in the words of a typical college
catalog, “the best education is that which develops a strong, robust body as well
as other parts of the human makeup.” To turn the pages of the yearbooks
published by many of those institutions in the early twentieth century, or to read
the coverage in the black press of the sporting traditions at Bennett or North
Carolina College, for instance, is to learn that athletics played a significant role
in the African American collegiate experience—for women and men alike.
Although blacks showed an impressive vitality and sense of self-worth in
creating sporting communities of their own, they continued to protest segregation
and discrimination at every opportunity and made the most of the occasional
exceptions to the prevailing pattern of exclusion. During the first half of the
century, the black press fairly brimmed with news of athletic achievement,
interpreted as a measure of racial progress. Thus African Americans could dote
on the victories won and records established by “race men” in international
competition such as the Olympic Games; they were aware, as well, that black
baseball players more than held their own in mixed competition with white
major leaguers, and for many years they told stories about the legendary Jack
Johnson, heavyweight champion from 1908–1915. It would not be until the
Depression decade and the war years, however, that the gathering momentum of
civil rights activism reached a critical mass.
The campaign for equal opportunity in sports drew, at one level, on the status
of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens as national heroes, especially after their symbolic
victories over fascism in the late 1930s: the Berlin Olympics and the second
xii

Louis-Schmeling bout drew attention to the fact that in highly visible

international arenas, America’s foremost representatives were black men.
African-American leaders, such as those who guided the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) endeavored to publicize such
lessons of loyalty, especially since the Second World War was widely claimed as
a defense of freedom and democracy. To a significant extent, too, the linking of
racial reform to patriotism became a part of the U.S. propaganda project during
the early years of the Cold War; indeed, the whole world was watching as
President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military and as Branch
Rickey and Jackie Robinson altered the history of major league baseball, or on a
different podium, when African-American women represented both race and
nation in winning gold, silver, and bronze medals during the Olympiads of the
1950s and 60s. What stands out from the essays in the second section of this
volume is that the process of desegregation was halting, never sure. Racial
change rarely occurred in the flash of enlightenment by university officials, the
owners of professional teams, or politicians; rather, it was the result of local as well
as national agitation and protest, appeals that longstanding ideals—such as fair
play and sportsmanship—should finally be put into practice, then all kinds of
legal leverage. Nevertheless, long after the Supreme Court declared that separate
was inherently unequal, few commentators would have claimed that blacks and
whites played on a level playing field. What is more, the process of
desegregation represented not just a constitutional and political revolution; for
many athletes, who confronted myriad epithets and indignities during their
pioneering efforts, it was an ordeal in the most personal and poignant terms.
The relationship between the breakthroughs in sport and the larger civil rights
crusade remains the subject of considerable scholarly scrutiny. Indeed, it is
extremely important to know when a classroom, a locker room, or a dormitory
has fully and finally become an open place. Yet, as the contributions to the final
section of this book seek to show, the underlying significance of sport in the
larger quest for racial justice rests on how athletic accomplishment is interpreted.
Clearly, the images of black athletes have been contested within Afro-America
ever since the time of Jack Johnson, but perhaps more importantly, it is the ways
in which white Americans have perceived the achievements of African
Americans in the sporting realm that matters most for the prospects of blacks
beyond the playing fields. From the era when black sports journalists such as
Edwin Bancroft Henderson promoted the ideal of “muscular assimilationism”
down to the present era, many African-American commentators have elaborated
success in sports as an emblem of race pride and an indicator of accomplishment
that could and should be translated to every other domain of human endeavor.
Such an ideological stance, however, has imposed enormous constraints on black
athletes—even as it has assumed that white America will look past race to hard
work and qualities of character that have long defined the athletic ideal. In fact,
some of the greatest African-American performers have resisted conformity to
the ideal, as the biographies of Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan reveal:
 xiii

should there be a template for black athletic success when no one model exists
for other notable Americans in other professions? And in fact, no matter in what
forms African-American achievement has been cast, the black image in the white
mind continues to be bound to stereotype and caricature, sometimes encoded in
the language of pseudoscientific assertions, often exhibited in racial profiling,
and from time to time still alluded to by the most prominent government officials
—even one hundred years after Du Bois had made his appeal and his warning—
that race relations were somehow simpler “back then.” As the concluding piece
in this collection suggests, in a variety of ways “back then” is also “now” for
many African Americans. Ultimately, if sport stands as one of the ways to erase
the color line during the twenty-first century, it cannot stand outside such
traditional notions as racial pride and community solidarity, or conventionally
broader paths to social mobility and social justice. Still, the next generation of
scholars and students of the African-American experience will need to be
innovative about the issues they confront, the problems they strive to solve. But
they should not feel compelled to start from scratch. Ideally, this collection
offers some historical foundations—not just lively sports stories but also an array
of insights about race relations in the recent past.
 I

SPORT AND COMMUNITY IN THE ERA

OF JIM CROW

“AT A TIME WHEN black Americans were denied basic fairness across the
board, the theory that hard work could trump racism was both noble and patently
false.” (Brent Staples in the New York Times, February 1, 2003). Indeed, before
the middle of the twentieth century, when mainstream institutions—major
colleges and universities, law firms, corporate offices, the U.S. military, and civil
service—made their first tentative but significant efforts to include black
Americans, positions of leadership and responsibility were filled principally
within the African-American community. The walls of segregation were built
thick and high during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first
years of the twentieth, and racism manifested itself not only in exclusionary
practices, which pervaded the sporting world as well, but also in the myriad
indignities and the outright violence regularly confronted by blacks.
No one narrative captures the ambition and despair, the frustration and striving
that characterized the experience of Jim Crow for the mass of black Americans.
Although there was no Mason-Dixon Line demarking the boundaries of racism in
America, the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural
South to the urban North did suggest that greater opportunity and freedom in
cities like Pittsburgh possessed substantial appeal. There, black Americans faced
continued hardship, but their impressive energy in (re)creating their churches and
benevolent associations, in founding business enterprises, and establishing
community centers—including sporting clubs, parks, and local YMCAs— spoke
to a newfound spirit and sense of hope for the future. In many ways athletic
achievement, even when displayed behind the veil of segregation, informed the
concept of the “New Negro”—increasingly proud and assertive.
The emerging black press captured the vitality of northern communities when
discussing politics, education, the African-American social swirl of the big
cities, and the mounting number of achievements in the athletic arena. Occasional
opportunities for interracial competition presented themselves, and such events
as Jack Johnson’s victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910 were celebrated in black
communities across the nation as enormously significant events. In a striking
commentary on the meaning of that bout, Reverend Reverdy Ransom declared
that in addition to black athletes, African-American musicians, poets, artists, and
scholars would “keep the white race busy for the next few hundred years…in
2

defending the interests of white supremacy…. What Jack Johnson seeks to do to

Jeffries in the roped arena will be more the ambition of Negroes in every domain
of human endeavor.”
Race pride and the cultivation of institutions of uplift and assimilation also
represented a central feature of the development of historically black colleges
and universities (HBCUs), such as Fisk and Howard, and the poorly funded but
proud state universities like Alcorn A & M and Morgan State. At these southern
schools, a richly textured extra-curriculum, including drama and debate, choral
groups, poetry societies, AND an array of intercollegiate sports contributed to
campus life for women and men, as well as strengthening the bonds between
individuals and their supporting communities. Within severe economic
constraints and under the surveillance of wary white southerners, black
educational institutions, high schools as well as colleges, endeavored to fashion
settings where success in sport prepared black youth for ever-greater
possibilities.
Ultimately, Jim Crow meant that African Americans would be compelled to
establish their own medical associations and bar associations because they were
excluded from membership in the American Medical Association (AMA) and
American Bar Association (ABA). This development paralleled the founding of
Negro League baseball and other organizations meeting the needs of African-
American golfers, bowlers, and tennis players. Yet such institution-building
reinforced race pride and community solidarity, and set significant records of
accomplishment just as they provided platforms of protest against segregation
and discrimination. At mid-century the Kansas City Monarchs might claim a role
in Jackie Robinson’s ascent to Major League Baseball in nearly the same way
that Howard University Law School launched Thurgood Marshall’s career from
civil rights lawyer to a place on the Supreme Court of the United States.
 1
SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–
1930
Rob Ruck

ONE CAN STILL FEEL a sense of neighborhood in Pittsburgh, of its ethnic

pockets and groupings. Pierogies and kielbasas lend their fragrance to the
Southside, and Italian remains the native tongue for many in Bloomfield and
East Liberty. The Northside retains a faint Germanic ambience, and on Polish
Hill a plaque marks the 1969 visit of Karol Wojtyla, now Pope John Paul II.
Pittsburgh’s rivers, ravines, bluffs, and hollows divide the city into dozens of
smaller communities, just as they have for almost two centuries.
These formidable natural barriers were reinforced by the historic clustering of
the different ethnic and racial groups that migrated to Pittsburgh in the course of
the city’s rise as the nation’s iron and steel workshop. By the turn of the century
they made Pittsburgh and its satellite mill towns into a multiethnic metropolis of
over half a million people, many of whom labored to produce 40 percent of the
country’s steel.
Each ethnic group that came to Pittsburgh tended to settle in a particular
neighborhood where nationality dictated which church one attended and where
one drank. But ethnicity was not an absolute factor: one did not need an ethnic
passport to move to the Hill, which loomed over the city’s downtown, or to
reside in Braddock, Homestead, or any of the other mill towns along the banks of
the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. These neighborhoods may have become
ghettos, but they were multiethnic ones. Polish, Italian, Yiddish, and Croatian
were spoken on the street and in the stores, intermingled with English and the
dialect of migrants from the Black Belt.
It was in this multiethnic, industrial city that a black community began to form
in the nineteenth century. Unlike the city’s white immigrant neighborhoods,
where the residential and occupational gains of the first generation were
bequeathed to the second, black Pittsburghers found it hard to lay the foundation
for community growth. White ethnic neighborhoods became increasingly stable
and cohesive during the twentieth century as a result of a strong infrastructure of
churches and neighborhood associations, residential persistence, and greater
workplace security. Moreover, by the 1930s the steady stream of European
immigrants had slowed to a trickle. The sons and daughters of the earlier
migrants built on the efforts of their parents, especially at work and in becoming
homeowners in tightly knit ethnic enclaves. Blacks were not so fortunate.1
4 ROB RUCK

The efforts of black Pittsburghers to achieve second-generation status were

hampered by continuing waves of black immigrants and emigrants well into the
1950s. An estimated two-thirds of all blacks living in Pittsburgh in 1910 left the
city by 1920, to be replaced a decade later by relative newcomers. Although
blacks attained slightly greater occupational and residential stability in the
1930s, a second wave of migration during and after World War II soon recast
black Pittsburgh yet again.2
Those blacks who came to Pittsburgh after the 1920s discovered a city that
was already past its economic prime. The earlier competitive advantage held by
Pittsburgh in heavy industrial production faded after World War I, resulting in
long-term economic decline. Nonetheless, blacks poured into the city in
unprecedented numbers between 1930 and 1960, as the black population
increased from about 55,000 to over 100,000. These newcomers faced both
dwindling economic opportunities and a black community that had yet to
completely shed its first-generation urban status.3

THE MAKING OF A BLACK COMMUNITY

By 1900 there were over 20,000 blacks in Pittsburgh, the majority living on the
Hill. Black Pittsburgh was a community in the making in the early twentieth
century, but it was one beset by forces pulling it apart. Against a backdrop of
discrimination in workplaces and neighborhoods, black Pittsburgh’s already
inadequate facilities were soon overwhelmed by a swelling tide of southern
migrants. In the early stages of this migration, the black community appeared to
divide along the lines of Pittsburgh-born versus migrant, with some parallels to
the social class and occupations of the two groups. It was not until the 1920s and
later that black Pittsburgh came to terms with itself and emerged with a sense of
identity as both a community and a part of an emerging national black
consciousness.
In the early twentieth century black Pittsburgh grew along with the city’s
expanding industrial base. When World War I shut off the flow of southern and
eastern European immigrants to area mines and mills, blacks from the American
South stepped in to fill the void. The number of blacks in the city more than
doubled between 1910 and 1930, exceeding 50,000. Simultaneously, the
percentage of blacks among the total city population rose from 4.8 to 8.2.4
Drawn by the prospects of better work and improved social conditions,
alternatives that the South seemed unlikely to offer, increasing numbers of
blacks trekked northward to the Steel City from Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and
elsewhere. By 1930 less than a third of Pittsburgh’s black population had been
born in Pennsylvania.5
Migration affected both the demographics and the geography of black
Pittsburgh. Men were more likely than women to make the trip north; hence the
black community soon found a disproportionate number of black southern males
on its streets and in its boardinghouses. While the migrants settled in mill towns
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 5

up and down the rivers, most found their way to the district known as the Hill. A
traditional gathering point for migrants of all backgrounds, the Hill had
supported a black population since before the Civil War, when it was popularly
known as Little Hayti.6 About half of Pittsburgh’s black population lived there in
the 1930s, with the remainder clustered in smaller groups in the eastern portion of
the city.7 Over time, black enclaves developed in the Manchester and
Beltzhoover sections as well. The Hill, like most of Pittsburgh and the nearby
mill towns, was composed of a heavily foreign-born or second-generation
population, with Irish, Italians, Jews, and Syrians living alongside blacks. While
blacks and whites sometimes shared the same building and often lived side by
side, there was a marked tendency toward racial and ethnic clustering within the
district.8
There was a definite clustering, too, of migrants and old-stock blacks.
Pittsburgh-born blacks were generally better off than the more recent migrants,
especially those from the Deep South.9 There was even a local black elite with
middle-class aspirations, referred to as “OP’s,”or Old Pittsburghers. These class
differences were compounded by a residential separation of most migrants from
the northerners. In the nearby steel town of Homestead, across the river from
Pittsburgh, skilled black workers, professionals, and shopkeepers lived in the
“Hilltop” neighborhood while the migrants who labored on work gangs in the
mills lived in crowded boardinghouses in the “Ward” along the river.10 They
went to different churches on Sunday and returned to different neighborhoods
afterward, one a fairly pleasant residential section and the other a district with a
reputation for prostitution and gambling.11 This geographic separation held for
Pittsburgh, too, as the more economically secure Pittsburgh-born blacks moved
into particular parts of the Hill and into Beltzhoover and Homewood, away from
the newcomers.12
Southern migrants and northern blacks also encountered different experiences
at work. The migrants were more likely to join the industrial work force,
sometimes introduced to break strikes but more often to make up for a
diminishing supply of southern and eastern European labor. By contrast,
Pittsburgh-born blacks could be found in domestic, clerical, or service positions.
When both worked in the mills, the locals were more likely to hold the few
skilled jobs allotted to black workers.13
This southern influx aggravated class divisions and led to two nearly separate
black communities in Pittsburgh based on place of birth and occupation. The two
groups lived apart, worked apart, and played apart. OP’s formed their own
fraternal and literary societies, while many of the migrants brought their native
community organizations with them.14 The migrants, observers noted, kept to
themselves, while the older families remained aloof, believing themselves to be
socially superior because of long residence in a northern city with its advantages
of higher literacy rates, a broader culture, greater economic security, and a better
standard of living.15
6 ROB RUCK

Another reason the black community divided was that increased numbers of
newcomers taxed scanty housing and social services and heightened competition
for work. The black middle classes also saw the migrants as a threat to their own
public image of respectability.16
Black Pittsburgh’s internal problems were compounded by the fact that
migration was not simply a one-way exodus to the North. Many migrants,
because of family ties, holidays, and the need to help out on the farm, made
seasonal pilgrimages back home. With frequent returns south, these migrants
were less likely to establish roots and meld with the northern-born population.
The two-way flow was a common experience, at least until the early 1930s.17 For
other migrants Pittsburgh was just a temporary layover in an often frustrated
quest for a better life that took them from city to city.18
This sense of unease over its own makeup was deepened by the material
conditions facing the black community. Life was harsh for most early twentieth-
century migrants, but its realities were particularly grim for blacks. The 1907
Pittsburgh Survey found that housing was a serious problem for black and
immigrant Pittsburghers, and conditions deteriorated as the number of residents
climbed. Housing accommodations were taxed well beyond their limits as
families doubled and tripled up and often took on boarders as well to meet rent
payments. Black homeownership remained at less than 4 percent on the Hill
during the 1920s, and rental properties were scarce. Blacks moved in to virtually
any space with a roof over it, crowding into abandoned boxcars, cellars, and
shacks. As the black population increased, so did the tendency for blacks to live
in segregated communities as whites sought to prevent them from moving to
certain parts of town. Small black communities coalesced in Beltzhoover, East
Liberty, and Homewood, their founders often having fled the deteriorating Hill
neighborhood.19
The Hill, as a consequence of its population density and low per capita income,
suffered from the highest incidence of disease and greatest number of public
health problems in the city. Death rates in the Third and Fifth Wards were among
the highest in the city, with the Third Ward having the highest death rate due to
transmissible diseases in Pittsburgh. Infant mortality and deaths due to all causes
were higher for blacks than whites.20
Nor did the world of work offer any respite. The opportunity for a better job
had induced many blacks to migrate in the first place. A beachhead in industrial
work was established during the relatively labor-scarce 1920s, especially in local
mills, on the railroads, and in the mines.21 Black women labored as domestics,
cleaners, and laundresses, while the men were primarily engaged as porters,
janitors, and laborers in the mills and on construction sites. Only a small
percentage escaped low-paying, unskilled labor to practice a more skilled,
rewarding occupation. However, when the Great Depression hit, black
employment plummeted, and the gains of the 1920s were all but wiped out as
black unemployment and underemployment in Allegheny County totaled 69
percent in 1934.22 The upshot was that work was neither particularly steady,
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 7

financially remunerative, nor likely to instill a sense of competence. Like

conditions in the black community, the world of work was severely lacking.
Another factor fragmenting black Pittsburgh was its geographic dispersal. In
Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, the black community formed one
contiguous area. In Pittsburgh, however, the black populace was splintered into a
fairly large enclave on the Hill and smaller neighborhoods on the Southside and
in East Liberty, Homewood, Manchester, Woods Run, and Beltzhoover.23 This
absence of a consolidated black community undercut black business and
electoral strength. “The economic basis upon which rests the social, political and
cultural life in [black] Pittsburgh is weaker and more shifting than that of any
other group,” social commentator J.Ernest Wright argued in 1940. “Because of
such variability and the existence of several communities rather than one
concentrated settlement such as Harlem or South Chicago, the group mood and
outlook has not stabilized or coalesced. The group unity has remained weak.”24

THE EVOLUTION OF A BLACK SPORTING LIFE

Black Pittsburghers took to the streets in jubilation after Jack Johnson knocked
out Jim Jeffries in their racially charged 1910 championship bout, and they
followed Joe Louis’s career with a fascination approaching reverence. But sport
also carried more subtle political meanings. Through its pantheon of sandlot and
national heroes, the struggles over the desegregation of recreation and play, and
its role in everyday life, sport played a central role in the coalescence of black
Pittsburgh after the disruptive migrations of the World War I years. In the 1920s,
1930s, and 1940s, sport offered black Pittsburgh a cultural counterpoint to its
collective lot, one that promoted internal cohesion and brought together both
Pittsburgh-born residents and southern migrants in the context of a changing
black consciousness. Moreover, sport helped the scattered black Pittsburgh
community to gain a sense of itself as part of a national black community.
Just as experiences at work and in the community shaped black Pittsburgh’s
consciousness of itself, so too did its sporting life. Sport in black Pittsburgh
during the early twentieth century was not solely the creation of black
Pittsburghers, however. While it lent a sense of cohesion to black Pittsburgh, it
did so at a time when groups and institutions external to the community sought to
organize its sporting life. They ranged from local industry and city government
to settlement agencies and the organized play movement. The context for their
work was a black community in flux as migration reshaped it and allowed
greater latitude for outside influence. While this loosely knit coalition
contributed to the development of black sport, it eventually faded from the arena
during the late 1920s, and in subsequent years black Pittsburgh was more fully in
control of its own sporting life.
A fairly wide spectrum of sport already existed in the black community,
ranging from a vibrant street life to the more restricted facilities of private clubs.
In the middle, both in terms of scope and accessibility by all classes, were sandlots,
8 ROB RUCK

neighborhood gyms, and recreation centers. But these facilities were never that
abundant, and black Pittsburghers, like white immigrant and industrial workers,
resorted to the streets and the materials of everyday life for their sport and
recreation.25

STREET LIFE AND SPORT

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Hill was without a single municipal
playground. Almost four decades later, a three-year study of the city and county
concluded that with the exception of a few parks, “no form of recreational
facility is available in proportions even approximating recognized standards If
the Negro population has less access to leisure time activities than has the general
population, they must be limited indeed.”26 But streets and empty lots were
available, even if public and private recreational opportunities were not. Street
culture has long been a part of black community life, and in Pittsburgh it took the
form of endless pickup games played amid the daily interactions of neighbors
and community residents on the stoop and sidewalk, in the pool hall and the
barbershop. The street scene included a yearly carnival and musicians
performing on street corners on the Hill, an informally organized outdoor dance
hall with a phonograph and jitterbugging on Shetland Street in East Liberty, and
nightly congregations along Wylie and Frankstown avenues.27
The street scene flourished in Pittsburgh because blacks were denied access to
a wider range of recreational facilities. In some cases the streets and the rivers
along which black mill-town populations lived were the only available
recreational resources. In others, the facilities existed but black youths had to
look elsewhere, because public recreation centers and pools were segregated on a
de facto basis. Many thus gravitated to the streets and played ball there. For a
brief span during the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) pumped
money and 1,500 WPA workers into Allegheny County playgrounds and
recreation centers. But World War II brought an end to the program. As one
columnist for Pittsburgh’s black weekly, the Pittsburgh Courier, saw it, “There
will be little else for the local children to do but return to the dusty, traffic-filled
streets and alleys from which this project was intended to rescue them.”28

BUILDING A SPORTING NETWORK FROM THE

OUTSIDE
The street scene was largely spontaneous, filling in the gaps of social life
without a formal organizing center. However, a wide spectrum of forces
consciously began to organize black sport and recreation. Capitalizing on a
growing enthusiasm for organized team sport, these forces sought to channel that
energy to meet their own particular goals. Outside influences ranged from local
government, social agencies, and area industry, to private social clubs and sports
promoters. The general trend was toward the latter, the sports entrepreneur, who
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 9

operated in conjunction with an ever stronger impulse toward self-organization

by the players themselves. Increasing commercial influence also was evident as
the locus of organization moved within the black community.
The making of an organized sporting life in black Pittsburgh involved both the
building of an infrastructure and the sponsorship of teams, clubs, and leagues.
The first required the construction of gymnasiums, pools, playing fields, and
recreation centers, facilities that were scarce for black Pittsburghers before the
twentieth century. The second built on a history of organized team and club sport
extending back to the late nineteenth century. The efforts of a loosely knit
coalition of the city, social agencies, and local industry combined with the
energies of sports promoters, social clubs, and self-organized teams to build a
fairly substantial black sporting network by the 1920s. The sandlot and
community teams playing on local fields and in neighborhood gyms and centers
were its backbone. Yet black Pittsburgh’s sporting banner was already being
carried by barnstorming baseball and basketball clubs and a contingent of track
and field athletes representing not only their community but their country in both
national and Olympic competition. As dramatic an improvement as this sporting
life was, it nevertheless was inadequate and marred by racial and class
discrimination.

THE CITY AND THE ORGANIZED PLAY MOVEMENT

The city government’s role in the recreational and sporting life of Pittsburgh,
both black and white, historically had been a limited one and was rarely
supplemented by other levels of government. City Hall did add considerably to
Pittsburgh’s sporting facilities in the early years of the twentieth century as it
acted in concert with a growing organized play movement then campaigning in
urban areas across the country. This organized play movement, with its
supervised playgrounds and recreation centers, was in conscious opposition to
the world of street life and the sort of sport it fostered. Cary Goodman, a scholar
of the movement, argues that the alternatives supported by this national play
movement were intended not only to lure children away from the streets but to
socialize the offspring of the immigrant population to a particular system of
class-bred values and behavior.29 The city was induced by the Pittsburgh
Playground Association (PPA), the local arm of the organized play movement, to
take a more activist role in promoting sport and recreation among its residents. It
turned Washington Park, on the lower Hill, over to the PPA in 1903, and the
group proceeded to erect a wood-frame recreational center on what had once
been a dumping grounds. An athletic field and bleachers were built, and in 1908
a more modern center was constructed. The first fully equipped playground and
athletic field in the city, Washington Park became a center for baseball, boxing,
basketball, and football for the next forty-odd years.
By 1929 Pittsburgh’s Bureau of Recreation was running seventy-eight
recreational centers, eight of which were located on the Hill. There was an
10 ROB RUCK

assortment of playgrounds, swimming pools, athletic fields, and recreation

centers, with an emphasis on summer sport and recreation. Of the eight facilities
on the Hill, two were year-round recreation centers—the Crawford Bath House
and Washington Park—one was a swimming pool, and the others were a mix of
summer playgrounds and athletic fields.
The recreation centers and the athletic fields were more of a focus for
organized sport than the playgrounds, where younger children gathered. The
Crawford Bath House was a combination bathhouse and club center for sport.
But sport was only part of its program to help migrant blacks adjust to urban-
industrial life. This program included a kindergarten and classes for adults.
Lacking an athletic field, the Crawford Bath House served as a center for both
girls’ and boys’ basketball teams and housed a boxing ring where some of
Pittsburgh’s finest pugilists trained, including Jackie Wilson and Charles Burley,
contenders who worked out there in the 1930s and 1940s. And in 1926 the
bathhouse sponsored and lent its name to a ragtag group of youths who became
one of the best baseball teams in the Western Hemisphere, the Pittsburgh
Crawfords.30
The Crawford Bath House, with an all-black staff in 1929, catered mainly to
blacks. The racial mix was greater at Washington Park, where about one-third of
the participants on any given day were likely to be black. The playgrounds were
usually either predominantly black or predominantly white. While the city’s
general policy was not ostensibly segregationist, there was de facto segregation
of certain centers and facilities. In some cases swimming pool hours were
divided along racial lines; in others a pattern of friction and sometimes physical
violence persuaded blacks not to use the pool or center.31 But where both blacks
and whites used the same facilities there seems to have been a high degree of
interaction.
Most of the city-run centers catering to blacks were on the Hill, where the
largest concentration of blacks in the city lived. Blacks in other parts of the city
frequently went there if they wanted to use the city’s recreation centers because
of subtle and not-so-subtle discouragement from using centers located
elsewhere. The city’s services, which were criticized repeatedly for their
inadequacies, were augmented by the work of various social agencies and
settlement houses.

SOCIAL AGENCIES AND SETTLEMENT HOUSES

The Soho and Morgan community houses, the YMCA and YWCA, the Urban
League, the Kay Club, and the black churches all directed energy into the
sporting life of black Pittsburgh. The sum total of their efforts was an addition to
both physical plant and the sponsorship of teams and leagues.32
The YMCA became the cornerstone of this social agency work in sport, but its
impact in the black community was severely circumscribed by its racial and class
biases. In the first place, YMCAs generally were found in communities where
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 11

there was a combination of strong Protestant influence and some affluence.33 By

serving an economically favored strata, the YMCAs discouraged black
participation. Moreover, certain local branches, such as the ones in McKeesport,
Sewickley, and Coraopolis, simply excluded blacks. The racial compromise was
to build a YMCA on the Hill, designated as the “colored” branch among the
fourteen local facilities operating in 1928. This was standard operating procedure
for the YMCA nationally in those years. While concentrating its energies among
the most ghettoized of the black populace, the YMCA’s policy of segregation
left blacks in other parts of the city outside its program.34
Black Pittsburgh’s YMCA was built at the heart of the Hill, across Centre
Avenue from the building that housed the Pittsburgh Courier. Courier editor
Robert L.Vann chaired the fundraising efforts for the new building, which relied
heavily on the contributions of the Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald, a
Chicago mail-order magnate, contributed to the construction of more than a score
of YMCAs in black communities. Completed in 1923, the Centre Avenue Y
rapidly emerged as a key social and political center for black Pittsburgh. Its rooms
and auditoriums were used for community meetings and served as a gathering
point during political campaigns. With classrooms and club rooms, a dormitory,
a pool, and a gymnasium, the YMCA had its hands in activities ranging from
industrial work and health education to sport and recreation.
The YMCA provided sports facilities and sponsored teams and league
activity. Blacks participated in tennis, volleyball, track and field, and swimming,
as well as basketball, the most widely played sport at the YMCA. As of 1930, the
YMCA had the only basketball court consistently available to blacks in the city.
In the spring of 1929, eighteen different black teams played there. Although it
did not sponsor baseball or football, the YMCA participated in a mushball
(softball) league and helped coordinate a black industrial workers’ baseball
league. The black churches worked through the YMCA in establishing a church
athletic league, as did the Urban League and local industry.
YMCA-sponsored teams competed within all-black leagues in addition to
entering tournaments and leagues hosted by the American Athletic Union, the
Pittsburgh Press, and regional and state YMCA bodies. Participation in the latter
often meant breaching racial barriers. When the Centre Avenue Y’s lightweight
team won the state basketball title in 1924, it was the first black team to have
played in the state YMCA tournament. Its teams also integrated volleyball and
swimming meets, as well as the Keystone Softball League in 1945. In track and
field, which was probably the most racially mixed amateur sport, the Centre
Avenue squad won the Pittsburgh Press, YMCA, and Amateur Athletic Union
(AAU) meets on a regular basis.
Nonetheless, the YMCA was criticized for reaching only a small part of the
black community. The Urban League estimated that of over 20,000 black males
between the ages of ten and fifty who lived in the city during the 1920s, the
YMCA served only about 1.5 percent of them. It argued for programs that would
include the “underprivileged Negro boy” and urged that additional funds and
12 ROB RUCK

Figure 1±1 The Monticello basketball squad. Top row (from left to right): Joe Mahoney,
Evan Baker; Middle row: Jim Dorsey, Seward Posey, Walter Clark; Bottom row: “Bird”
Brown, Cumberland Posey, Sellers Hall, Charles Richmond. Cum Posey, a stellar player
in early twentieth-century basketball and later black Pittsburgh’s most successful sports
entrepreneur. Courtesy of Zerbie Dorsey.

personnel be allocated to supplement the work being done. However, interviews

conducted with some sixty participants in Pittsburgh’s sporting past, as well as
newspaper accounts of the YMCA’s activities, indicate that at least its sport
program reached a fairly wide cross-section of the black community. Its teams
included such men as sportswriters Wendell Smith and Chester Washington from
the Pittsburgh Courier; former collegiate athletes Everett Utterback, Max
Thompson, and Woody Harris; black professional athletes Ted Page and Josh
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 13

Gibson; sandlot stars Gabe Patterson and Ralph Mellix; and a host of young boys
and men from working-class backgrounds.35
Sport in the black community was heavily biased toward males, and females
were often excluded. While the YMCA was severely restricted in its activities
due to a lack of suitable physical facilities, it afforded black youth a chance to
play and to compete on an organized basis. In later years it also was a possible
stepping-stone to a collegiate career. Some blacks made the YMCA their primary
sporting outlet and spent their entire athletic lives competing for its teams and in
its leagues.36
The settlement house movement also added to the recreational life of black
Pittsburgh by sponsoring teams. Yet settlement work was for the most part a
transitory phenomenon hindered by its own racial practices. Settlements were
traditionally oriented toward meeting the needs of poor, frequently immigrant
communities, and black Pittsburgh met both these qualifications. There were,
however, but a few settlement houses that either worked within black
communities or opened their facilities to blacks.37 Moreover, these settlements
were hampered by scarce funding.
Three settlements served the Hill in the migration years; two of them closed their
doors by 1928. The Soho Community House, founded in 1907 in an integrated
working-class neighborhood near the Hill, provided limited sporting facilities to
its members, about 15 percent of whom were black. The Bryant Community
Center and the Morgan Community House were church-supported centers for
blacks on the Hill. The lack of steady funding brought both to an end in the
1920s. The Morgan Community House, despite its short life span between 1919
and 1924, hosted a unique sporting aggregation.38
In 1919 the racially mixed but predominantly black Scholastic Club of
Pittsburgh sponsored a track and field squad coached by Hunter Johnson, then
trainer for the football team at the University of Pittsburgh and former head of
the Century Athletic Club in New York. Johnson actively recruited blacks to
come to Pittsburgh to run for the Scholastic Club. He persuaded Earl Johnson
from Baltimore, Charlie West from Washington and Jefferson College, and
DeHart Hubbard from his redcap stand at Pittsburgh’s Union Station to move to
town and train under him. The following year, 1920, Johnson became trainer and
manager of the Morgan Community Athletic Club (MCAC), and Earl Johnson,
Charley West, and DeHart Hubbard went with him. The MCAC sponsored
baseball, basketball, and boxing in addition to track, and such players as Vic
Harris and Pappy Williams developed on its squads. But the club’s forte was
track, and three of its members—Johnson, Hubbard, and West—represented the
United States at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Hubbard, a long jumper, was
the first black American to win an Olympic championship. Johnson, who became
a fixture in black Pittsburgh’s sporting world, placed third in the 10,000-meter
race behind Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, and his compatriot, Willie Ritola.
However, the MCAC, which had had no money to send candidates to the 1920
Olympic tryouts, soon folded due to lack of funds.39
14 ROB RUCK

There were other settlement-type centers, such as the Kay Boy’s Club and the
Rankin Christian Center, involved in sport and recreation, yet these centers were
hampered by insufficient financing. The black churches, which provided some
financial support and sponsored leagues and teams through the YMCA, and the
Urban League, which acted similarly, had virtually no independent sports
programs.40 These organizations took a conscious interest in sport and
recreation, however, and cooperated with the YMCA and local industry in a
variety of ventures.
The churches and social agencies were undoubtedly driven by sincere concern
for the plight of black Pittsburghers. But they also had a political and social
agenda for the black community that reflected the realities of Pittsburgh in the
1920s. The region’s growing economic base and the restriction of European
immigration had created unprecedented opportunities for blacks. The YMCA,
the Urban League, and many black ministers and settlement leaders wanted to
make sure that blacks took advantage of the situation. Sport and recreation were
inducements to boys and young men to take part in the larger programs, which,
in the organizers’ own words, were bent on “improving the morale, efficiency
and consciousness of Negro workers.”41 They facilitated the adjustment of
blacks, especially those from the South, to the routines and demands of industry.
Acting as labor recruiters for industry, they also helped black laborers to make
their work habits more acceptable to white society. Sport teams and recreational
facilities were but a part of this larger program; the direct link was more concrete
in these agencies’ cooperation with local industry in the field of industrial sport
and recreation.

INDUSTRIAL SPORT AND RECREATION

The capitalist world system was shaken to its very foundations in the early
twentieth century. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and a labor upsurge of
almost unprecedented proportions combined to pose a direct challenge to
managerial authority.42 When adverse economic conditions undercut the labor
movement in the early 1920s, however, American manufacturers counterattacked
and launched a broad set of changes in industrial life to ensure that the upsurge
would not be repeated.
This American plan was perceived as an alternative to both Bolshevism and
unionism. It stressed the open (i.e., nonunion) shop and introduced employee
representation plans as a company-sanctioned forum from which workers might
communicate their grievances, thus defusing shop-floor dissent. The plan
revamped production as the precepts of scientific management emphasized the
goals of managerial control and greater productivity. For skilled workers,
management was willing to try to guarantee some semblance of employment
security. Finally, the American plan made use of new plant professionals,
personnel managers, who introduced a variety of workplace welfare measures
including lunchrooms, company newspapers, and clean washrooms. As a Time
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 15

magazine advertisement extolling the virtues of Scot Tissue Towels put it, “Is
your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?”43 Foremost among these schemes was a
focus on athletic teams and recreation.
The immediate tasks were to solve the problem of turnover that plagued
American industry and to devise a means of shaping the attitudes of the
workforce. Long concerned with the supply of labor, American industry has
always gone to great lengths to ensure that it would be both adequate in size and
willing to work. In the early twentieth century the labor supply fluctuated
dramatically with the strength of the economy and as waves of migrants flooded
American cities only to retreat when war struck Europe in August 1914. When
the demand for labor was high, workers commonly left one job for a better deal
somewhere else. It was not unusual for a worker to accept a half-dozen or more
job offers in a single day, then report only to the one offering the highest wages
and best working conditions. Annual turnover rates were as high as 1,600 to 2,
000 percent in a single factory during World War I.44
While industry was addressing its concerns over astronomical turnover and
labor turbulence, it also had to consider another changing aspect of work, that of
shorter workdays. The second decade of the twentieth century was the critical
period in the struggle for the eight-hour workday. During that time, those who
worked forty-eight hours per week or less increased from 8 to 48 percent of the
work force; those working more than fifty-four hours per week dropped from
almost 70 percent to less than 26 percent.45 Even the steel industry, where the
norm had been a twelve-hour day and alternate six- and seven-day workweeks
with a full twenty-four-hour turnabout shift every other week, went to an eight-
hour workday by the end of 1923. This decline in the number of hours worked
was a vital precondition for greater participation by workers in sport and
recreation. It raised questions in the minds of personnel managers as to who
would direct and influence workingclass leisure time.
The United States was the world’s leading industrial manufacturer during the
1920s, producing a higher percentage of global manufacturing than it ever had
before or would afterward. The nation’s manufacturers did not reach this
pinnacle by ignoring the attitudes and aspirations of their workers. On the
contrary, American industry sought to take advantage of them. The writings of
L.C.Gardner, the superintendent of the Homestead Works of Carnegie-Illinois
Steel Company (later United States Steel), are indicative of the thinking of
American industry.46 Carnegie-Illinois sponsored a wide range of athletic teams
and recreational facilities at its Monongahela River valley plants, not only for its
workers but the surrounding communities.
Gardner’s essay on “Community Athletic Recreation for Employees and Their
Families” begins with the assumption that practical managers will “see to it that
the lot of their employees is as pleasant as possible because it is good business.”
Gardner suggested, “The matter of recreation is one that may promise to be a
cure-all. It is attractive, it looks easy to handle and a certain element of [the
workforce] is outspoken for it A sane, moderate program of recreation that aims
16 ROB RUCK

to give everybody something to do in his leisure time is one way the employer
can insure his workers coming to work refreshed and alert and in a happy frame
of mind.”
The superintendent also urged plant managers to look beyond the confines of
their factory. “Good will is not a sentiment that trickles down from above. It comes
into existence at the bottom of the social structure. The place to cultivate good
will is where it grows naturally—in the community, in the neighborhood, where
people meet as folks.” Consequently, industrial plants should foster sport in the
community in addition to the plant. Gardner listed twenty-eight possible
activities, ranging from sport teams to playgrounds and festivals.
Gardner justified these commitments on several grounds, beginning with the
matter of labor: “The best and most logical supply of labor is in the immediate
community of a plant. Every resident, man, woman, boy or girl is a potential
employee.” Second, he noted that community recreation “helps to make good
will. And the good will of a community is a real asset.” Third, the program
helped workers develop “strong bodies and alert minds”; children “grow into
better specimens of manhood and the adults will keep in better physical
condition.” Gardner also suggested that recreation instilled a certain sense of
organization and ideology: “It trains leaders to work with the company and does
so in non-controversial subjects, so that these leaders are likely to be anchors to
windward when outside leaders attempt to gather a following.” Moreover,
recreation acted as a powerful force in “preaching the gospel of clean living” and
allowed youngsters an outlet in games so that there would be “less desire or
inclination to violate laws and destroy property.” Gardner concluded, “The
industrial firm that takes a long look ahead, and invests in Community
Recreation can expect as a dividend, loyal, healthy, clean living and team
working employees drawn from its immediate neighborhoods.”
Company sport became a national phenomenon as a majority of large firms
sponsored some sort of recreational program during the 1920s.47 One automaker
sponsored twentyseven uniformed teams. Another company, with twenty-six
teams, built a steel and concrete stadium with a seating capacity of 4,000. Most of
the firms donated uniforms and equipment, paid the umpires and traveling costs,
and provided some sort of reward or banquet for the players. Teams ranged from
intramural departmental outfits, to an auto company soccer team with a national
reputation, to an iron and steel company team which toured Europe each year,
with all expenses being paid by the company. Some of the squads eventually
turned professional: for example, the Chicago Bears, one of America’s oldest
professional football teams, had its beginnings as the A.E.Staley company team
in Decatur, Illinois.48
In addition to football, basketball, and volleyball teams, many companies also
provided tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and golf courses, and sponsored
employee athletic associations. A midwestern company with 17,000 employees
built an athletic field with a grandstand seating 10,000 complete with locker
rooms, showers, six tennis courts, four baseball diamonds, horseshoe courts, a
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 17

cinder running track, and a playground for workers’ children. The official stance
was, “Given a square-deal management, industrial ama teur athletics organized
on a businesslike basis will promote plant morale quicker than any other single
method.”49
Many firms worked with the local branch of the childrens’ playground
movement and cooperated with the YMCA, the YWCA, and the settlement
houses; at times, local industries also worked with each other. Industrial athletic
associations could be found in Newark, Paterson, Baltimore, Cleveland, and
Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh’s workingmen and women were at the forefront of the labor
upsurge. They confronted management at the Pressed Steel Car Company in
McKees Rocks and the Westinghouse complex in East Pittsburgh, and joined the
1919 steel strike and a score of other walkouts. When the dust of battle had
settled, industry responded with a variety of welfare provisions. The steel and
electrical industries, which dominated Pittsburgh’s river valleys, set the tone for
community recreation and company sport. During the relatively prosperous
Coolidge years of the 1920s, they built playgrounds, nurseries, and community
centers near many of their mills. Andrew Carnegie, the titan of the American iron
and steel industry, endowed combined libraries and athletic clubs in Munhall,
Braddock, Duquesne, and Carnegie and contributed to the construction of
Schwab Vocational High School in Homestead and Renziehausen Park in
McKeesport. Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company (WEMCO)
and Spang-Chalfant built and maintained recreation centers in Turtle Creek and
Etna. The railroads and the coal companies also sponsored teams and leagues for
their workers.50
The Homestead Works of Carnegie-Illinois Steel conducted what was
probably the most extensive sport and recreation program in the area. The
Homestead Library Athletic Club (HLAC), an appendage of the Carnegie-
financed Munhall Carnegie Library, could trace its athletic heritage to the late
nineteenth century. In the 1890s their football team, composed of former
collegians from the Ivy League, was recognized as one of the top semipro squads
in the nation and its semipro baseball team, with the eminently eccentric Hall of
Famer Rube Waddell on the mound, played before large and enthusiastic
crowds. Throughout the early twentieth century the HLAC was a mecca for local
children, who used its swimming pool, bowling alleys, and gymnasium. Concerts
and plays competed for space with wrestling, water polo, swimming, and team
sports. HLAC teams won national amateur championships in wrestling and in
track and field and also sent members of its women’s swim team to the 1928,
1932, and 1936 Olympics.
Shortly before the United States entered World War I, Carnegie-Illinois Steel
expanded its community program, building two playgrounds in Munhall and two
in Homestead. The company showed outdoor movies once a week and employed
playground directors to supervise both young children and team sports. Older
children played soccer, mushball, field hockey, basketball, or baseball, while
18 ROB RUCK

their mothers took advantage of the well-baby clinic and brought their toddlers to
the wading pool. The program was directed by the Homestead Works’ employee
welfare department.
This same department also sponsored baseball and basketball teams for
company workers, and games were held almost every night of the week at nearby
West Field. The best players from the Homestead Works often tangled with teams
from other mills in exhibition and industrial league matches.51
Much of this company welfare was off-limits to the black community, however.
What was not strictly proscribed was segregated by race. The Carnegie Library
clubs in Homestead and Duquesne, with their swimming pools, gymnasiums, and
books, denied membership to blacks. In the plant, blacks could play ball but only
on black teams. As one historian of the black migration to Pittsburgh noted,
blacks might have shopped and dined with whites in Homestead’s commercial
district and worked alongside them in the mill, but when it came to the
company’s recreational program, Jim Crow was the rule.52
The sum total of industry’s involvement in sport in the black community was
nonetheless rather impressive. Many of the larger companies employed “Negro
welfare workers” during the migration, men who supervised black teams and
recreation during the 1920s.53 Earl Johnson of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works
in Braddock, Cyrus T.Green of Westinghouse, Charles Deevers and J.D.Barr of
Pennsylvania Railways Company, William (“Pimp”) Young of Lockhart Iron
and Steel, Charles Betts of Homestead Steel Works, and W.R.Johnson of the
Philadelphia Company constituted a group of company welfare and community
workers who aligned themselves with their counterparts at the YMCA, the Urban
League, and the settlement houses. Together they promoted not only teams and
athletic clubs at their respective workplaces but leagues made up of company,
community, and YMCA squads.54
Earl Johnson, an Olympic medalist and feature writer for the Pittsburgh
Courier' s sports pages, directed the diverse activities of the black Edgar
Thomson Steel Works Club.55 Johnson also ran for the club in national and local
track and field meets. In the American Athletic Union national five-mile
championship in Chicago in the fall of 1923, he defeated Willie Ritola, the
Finnish marathoner who would edge him out for the silver medal the following
summer at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.
The Edgar Thomson Works, commonly referred to as ET, fielded baseball,
track and field, basketball, and boxing teams. The baseball roster included
youths who would go on to play Negro League ball as well as men in the
twilight of their playing careers who had previously been with the Homestead
Grays or the Pittsburgh Crawfords. While the ET ball club was formed to meet
the recreational needs of black steelworkers, its players were frequently offered
jobs and money by the company to play ball. When John Herron, financial backer
and manager of the Pittsburgh Monarchs, disbanded his black sandlot team in
1926 a number of the players wound up at ET.Harold Tinker, one of the
Monarchs making the switch, recalled that the ET team “wasn’t doing too well,
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 19

Figure 1±2 The Edgar Thomson Works team, called ET, was coached by Olympic
medallist Earl Johnson. Several of the ET players jumped to the Crawfords in the late
1920s. Back row (left to right): Ted Sledge, (unidentified player), Neal Harris, Claude
Johnson, Randy Hughes, (unidentified), Charlie Becotas, Watson, Earl Johnson. Front row
(left to right): (unidentified player), (unidentified player), Gus Neville, Ernest Terry, Harold
Tinker, (unidentified player), William Kimbo, (unidentified player). Courtesy of Harold
Tinker.

but Earl Johnson was a very progressive guy and he went out and looked for
ballplayers. He took the nucleus of the Monarchs.”56 Charlie Hughes, Ormsby
Roy, Neal Harris, Claude Johnson, William Kimbo, and Tinker had grown up
playing ball with each other, and when the Monarchs folded they decided to stick
together. An offer of employment made moving en masse to the ET squad an
easy decision. Hughes recalled getting a job at the mill in order to play on the
team: “It was an easy job, steady daylight and they gave you time off to play and
everything.”57 His brother Walt indicated that while the team had company
support and most of the players got jobs in the mills, some simply played for the
team on a semiprofessional basis, receiving payment for each game played.58
Such arrangements were fairly common on company teams. Willis Moody, a
sandlot and Negro League star for a score of seasons, went to work for the
Homestead plant of Carnegie Illinois Steel and wound up managing their black
ball club. He was able to get men jobs so they could play on the team and also
was allowed to include on the roster five players who had nothing to do with the
mill. How they were remunerated was “none of my concern,” he explained.59
The ET baseball team graced area sandlots for the better part of two decades,
from 1923 through World War II. The steel company’s financial support
apparently tailed off in the 1930s, however, and community groups like the Oak
Leaf Club and the Young Men’s Business Club picked up the slack. Still headed
by Earl Johnson, the ball club passed the hat at games and hosted a series of
entertainment features to raise money. In the late 1930s Rufus (“Sonnyman”)
20 ROB RUCK

Jackson, co-owner of the Homestead Grays and a prominent numbers banker in

Homestead, was rumored to be lending a hand. ET teams were crowned the
“mythical sandlot champs” of western Pennsylvania in 1937 and 1938 after
winning the honors in Pittsburgh’s top sandlot circuit, the Greater Pittsburgh
League.60 Playing not only other black mill teams but white sandlot clubs as
well, the ET squad often took the field for as many as sixty or seventy games a
season. In 1938, for example, the team won fifty-six, lost four, and had five
games end in ties. Over the years, men like Lefty Williams, Joe Strong, Bus
Clarkson, Pete Watson, Fuzzy Walton, and Dodo Baden played for the team.
Some made their mark in the Negro Leagues while others acquired reputations
on the local sandlots. Still more played simply to take part in the game of
baseball and compete on one of the area’s more highly regarded squads.
Westinghouse (WEMCO), Homestead Steel, Pittsburgh Railways, Gimbel
Brothers, the Philadelphia Company, Carnegie Steel, Pittsburgh Screw and Bolt,
and probably another dozen or so companies sponsored teams for their black
workers. Some of them, like Gimbels and the Philadelphia Company, ran entire
leagues; others, like WEMCO, sponsored individual clubs. Organized in 1922,
with 150 members, the WEMCO Club was open to black employees of
Westinghouse and a handful of honorary white members. Pursuing “civic, social
and industrial” ends with the aim of promoting good will and better relationships
among the employees, the WEMCO Club sponsored basketball teams and an
annual field day.61 These field days regularly drew 1,500 to 2000 fans to Wildin
Field in Wilmerding, in the Turtle Creek valley. Music, stunts, and races vied
with prizes for the children, a grand drawing, and an enormous barbecue. Boxing
matches and a doubleheader featuring the WEMCO team highlighted the day.62
Industry also helped their black company teams align themselves with
neighborhood clubs and organized leagues. Beyond the pale of organized
baseball and informally barred from the top local semipro and sandlot circuits
during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, black ball clubs for the most part played
independent ball. Teams arranged games with each other on an ad hoc basis. The
sports pages of the Courier issued periodic calls for a black baseball league
comprising the better sandlot outfits, and local companies, through their
employee welfare agents, backed these ventures. It was one thing to play
independent ball, booking separate engagements with other teams; it was quite
another proposition to organize a league, providing structure and leadership,
ticket distribution, press contacts, a regular schedule, and championships.
Besides the internal departmental leagues of the Philadelphia Company and
Gimbel Brothers, there were at least four other workplace-based leagues in
Pittsburgh during the 1920s.
The Negro Industrial Baseball League was the earliest, operating in 1922 and
1923. It stipulated that team rosters must be filled with amateurs, the majority of
whom were industrial workmen connected with the same plant, but teams soon
moved to import professional talent. Most of the teams were from steel mills like
Fort Pitt, Carnegie, Lockhart, Woodlawn, and Coraopolis. Its first president,
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 21

John T.Clark, who was also secretary of the Urban League, resigned during the
1923 season to protest the dilution of the amateur-only policy. Leadership
devolved to Cyrus T.Green, league secretary and a welfare worker for
Westinghouse. A second effort, the Colored Industrial and Community
Basketball League, appeared a few seasons later and was the centerpiece of local
amateur basketball in 1926 and 1927. Teams from Edgar Thomson, the
Duquesne Steel Works, the Philadelphia Company, and the WEMCO Club
represented the industrial side of the league, while the Paramount and Holy
Cross athletic clubs and the North Side Scholastics and the Vandals represented
the neighborhoods. The league’s leadership included the tireless Earl Johnson,
Max Bond, who was the physical director of the Centre Avenue branch of the
YMCA and a former athlete at University of Chicago, W.R.Johnson, who was
the physical activities director of the Philadelphia Company, and Cyrus T.Green.
Playing their games at the ET gym and the Centre Avenue Y, the Colored
Industrial and Community Basketball League attempted to bar all the “so called
and recognized professional colored floor stars,” an indication of encroaching
commercial influence.63
Two other baseball leagues came together in the late 1920s and pitted
industrial and community teams in regular competition. The Mon-Yough League
was made up of teams from workplaces along the Monongahela and
Youghiogheny rivers. Donora, Duquesne, Clairton, Wilmerding, Hays, and
Christie Park were its mainstays. The Colored Industrial loop was a mix of
community and mill teams, with WEMCO, Carnegie Steel, and the Philadelphia
Company joining the East Liberty Greys and the Mendor, Hemlock, Bidwell, and
fledgling Crawford athletic clubs.64
Scanning the list of team and league organizers reveals a core of activists,
representing the YMCA, the Urban League, city recreation centers, settlement
houses, and local industry, who were behind most league activity. Some of them
went back and forth between the private and public sector but retained their
commitment to recreation. Charles Betts is one such example. Betts moved to
Homestead in 1911 at the age of ten and found work in his teens at
Westinghouse. From 1927 to 1928 he was the assistant director of welfare there
and played for the Loendi Reserves and the Homestead Athletic Association. The
Great Depression cost him his job, but he was eventually hired by the WPA to
turn an abandoned building into the McClure Community Center. The Carnegie
Steel Works Colored Club wired the building and paid for the electricity, and the
Homestead Council was petitioned to pay the rent and water bills. Betts later
directed the Ammon Recreation Center on the Hill, a post he held for twenty-
four years. During that time he coached the Ammon Track Club, whose ranks
included Herb Douglas, an Olympic medalist in 1948. Betts also helped form the
Uptown Little League in 1952. His employers changed regularly but his
involvement in black sport was a constant. Leagues and organized competition
were thus an arena where men like Betts cooperated in building sport and
recreation in black Pittsburgh. They saw their goals as common ones.65
22 ROB RUCK

BACKING OFF: THE DECLINE OF EXTERNAL

INFLUENCE
Between the efforts of social agencies and settlement houses, companies and the
city, a greatly enlarged sporting network took shape in the first thirty years of the
twentieth century. But this coalition dissipated with the advent of economic
depression. While the need for recreational facilities and sporting opportunities
was greater than ever during hard times, when enforced idleness left many with
time on their hands and little else, the physical plant and sport programs
sponsored by this coalition did not grow to fill the void. Indeed, company, city,
and social agency commitment to sport shrunk at a rate almost proportional to
the declining economy.
City and community recreational programs would have been insufficient
during the 1930s even if they had been maintained at their maximum level of
funding from the 1920s. But when tax revenues from depressed industries fell,
social and civic programs were cut back or terminated. Police, fire, and medical
care suffered throughout the Monongahela River valley, and with these essential
services in trouble, it is no surprise that recreational programs received little
backing.66
The decline of city and community support was compounded by the almost
total withdrawal of industry commitment in the early 1930s. With financial
retrenchment came a drive to cut expenses, and the subsidies for company sport
and recreation were among the first to go. Suddenly, the tremendous sums
pumped into area sport by companies whose coffers had overflowed from profits
garnered during World War I and the 1920s was reduced to a trickle and then cut
off completely. Recreation centers maintained by WEMCO in Turtle Creek and
Spang-Chalfant in Etna were boarded up. The athletic facilities of the Carnegie
Library were closed. Playground equipment bought by the companies during the
early 1920s that needed upkeep and replacement simply deteriorated. Fewer
teams and leagues could depend on company financing and support in terms of
getting players hired and letting them off from work for practice and games.67
Most of the settlement houses closed of their own volition by the 1930s, and with
the depression, the YMCA and other social agencies restricted their services. As
their financial support declined, they had to make cuts in staff, and in some cases
even close down their centers. The membership fees at some of the endowed
Carnegie Libraries were reduced, but even this lower rate was often too high to
keep or to attract members.68
The demise of this informal coalition undercut sport and recreation in black
Pittsburgh, but the blow was hardly a lethal one. Nor was it the end to the role
that social agencies, city and community departments, and local companies
would play in sport, as all of these forces either continued to maintain some level
of commitment or returned to the field when economic conditions improved.69
Yet none of these groups were ever as much a factor in the sporting life of black
Pittsburgh as they had been during the years prior to the depression.
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 23

It is difficult to assess how successful these forces were in meeting their goals
because sport and recreation were usually only part of a larger program.
Moreover, ascribing political aims to particular sports ventures often tortures the
connections between them. Yet the settlement houses, agencies like the YMCA
and the Urban League, the city, and local companies pursued these undertakings
for their own reasons, which can be broken down into three sets.
The first set represented the goals of the national organized play movement
and partly explained the role of the settlement houses, the social agencies, and
the city in sport. Emphasizing supervised play, the movement sought to employ
recreation as a means of socializing children to the values of an industrializing
American society. It saw itself in opposition to the street culture of immigrant
communities, both white and black.
The second set of motives overlapped with the first. The key question was how
to help black migrants adjust to urban-industrial life. The YMCA and YWCA,
the Urban League, and the settlement houses confronted this problem through a
variety of measures, sport being one of them. A team, a league, a gymnasium,
and a bathhouse were means by which these agencies reached the migrants and
sought to influence them.
The third set was less ambiguous than the first two and much more ambitious.
The sporting and recreational agenda of industry was perceived as a potential tonic
for industrial peace, worker productivity, and a steady flow of labor from
surrounding communities. The dividends of sport, to recall L.C.Gardner’s advice,
would be “loyal, healthy, clean-living and team working employees” who would
be “anchors to windward” when the ubiquitous outside agitators appeared.70
How effective were the programs and efforts of these forces in meeting these
ends? The values of the organized play movement certainly took root, and many
of the truisms about the meaning of sport and its role in reducing juvenile
delinquency and fostering cleanliving youth are still potent. The organized play
movement, while probably an effective means of socialization, hardly slew the
enemy, street life. Nevertheless, contemporary community-based sport projects
among black Pittsburghers echo the rhetoric about the role of sport for black
youth.71
The black migration to Pittsburgh ebbed with hard times but picked up
considerably when World War II refueled the economy. The efforts of the Urban
League, the Y’s, and the settlement houses to help migrants adjust to an urban-
industrial environment and advance in terms of education and employment were
partly successful, but underlying economic forces loomed large here. The role
these agencies played in sport and recreation certainly enhanced their image in
the black community and probably made their other programs more effective.
The leaders of these agencies were often considered by the Pittsburgh Courier
and the black community as black Pittsburgh’s leadership, and their association
with sport did them no harm.
The 1920s were relatively free of labor problems, and the black community
proved to be a steady supplier of labor wherever industry would hire black
24 ROB RUCK

workers. From a vantage point of fifty or more years, many of the black
recipients of company largess in sport gave industry credit for their recreational
activity at the same time that they acknowledged an understanding of why the
companies were involved. Few seemed to think that the programs had a major
impact on the thinking of black workers or suggested that it deterred anyone from
later participating in the labor movement when it returned in force to Pittsburgh
in the 1930s. Harold Tinker played ball for ET, but he was the first to sign a
union card in his shop. Yet area firms still employ black athletes in public
relations roles and hire them to advertise their products. If sport was not an
antidote to labor organizing then, it at least temporarily improved the image of
certain companies. By reverting to a policy of nonsupport during hard times and
unionization, much of that goodwill was lost. A company or social agency could
sponsor a team, but it took a sport activist or core group of players to really
organize it, thus reducing the ideological impact of the sponsoring agency on the
players who saw themselves or men like Earl Johnson or Sam Alexander, not
Edgar Thomson Steel Works or WEMCO, as the driving force. Even in the black
press, it was Earl Johnson’s squad more than Edgar Thomson’s, and the
industrial leagues were the work of a handful of sport activists, not of industry.
The sum total of these efforts in sport was not so much to create a fair and
decent set of recreational opportunities for black Pittsburgh as to foster a sense
that black Pittsburgh had a shared sporting life with enough dazzle and
competence to be a source of selfesteem. The legacy was that of a core of sport
activists, a cadre committed to sport and recreation for black Pittsburgh with
goals and values that transcended the particular funding interests employing them.
It left, too, a minimal number of playgrounds and fields, gyms, and swimming
pools, which, while never enough, were better than nothing. This coalition of
forces pumped money into team and league sport and supported them in other
ways as well. In a sense, these forces legitimized sport in the black community
by involving members of the black elite.
At the same time, sport began to emerge as a source of cohesion for the
community, transcending the divisions of class and place of birth. Many blacks
were exposed to sport, especially sports other than baseball and basketball,
because of these efforts. There was such an interest in sport that Courier writer
Wendell Smith would claim not long afterward that he was “absolutely sure that
no other section of the city is more sports conscious than this neglected, deprived
civic orphan,” the Hill.72
Another part of this legacy was a reinforcement of color lines in sport. The
settlement houses, social agencies, the city, and companies all contributed in some
way to the erection or maintenance of these barriers. Integrated teams and
recreational opportunities existed, but they were neither guaranteed nor the
norm. Ironically, the very street scene that the organized play movement wanted
to eradicate was more integrated and less bothered by racial differences than the
settlement houses and supervised playgrounds.73
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 25

This history of exclusion and the curtailment of programs sponsored by local

companies, settlement houses, and social agencies left black Pittsburgh on its
own in the 1930s and 1940s. Exclusion meant that black sport would have to be
built by the black community, not forces external to it. The economic realities
implied that black sport would require a greater degree of self-reliance. The field
was increasingly left to black social clubs, sports entrepreneurs, and the players
themselves. They expanded rapidly to fill whatever void was left by the
disappearance of company sport and the decline of city and social agency efforts.
During the 1930s and 1940s, black Pittsburgh was to sport what Harlem was to
the cultural and intellectual renaissance of the 1920s. Nowhere was this more
striking than on the sandlots.

NOTES

1. John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P.Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks,
Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900±1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1982), 78, 82, 131–33. The most insightful treatment of black Pittsburgh is
Laurence Glasco, “Double Burden: The Black Experience in Pittsburgh,” in
Samuel P.Hays, City at the Point (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1989). Much of my interpretation has been shaped by working with Glasco, who
was on my dissertation committee.
2. Bodnar et al., Lives, 188–96.
3. Bodnar et al., Lives, 187, 265.
4. Elsie Witchen, “Tuberculosis and the Negro in Pittsburgh: A Report of the Negro
Health Survey” (Pittsburgh: Tuberculosis League of Pittsburgh, 1934), 2; Alonzo
Moran, “Distribution of the Negro Population in Pittsburgh: 1910–30” (master’s
thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1933), 10, cites Bureau of Census Press Release 3/
21/32 on “State of Birth of the National Population”; U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Negroes in the United States: 1900±1932 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 6, 14, 24–5.
Much of this rural-to-urban migration was to southern cities, and many other
migrants stopped over in southern urban areas for a few weeks or a few years
before heading north. While Pittsburgh was not a major route for the migration and
had a lower rate of black population growth than Chicago and Detroit, for example,
the net effect was to create a sizable black community.
5. Witchen, “Tuberculosis,” 2; John Nicely Rathnell, “Status of Pittsburgh Negroes in
Regard to Origin, Length of Residence, and Economic Aspects of Their Lives”
(master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1935), 22; Social Science Research
Bulletin 1 (no. 5, 1933): 2.
6. Andrew Buni, Robert L.Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black
Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 23, cites Charles
Dahlinger, Pittsburgh and Sketch of Its Early Social Life (NewYork, 1916).
7. Witchen, “Tuberculosis,” 2–3; Joe T.Darden, Afro-Americans in Pittsburgh: The
Residential Segregation of a People (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books,
D.C.Heath and Co., 1973), 6–7.
8. Darden, Residential Segregation, 6–7; interviews with Bill Harris, 7/29/80,
Pittsburgh; Bus Christian, 2/20/81, Pittsburgh; Wyatt Turner, 12/29/80, Pittsburgh.
26 ROB RUCK

9. Rathnell, “Status,” 32; Bodnar et al., Lives, 71–2.

10. Buni, Vann, 32, cites Ernest Price McKinney, “These Colored United States,
Pennsylvania: A Tale of Two Cities,” Messenger (May 1932): 692.
11. Peter Gottlieb, “Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to
Pittsburgh, 1916–30” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1977), 256. Gottlieb’s
dissertation was published under the same title (University of Illinois Press:
Urbana, 1987).
12. Miriam Rosenbloom, “An Outline of the Negro in the Pittsburgh Area”
(M.A.thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1945), 29.
13. Gottlieb, “Making,” 261; Bodnar et al., Lives, 60–6, cites research confirming that
northern-born blacks held a higher percentage of white collar, skilled, and
semiskilled jobs than southern migrants.
14. J.Ernest Wright, “Negro in Pittsburgh” (WPA Writers’ Project, 1940), 13, 24. I
used a typed copy of this in C.Rollo Turner’s possession. A copy is now available
at Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh.
15. Wright “Negro in Pittsburgh,” 11.
16. Buni, Vann, 32, also cites Wright, “Negro,” 9–12.
17. For an excellent presentation of this argument, see Gottlieb, “Making,” 109–10.
18. Bodnar et al., Lives, 188.
19. Buni, Vann, 61–2; Witchen,“Tuberculosis,” 64–5; Ira DeA.Reid, “Social Conditions
of the Negro in the Hill District of Pittsburgh” (General Committee on the Hill
Survey, 1930), 38.
20. Witchen, “Tuberculosis,” 8–9; Reid, “Social Conditions,” 12. The percentage of
black deaths per 1,000 population in Pittsburgh was from two to fourteen points
higher than the percentage of white deaths per 1,000 every year between 1910 and
1928. In 1933, for example, the rate of deaths for blacks was 22.5 per 1,000 as
compared to 12.5 per 1,000 for whites. In 1933, the black population of Pitts burgh
(8.2 percent of the total population, according to the 1930 U.S. census) accounted
for 14 percent of all deaths, 15 percent of all infant deaths, 24 percent of all deaths
from pneumonia, and 35 percent of all deaths from tuberculosis.
21. Buni, Vann, 25, 69–71, 109.
22. Reid, “Social Conditions,” 52–5; Buni, Vann, 24–7; William Y. Bell, “Commercial
Recreation Facilities among Negroes in the Hill District” (master’s thesis,
University of Pittsburgh, 1938), 10. According to Wright, “Negro,” 2, about one-
third of black workers in Pittsburgh in 1930 were working as laborers in the steel
and glass industries, the building trades, or other manufacturing and industrial
activity; one-half were domestics or engaged in personal service; one-sixth were in
trade or transportation; and one-fifteenth were involved in white-collar or
professional work.
23. Wright, “Negro,” 4.
24. Wright, “Negro,” 14. An Urban League member contended, “The absence of a
solidly Negro community in Pittsburgh reduces very materially the power of the
Negro population to compel retail dealers to employ Negro clerks in Negro
residential districts and to secure Negro political representation as in some
Northern cities.” A.G.Moran and F.F.Stephan, “The Negro Population and Negro
Families in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County,” Social Research Bulletin 1 (April
20, 1933): 4.
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 27

25. I was able to revisit the role that sport played in the making of a black Pittsburgh
community in the documentary film, Kings on the Hill: Baseball's Forgotten Men
(San Pedro Productions, 1993). See Cary Goodman, Choosing Sides (New York:
Schocken Books, 1979), for a case study of the clash between the organized play
movement and street life.
26. Philip Klein, A Social Study of Pittsburgh (New York: Columbia University Press,
1938), 281; Buni, Vann, 29; M.R.Goldman, “The Hill District As I Knew It,”
Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 51 (July 1, 1968): 285.
27. Bell, “Commercial Facilities,” 30–1, 67–8; Ruby E.Ovid, “Recreational Facilities
for the Negro in Manchester” (master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1952);
Hilda Kaplan and Selma Levy, “Recreational Facilities for the Negro in East
Liberty District with Special Emphasis on Tracts 7G, 12D and 12E” (master’s
thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1945), 14–32; Geraldine Hermalin and Ruth
L.Levin, “Recreational Resources for the Negro” (master’s thesis, University of
Pittsburgh, 1945), 53.
28. Pittsburgh Courier, July 5, 1941, sec. 2, p. 3.
29. Goodman, Choosing Sides, 15.
30. The local black press credited the Urban League’s John Clark for its existence.
Reid, “Social Conditions,” 711–75; Pittsburgh American, September 8, 1922.
August Wilson, a neighbor of Charles Burley on the Hill, said that the southpaw
boxer was his model for the former Negro Leaguer Troy Maxon, in his Pulitzer-
prize winning play, Fences.
31. Pittsburgh Courier, April 24, 1954, 27; Reid, “Social Conditions,” 72.
32. Reid, “Social Conditions,” 76–78; Pittsburgh Courier, May 5, 1951, p. 17;
February 2, 1952, p. 118; March 29, 1952, p. 28.
33. Klein, Social Study, 865.
34. Klein, Social Study, 283–4; Buni, Vann, 49, 338, cites YMCA, “Annual Concerted
Operating Budget Canvas,” Oct. 15, 1928, in the possession of Percival L.Prattis,
Pittsburgh.
35. It is also safe to say that when the YMCA athletes were from the professional and
middleclass ranks of the black community, they received more recognition in the
black press for their play. Reid,“Social Conditions,” 15–7, 75, 107; Pittsburgh
Courier, January 27, 1934, sec. 2, p. 5; February 3, 1934, sec. 2, p. 5; February 10,
1934, sec. 2, p. 4; March 10, 1934, sec. 2, p. 5; March 17, 1934, sec. 2, p. 5; March
24, 1934, sec. 2, p. 5; January 14, 1939, p. 17; November 18, 1939, p. 16; February
11, 1954, p. 18; April 7, 1945, p. 117; December 18, 1954, p. 24.
36. Reid, “Social Conditions,” 114–7, 75.
37. Klein, Social Study, 282.
38. Reid, “Social Conditions,” 75–9.
39. Pittsburgh Courier, May 4, 1951, p. 17; February 2, 1952, p. 19; March 29, 1952,
p. 28.
40. Reid, “Social Conditions,” 95–105; Pittsburgh Courier, December 20, 1941, p. 17;
June 9, 1945, p. 14.
41. Reid, “Social Conditions,” 13.
42. David Montgomery, “The New Unionism and the Transformation of Workers’
Consciousness in America: 1909–1922,” Journal of Social History (Summer
1974): 511. This piece is an excellent analysis of the labor upsurge.
43. New American Movement reprint of 1932, Time magazine advertisement.
28 ROB RUCK

44. Montgomery, “New Unionism,” 514, quoting Leon C.Marshall, “The War Labor
Program and Its Administration,” Journal of Political Economy 26 (May 1918):
429.
45. Montgomery, “New Unionism,” 515; Monthly Labor Review 17 (Dec. 1923): 81–
5.
46. L.C.Gardner,“Community Atheletic Recreation for Employees and Their Families”
(Carnegie Steel Co., Munhall, Pa., typeset, n.d.), found in the back room of the
Munhall Carnegie Library. Gardner was superintendent of the plant in the early
twentieth century. All Gardner statements are from this eight-page essay.
47. Monthly Labor Review 24 (May 1927): 867–82.
48. George Halas, with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey, Halas by Halas: The
Autobiography of George Halas (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 54–76.
49. Monthly Labor Review 24 (May 1927): 874.
50. Klein, Social Study, 60–63; interview by the author with Russell Weiskircher,
September 28, 1979, Boston, Pa.
51. Homestead Album Project, interviews with George Miller, Mel Rutter, Anna Mae
and Russell Lindberg, Archives of Industrial Society, Hillman Library, University
of Pittsburgh, 1976; Homestead Daily Messenger, December 22, 1929, October 9,
1930, September 17, 1940, April 23, 1976; Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, August 11,
1958; from typed copy, Catherine Butler to Mr.Hogan, March 10, 1943, Carnegie
Munhall Library.
52. Gottlieb, “Making,” 2.
53. Klein, Social Study, 60.
54. Pittsburgh Courier, February 26, 1927, sec. 2, p. 4; November 18, 1926, sec. 2., p.
6. Pittsburgh Post, May 28, 1922.
55. Pittsburgh Courier, September 8, 1923, sec. 1, p. 4; January 14, 1939, p. 16; March
25, 1939, p. 17; April 1, 1939, p. 15; May 15, 1939, p. 15; June 3, 1939, p. 16; June
3, 1939, p. 15; July 26, 1941, p. 16; July 8, 1950, p. 31. These are the primary
sources for the discussion of the Edgar Thomson team.
56. Interview by the author with Harold Tinker, June 19, 1980, Pittsburgh.
57. Interview by the author with Charlie Hughes, February 1, 1981, Pittsburgh.
58. Interview by the author with Walt Hughes, January 9, 1981, Pittsburgh.
59. Interview by the author with Willis Moody, January 6, 1981, Pittsburgh.
60. Robert Hughey, in Pittsburgh Courier, April 15, 1939, p. 15.
61. Betty Ann Weiskopf, “A Directory of Some of the Organizations to Which People
in the Hill District of Pittsburgh Belong: 1943” (master’s thesis, University of
Pittsburgh, 1943), 43.
62. Pittsburgh Courier, August 8, 1925, p. 12; January 2, 1926, sec. 2, p. 2; July 17,
1926, p. 14; January 1, 1927, sec. 2, p. 6; July 21,1928.
63. Pittsburgh Courier, December 18,1926, sec. 2, p. 6.
64. For company sports, see interviews by the author with Harold Tinker, June 19,
1980, and Willis Moody, January 6, 1981; Pittsburgh Courier, January 1, 1927,
sec. 2, p. 6; January 15, 1917. sec. 2, p. 6; February 26, 1927, sec. 2, p. 4; May 28,
1927, sec. 2, p. 5.
65. Pittsburgh Courier, March 1, 1941, sec. 2, p. 1; May 24, 1972.
66. Klein, Social Study, 62–3.
67. Klein, Social Study, 63; Bob Hughes, “How Many Are Playing?” Pittsburgh Press,
April 15, 1931.
 SPORT AND BLACK PITTSBURGH, 1900–1930 29

68. Klein, Social Study, 63.

69. George Weinstein, in Coronet (April 1951): 56–9. This study found over 18,000
U.S. industrial and business firms sponsoring some form of recreation or sport for
their workers. The author argued that industry had learned during World War II
that such programs could reduce absenteeism and increase productivity.
70. Gardner, “Community Recreation.”
71. Current examples of this in Pittsburgh are the Connie Hawkins and Ozanam
summer basketball leagues.
72. Pittsburgh Courier, March 22, 1941, p. 16.
73. Countless interviews by the author confirmed this: for example, Bill Harris, July 19,
1980; Fred Clark, December 29, 1980; Bus Christian, February 20, 1981; Wyatt
Turner, December 29, 1980; Jack Parker and Joe Ware, July 15, 1980.
 2
BLACK ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE
NATIONAL PASTIME
The Rise of Semiprofessional Baseball in Black Chicago,
1890–1915

Michael E.Lomax

DURING THE 1980s AND 1990s, popular and professional historians of

baseball gave increased attention to the black experience in the national pastime.
They have examined the game’s relationship to white society, analyzed the trials
and triumphs of black ballplayers, and extolled the competency of black
ballplayers as they confronted racist America. Their research has also examined
the connection between black baseball and the black community, emphasizing in
particular how the game served as a unifying element to communities in
transition and how it helped bridge class distinctions.1
These efforts have dramatically expanded our knowledge, but the writings on
black baseball have been somewhat narrow and limited. Most of the emphasis has
been on the experience of players and the game on the field. While writers have
noted the connection between black baseball and the black community, most of
the research, especially in popular works, has neglected to analyze this linkage.
Part and parcel of these limitations is the virtual absence of any analysis that
examines the role of local businessmen, communal patterns, and the
development of black baseball.
Baseball in black Chicago exemplifies the efforts of black businessmen to
pursue sport as an entrepreneurial endeavor. Their attempt to establish baseball
as a profitable business illustrates the efforts of black businessmen to counter
discrimination and the exclusion of African Americans from places of
amusement. It also illustrates how these African-Ameri-can entrepreneurs
responded to obstacles, such as the inability to secure credit, that adversely
impacted economic development. These entrepreneurs organized a segregated
enterprise within the fabric of the national economy. In other words, the
segregated enterprise—black independent teams—operated within the
framework of the national economy—white semiprofessional baseball. African-
American baseball owners did not seek to promote their ball clubs exclusively to
a black clientele. But with the expansion of the African-American community in
Chicago in the 1890s, due to northern migration, black owners began catering to
this growing market.2
Andrew “Rube” Foster was to emerge as Chicago’s most prominent black
baseball entrepreneur. He became the first black owner to transform a weekend
enterprise into a full-time operation, and he also developed a barnstorming tour
 BLACK ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE NATIONAL PASTIME 31

in both the West and South in the pre-World War I years. While his Chicago
American Giants was a race-based enterprise, Foster recognized the need to
maintain business contacts with white baseball owners, This chapter will explore
the forces that shaped black baseball in Chicago from 1890 to 1915. Four themes
will serve to guide the narrative: the changing demographics of Chicago’s black
community, the development of Chicago’s new black leadership, the origins of
semiprofessional baseball, and the internal division among the enterprise’s
organizers leading to Rube Foster emerging as Chicago’s most prominent black
baseball entrepreneur.

GHETTOIZATION AND THE RISE OF

SEMIPROFESSIONAL BASEBALL
The black population of Chicago expanded significantly between 1890 and 1915.
During the first ten years of this period, Chicago experienced a dramatic growth
in its black population, from 14,852 to 30,150, an increase of 103 percent. From
1900 to 1910, while the city’s black population continued to climb steadily, its rate
of increase declined; the Windy City’s black population rose to 44,603, an
increase of 46.3 percent. African Americans remained a minority in the Windy
City, but their growing numbers made them far more conspicuous, and the large
numbers of recent arrivals were pushed to reside in certain areas. In the late
1890s, most Chicago blacks lived in primarily integrated neighborhoods, with only
a little more than a quarter residing in precincts in which they were a majority.
By 1915, the roots of ghettoization became firmly planted as African-American
enclaves emerged primarily on the south and near west sides. Few white
neighborhoods had ever accepted with equanimity the purchase of homes by
African-American families. As the black population increased, whites became
less tolerant towards black neighbors and actively resisted black settlement in
their areas.3
Eight or nine neighborhoods made up the core of Chicago’s black community.
The “black belt” extended from the downtown business district as far south as
Thirty-ninth Street. It was slowly expanding to accommodate the growing
population. Not only did blacks move steadily southward, but the black belt also
began to widen as blacks moved into comfortable homes east of State Street. By
1910, blacks lived as far east as Cottage Grove Avenue.4
Simultaneous with and emerging from these demographic and residential
changes was the creation of black institutions that contributed to the growing
vitality and self-consciousness of the black community. The oldest and most stable
African-American institution was the church. Quinn Chapel A.M.E. was the first
black church in the city; it was established in 1847, fourteen years after Chicago
was incorporated. By the end of the century, Chicago had more than a dozen
black churches, and between 1900 and 1915 this number doubled. These
institutions were attractive to African Americans who preferred to avoid white
people and their prejudices. They were also important for establishing a sense of
Other documents randomly have
different content
 Second Planting for Green Corn

Our green corn season lasted about ten days, when the grain,
though not yet ripe, became too hard for boiling green.
To provide green corn to be eaten late in the season, we used to
make a second planting of corn when June berries were ripe; and for
this purpose we left a space, not very large, vacant in the field. In
my father’s family this second planting was of about twenty-eight
hills of corn. It came ready to eat when the other corn was getting
hard; but it often got caught by the frost. Nearly every garden
owner made such a second planting; it was, indeed, a usual practice
in the tribe.

Cooking Fresh Green Corn

Our usual way of cooking fresh, green corn, was to boil it in a

kettle on the cob.
Fresh, green corn, shelled from the cob, was often put in a corn
mortar and pounded; and then boiled without fats or meat. Prepared
thus, it had a sweet taste and smell; much like that of the canned
corn we buy of the traders.
Shelled green corn, in the whole grain, was also boiled fresh,
mixed with beans and fats.

Roasting Ears

Green ears were sometimes roasted, usually by an individual

member of the family who wanted a little change of diet. The
women of my father’s family never prepared a full meal of roasted
ears that I remember; if any one wanted roasted, fresh, green corn,
he prepared it himself.
When I wanted to roast green corn I made a fire of cottonwood
and prepared a bed of coals. I laid the fresh ear on the coals with
the husk removed. As the corn roasted, I rolled the ear gently to and
fro over the coals. When properly cooked I removed the ear and laid
on another.
As the ear roasted, the green kernels would pop sometimes with
quite a sharp sound. If this popping noise was very loud, we would
laugh and say to the one roasting the ear, “Ah, we see you have
stolen that ear from some other family’s garden!”
Green corn was regularly taken out of the garden to roast until
frost came, when it lost its fragrance and fresh taste. To restore its
freshness, we would take the green corn silk of the same plucked
ear and rub the silk well into the kernels of the ear as they stood in
the cob. This measurably restored the fresh taste and smell.
We did not do this if the ear was to be boiled, only if we intended
to roast it.
For green corn, boiled and eaten fresh, we used all varieties
except the gummy; for when green they tasted alike. But for
roasting ears we thought the two yellow varieties, hard and soft,
were the best.

Mätu´a-la´kapa

A common dish made from green corn was mätu´a-la´kapa, from

mätu´a, green corn; and la´kapa, mush, or something mushy; thus,
wheat flour mixed with water to a thick paste we call la´kapa, even
if unboiled.
Ripening green corn, with the grain still soft, was shelled off the
cob with the tip of the thumb or with the thumb nail. The shelled
corn was pounded in a mortar and boiled with beans; it was flavored
with spring salt.

Corn Bread

We also made a kind of corn bread from green corn.

 Green ears were plucked and the corn shelled off with the thumb
nail, so as not to break open the kernels. Boiled green corn could be
shelled with a mussel shell because boiling toughened the kernels;
but unboiled green corn was shelled with the thumb nail.
Two or three women often worked at shelling the corn as it was
rather tedious work.
When enough of the corn had been shelled, it was put in a corn
mortar and pounded.
Some of the ears were naturally longer than others: a number of
these had been selected and their husks removed. Some of these
husks were now laid down side by side, but overlapping like
shingles, until a sheet was made about ten inches wide.
Another row of husks was laid over the first, transversely to them;
and so until four or five layers of the green husks were made, each
lying transversely to the layer of husks beneath.
The shelled corn, pounded almost to a pulp, was poured out on
this husk sheet, and patted down with the hand to a loaf about
seven or eight inches square, and an inch or two thick. However, this
varied; a girl would make a much smaller loaf than would a woman
preparing a mess for her family.
The ends of the uppermost layer of husks were now folded over
the top of the loaf, leaf by leaf; then the next layer of husks
beneath; and so until the ends of all the husks were folded over the
top of the loaf, quite hiding it.
Two or three husk leaves had been split into strips half an inch to
three quarters of an inch in width. These strips were tied together to
make bands to bind the loaf. Three bands passed around the loaf
each way, or six bands in all.
No grease nor fat, nor any seasoning, had been added to the loaf;
the pounded green corn pulp was all that entered into it.
The loaf made, now came the baking. The ashes in the fire place
in an earth lodge lay quite deep. A cavity was dug into these ashes
about as deep as my hand is long. Into the bottom of this cavity live
coals and hot ashes were raked, and upon these the loaf was laid; a
few ashes were raked over the top, and upon these ashes live coals
were heaped. The loaf baked in about two hours.
We called this loaf naktsi´, or buried-in-ashes-and-baked. Soft
white and soft yellow corn were good varieties from which to make
this buried-and-baked corn, as we called it.

Drying Green Corn for Winter

Every Hidatsa family put up a store of dried green corn for winter.
This is the way in which I prepared my family’s store.
In the proper season I went out into our garden and broke off the
ears that I found, that were of a dark green outside. Sometimes I
even broke open the husks to see if the ear was just right; but this
was seldom, as I could tell very well by the color and other signs I
have described. I went all over the garden, plucking the dark green
ears, and putting them in a pile in some convenient spot on the
cultivated ground. If I was close enough I tossed each ear upon the
pile as I plucked it; but as I drew further away, I gathered the ears
into my basket and bore them to the pile.
I left off plucking when the pile contained five basketfuls if I was
working alone. If two of us were working we plucked about ten
basketfuls.
Green corn for drying was always plucked in the evening, just
before sunset; and the newly plucked ears were let lie in the pile all
night, in the open air. The corn was not brought home on the
evening of the plucking, because if kept in the earth lodge over night
it would not taste so fresh and sweet, we thought.
The next morning before breakfast, I went out to the field and
fetched the corn to our lodge in the village. As I brought the baskets
into the lodge, I emptied them in a pile at the place marked B in
figure 11, near the fire.
 Sitting at A, I now began husking, breaking off the husks from
each ear in three strokes, thus: With my hand I drew back half the
husk; second, I drew back the other half; third, I broke the husk
from the cob. The husks I put in a pile, E, to one side. No husking
pegs were used, such as you describe to me; I could husk quite
rapidly with my bare hands.
As the ears were stripped, they were laid in a pile upon some of
the discarded husks, spread for that purpose. The freshly husked
ears made a pretty sight; some of them were big, fine ones, and all
had plump, shiny kernels. A twelve-row ear we thought a big one; a
few very big ears had fourteen rows of kernels; smaller ears had not
more than eight rows.
Two kettles, meanwhile, had been prepared. One marked D in
figure 11, was set upon coals in the fireplace; the other, C, was
suspended over the fire by a chain attached to the drying pole. The
kettles held water, which was now brought to a boil.
When enough corn was husked to fill one of these kettles, I
gathered up the ears and dropped them in the boiling water. I
watched the corn carefully, and when it was about half cooked, I
lifted the ears out with a mountain sheep horn spoon and laid them
on a pile of husks.
 Figure 11

When all the corn was cooked, I loaded the ears in my basket and
bore them out upon the drying stage, where I laid them in rows,
side by side, upon the stage floor. There I left them to dry over
night.
The work of bringing in the five basketfuls of corn from the field
and boiling the ears took all day, until evening.
In the morning the corn was brought into the lodge again. A skin
tent cover had been spread on the floor and the half boiled ears
were laid on it, in a pile. I now sat on the floor, as an Indian woman
sits, with ankles to the right, and with the edge of the tent cover
drawn over my knees, I took an ear of the half boiled corn in my left
hand, holding it with the greater end toward me. I had a small,
pointed stick; and this I ran, point forward, down between two rows
of kernels, thus loosening the grains. The right hand row of the two
rows of loosened kernels I now shelled off with my right thumb. I
then shelled off all the other rows of kernels, one row at a time,
working toward the left, and rolling the cob over toward the right as
I did so.
 There was another way of shelling half boiled corn. As before, I
would run a sharpened stick down two rows of kernels, loosening
the grains; and I would then shell them off with smart, quick strokes
of a mussel shell held in my right hand. We still shell half boiled corn
in this way, using large spoons instead of shells. There were very
few metal spoons in use in my tribe when I was a girl; mussel shells
were used instead for most purposes.
If while I was shelling the corn, a girl or woman came into the
lodge to visit, she would sit down and lend a hand while we chatted;
thus the shelling was soon done.
The shelling finished, I took an old tent cover and spread it on the
floor of the drying stage outside. On this cover I spread the shelled
corn to dry, carrying it up on the stage in my basket.
At night I covered the drying corn with old tent skins to protect it
from dampness.
The corn dried in about four days.
When the corn was well dried, I winnowed it. This I sometimes
did on the floor of the drying stage, sometimes on the ground.
Having chosen a day when a slight wind was blowing, I filled a
wooden bowl from the dried corn that lay heaped on the tent cover;
and holding the bowl aloft I let the grain pour slowly from it, that
any chaff might be winnowed out.
The corn was now ready to be put in sacks for winter.
Corn thus prepared we called maada´ckihĕ, from ada´ckihĕ,
treated-by-fire-but-not-cooked, a word also used to designate food
that has been prepared by smoking.
All varieties of corn could be prepared in this way.[11]
The Arikaras on this reservation have a different way of preparing
and drying green corn. They make a big heap of dried willows, and
upon these lay the ears, green and freshly plucked, in the husk.
When all is ready, they set fire to the willows, thus roasting the corn;
and they often roast a great pile of corn at one time, in this way.
The roasted ears are husked and shelled, and the grain dried, for
storing. Corn that has been roasted in the Arikara way, dries much
more quickly than that prepared by boiling.
Of late years some Mandan and Hidatsa families occasionally roast
their corn in imitation of the Arikara way; but I never saw this done
in my youth.
I do not like to eat food made of this dried, roasted corn; it is
dirty!

Mapë´di (Corn Smut)

Mapë´di

Mapë´di is a black mass that grows in the husk of an ear of corn;

it is what you say white men call corn smut fungus. Sometimes an
ear of corn appears very plump, or somewhat swelled; and when the
husk is opened, there is no corn inside, only mapë´di, or smut; or
sometimes part of the ear will be found with a little grain at one end,
and mapë´di at the other. These masses of mapë´di, or corn smut,
that we found growing on the ear, we gathered and dried for food.
There is another mapë´di that grows on the stalk of the corn. It is
not good to eat, and was not gathered up at the harvest time. The
mapë´di that grows on the stalk is commonly found at a place
where the stalk, by some accident, has been half broken.
We looked upon the mapë´di that grew on the corn ear as a kind
of corn, because it was borne on the cob; it was found on the ears
the grain of which was growing solid, or was about ready to be
eaten as green corn. We did not find many mapë´di masses in one
garden.

Harvest and Uses

 We gathered the black masses and half boiled and dried them, still
on the cob. When well dried, they were broken off the cob. These
broken off pieces we mixed with the dried half boiled green corn,
and stored in the same sack with them.
Mapë´di was cooked by boiling with the half-boiled dried corn. We
did not eat mapë´di fresh from the garden, nor did we cook it
separately. Mapë´di, boiled with corn, tasted good, not sweet, and
not sour.
I still follow the custom of my tribe and gather mapë´di each year
at the corn harvest.

The Ripe Corn Harvest

Husking

As the corn in the fields began to show signs of ripening, the

people of Like-a-fishhook village went hunting to get meat for the
husking feasts. This meat was usually dried; but if a kill was made
late in the season, the meat was sometimes brought in fresh.
When the corn was fully ripened, the owners of a garden went out
with baskets, plucked the ears from the stalks and piled them in a
heap ready for the husking. The empty stalks were left standing in
the field.
A small family sometimes took as many as three days to gather
and husk their ripe corn; this was because there were not many
persons in the family to do the work.
In a big family, like my fathers, harvesting was more speedily
done. We had a large garden, but we never spent more than one
day gathering up the corn, which we piled in a heap in the middle of
the field.
The next day after the corn was plucked, we gave a husking feast.
We took out into the field a great deal of dried meat that my
mothers had already cooked in the lodge; or we took the dried meat
into the field and boiled it in a kettle near the corn pile. We also
boiled corn on a fire near by. The meat and corn were for the feast.
Instead of dried meat, a family sometimes took out a side of fresh
buffalo meat and roasted it over a fire, near the corn pile.
Having then arrived at the field, and started a fire for the feast, all
of our family who had come out to work sat down and began to
husk. Word had been sent beforehand that we were going to give a
husking feast, and the invited helpers soon appeared. There was no
particular time set for their coming, but we expected them in one of
the morning hours.[12]
For the most part these were young men from nineteen to thirty
years of age, but a few old men would probably be in the company;
and these were welcomed and given a share of the feast.
There might be twenty-five or thirty of the young men. They were
paid for their labor with the meat given them to eat; and each
carried a sharp stick on which he skewered the meat he could not
eat, to take home.[13]
The husking season was looked upon as a time of jollity; and
youths and maidens dressed and decked themselves for the
occasion.
Of course each young man gave particular help to the garden of
his sweetheart. Some girls were more popular than others. The
young men were apt to vie with one another at the husking pile of
an attractive girl.
Some of the young men rode ponies, and when her corn pile had
been husked, a youth would sometimes lend his pony to his
sweetheart for her to carry home her corn. She loaded the pony with
loose ears in bags, bound on either side of the saddle, or with
strings of braided corn laid upon the pony’s back.
The husking season, like the green corn season, lasted about ten
days. The young men helped faithfully each day, and when they had
husked all the corn in one field, they moved to another. Thus all the
corn piles were speedily husked.
The husking was always done in the field. We never carried the
corn to the village to be husked, as the husks would then have
dried, and hurt the hands of the husker. As we plucked the ears, we
piled them in a heap in the field, to keep the husks moist and soft.
[14]

Rejecting Green Ears

As the huskers worked they were careful not to add any green
ears to the husked pile. A green ear would turn black and spoil, and
be fit for nothing.
Every husker knew this; and if a young man was helping another
family husk, he laid in a little pile beside him, any green ears that he
found. These green ears belonged to him, to eat or to feed to his
pony.
Last year a white man hired me to gather the corn in his field and
husk it; and I kept all the green ears for myself, for that is my
custom. I do not know whether that white man liked it or not. It
may be he thought I was stealing that green corn; but I was
following the custom that I learned of my tribe.
I am an Indian; if a white man hires me to do work for him, he
must expect that I will follow Indian custom.

Braiding Corn

Most of the corn as it was husked was tossed into a pile, to be

borne later to the village. This was true of all the smaller and less
favored ears: the best of the larger ears were braided into strings.
As we husked, if a long ear of good size and appearance was
found, it was laid aside for braiding. For this purpose the husk was
bent back upon the stub of the stalk on the big end of the ear,
leaving the three thin leaves that cling next to the kernels still lying
on the ear in their natural position. The part of the husk that was
bent back was cut off with a knife; the three thin leaves that
remained were now bent back on the ear, and the ear was laid
aside. Another ear was treated in the same way and laid beside the
first, also with its thin leaves bent back. And thus, until a row of ears
lay extended side by side upon the ground, all the ears lying point
forward.
Another row was started; and the ears, also lying point forward
and leaned against the first row, were laid so as to cover the thin
bent-back leaves of the first row, to protect them from the sun. As
the braiding was done with these thin leaves, if they were too dry—
as the sun was very apt to make them—they would break.
When a quantity of these ears, all with thin husk leaves bent back,
had accumulated, one of the huskers passed them to someone of
the young men, who braided them; or one of the women of the
family owning the field might braid them.
Even with care the thin leaves were sometimes too dry for the
braider to handle safely; and he would fill his mouth with water and
blow it over the leaves.
Fifty-four or fifty-five ears were commonly braided to a string; but
the number varied more or less. In my father’s family, we often
braided strings of fifty-six or fifty-seven ears.
I do not know why this number was chosen; but I think this
number of ears was about of a weight that a woman could well carry
and put upon the drying stage.
When the string was all braided, the braider took either end in his
hand, and placing his right foot against the middle of the string,
gave the ends a smart pull. This stretched and tightened the string,
and made it look neater and more finished; it also tried if there
might be any weak places in it.
We braided all varieties of corn but two, atạ´ki tso´ki, or hard
white, and tsï´di tso´ki, or hard yellow. These varieties we reckoned
too hard to parch, and for this reason they were not braided. We
did, however, sometimes parch hard yellow to be pounded up into
meal for corn balls.
The strings of braided corn were borne to the village on the backs
of ponies. Some families laid ten strings on a pony; but in my
father’s family we never laid on so many, believing it made too heavy
a load for the poor beast.
The braided strings were hung to dry on the drying stage upon
the railing that lay in the upper forks; and if there was need, poles
or drying rods were laid across the rails and strings were hung over
these also.[15]
These drying rods were laid across only where the forks supported
the rails (at the same places the staying thongs were tied), for at
these places the stage could better bear the weight of the heavy
strings of corn; the drying rods were bound at either end to the
railing, to stay them.

The Smaller Ears

Meanwhile the smaller and less favored ears were being carried
home in baskets. It took the members of my father’s family a whole
day, and the next day following until late in the afternoon, to get this
work done.
Each carrier, as she brought in a basket of corn, ascended the log
ladder of the stage and emptied the corn on the stage floor. Here
the corn lay in a long heap, in the middle of the floor; for a free path
was always left around the edge for us women; having this path for
our use, we did not have to tread on the corn as we moved about.
Also, if a pony came in with a load of braided corn, the heavy strings
could be handed up to us women on the stage as we moved around
in this free path.
As I now remember, our family’s husked corn when piled on the
stage floor, made a heap about eight yards long and four yards wide,
and about four feet high in the middle, from which point the pile
sloped down on all sides. This was the loose corn, the smaller ears;
and besides these there were about one hundred strings of braided
corn hung on the railing above the heap. I give these
measurements, judging as nearly as I can from the size of our
drying stage, and from our average yearly corn yield, when I was a
young woman. I think the figures are approximately accurate.
For about eight days the corn lay thus in a long heap upon the
stage. At the end of that time the ears on the top of the heap had
become dry and smooth and threatened to roll down the sides of the
pile. We now took drying rods and laid them along the floor against
the posts, two or three of them, for the whole length of the stage on
either side, and on the ends of the stage. Planks split from
cottonwood trunks were leaned against these drying rods, on the
side next the corn. The corn heap was now spread evenly over the
floor of the drying stage for the depth of about a foot; the split
planks prevented the dry smooth ears from sliding off the stage. The
dry ears had a tendency to roll or slide down the sides of the corn
pile, as fresh ears did not.
This spreading out the corn heap evenly had also the effect of
stirring up the underlying ears and exposing them to the air.
If rain fell while the corn was thus drying on the stage, it gave us
no concern. The corn soon dried again, and no harm was done it.
The corn, spread thus in an even heap, took about three more
days to dry, or eleven days in all. Then we began threshing.

Drying the Braided Ears

The strings of braided corn hanging on the rails at the top of the
posts of the drying stage, dried much more quickly than the loose
ears heaped on the stage floor. The wind, rattling the dry ears of the
strings together, was apt to shell out the drying kernels; it was
therefore usual for us before threshing time to tie these braids
together so that the wind could not rattle them.
 To do this I would ascend the ladder and make my way along the
edge of the stage floor, making places in the corn with my feet as I
walked, so that my feet would be on the stage floor and not tread
on the drying corn. I would push ten of the braided strings together
on the rail or the drying rod on which they hung, and tie them by
passing around them a raw hide thong.
These braided strings, bound thus in bundles of ten, hung on the
stage until we were ready to store them in the cache pit; and this
we could not do until we had our main harvest, the loose ears,
threshed and ready to store also.

Seed Corn
Selecting the Seed

I have said that for braiding corn we chose the longest and finest
ears. In my father’s family we used to braid about one hundred
strings, some years less, some years more, as the season had been
wet or dry; for the yield of fine ears was always less in a dry year. Of
these braided strings we selected the very best in the spring for
seed.
My mothers reckoned that we should need five braided strings of
soft white, and about thirty ears of soft yellow, for seed. Of ma
´ikadicakĕ, or gummy, we raised a little each year, not much; ten
ears of this, for seed, my mothers thought were a plenty.
Hard white and hard yellow corn, I have said, were not braided,
because not used for parching. For seed of these varieties, some
good ears were taken from the drying pile on the corn stage and
stored in the cache pit for the next year with loose grain of the same
variety. The ears were not put in a sack, but thrown in with the loose
grain.
When I selected seed corn, I chose only good, full, plump ears;
and I looked carefully to see if the kernels on any of the ears had
black hearts. When that part of a kernel of corn which joins the cob
is black or dark colored, we say it has a black heart. This
imperfection is caused by plucking the ear when too green. A kernel
with a black heart will not grow.
An ear of corn has always small grains toward the point of the
cob, and large grains toward the butt of the ear. When I came to
plant corn, I used only the kernels in the center of the cob for seed,
rejecting both the small and the large grains of the two ends.
Seed corn was shelled from the cob with the thumb; we never
threshed it with sticks. Sometimes we shelled an ear by rubbing it
against another ear.

Keeping Two Years’ Seed

Corn kept for seed would be best to plant the next spring; and it
would be fertile, and good to plant, the second spring after
harvesting. The third year the seed was not so good; and it did not
come up very well. The fourth year the seed would be dead and
useless.
Knowing that seed corn kept good for at least two years, it was
my family’s custom to gather enough seed for at least two years, in
seasons in which our crops were good. Some years, in spite of
careful hoeing, our crops were poor; the ears were small, there was
not much grain on them, and what grain they bore was of poor
quality. We did not like to save seed out of such a crop. Also, frost
occasionally destroyed our crop, or most of it.
When, therefore, we had a year of good crops, we put away seed
enough to last for two years; then, if the next year yielded a poor
crop, we still had good seed to plant the third season.
In my father’s family we always observed this custom of putting
away seed for two years; and we did this not only of our corn, but of
our squash seeds, beans, sunflower seeds, and even of our tobacco
seeds; for if I remember rightly, the tobacco fields were sometimes
injured by frost just as were our corn fields.
Not all families in our village were equally wise. Some were quite
improvident, and were not at all careful to save seed from their
crops. Such families, in the spring, had to buy their seed from
families that were more provident.
Saving a good store of seed was therefore profitable in a way. In
my father’s family we often sold a good deal of seed in the spring to
families that wanted. The price was one tanned buffalo skin for one
string of braided seed corn.

Corn stage of Butterfly’s wife

This stage lacks railings, and is floored Arikara fashion with a
willow mat. A pile of drying corn is seen on the stage floor. In the
ancient villages, where the lodges were crowded together, the
railings were always present.
 Owl Woman pounding corn into meal in a corn mortar

Even to-day, families on this reservation come to me to buy seed

corn and seed beans. A handful of beans, enough for one planting, I
sell for one calico—enough calico, that is, to make an Indian woman
a dress, or about ten yards.

Threshing Corn

The Booth

The threshing season was always a busy one, for all the families
of the village would be threshing their corn at the same time.
Corn was threshed in a booth, under the drying stage.
 Figure 12
The figure has been redrawn from sketches by Goodbird. The
original is a stage now standing on the reservation, but with mat of
willows for floor; to this Goodbird added a threshing booth as he
saw used by his grandmother when he was a boy. Goodbird’s
sketches are closely followed, excepting that the floor of slabs is
restored. The figure tallies in every respect with Buffalobird-
woman’s description, and the model made by her for the American
Museum of Natural History.

To make the booth, I began with the section at one end of the
stage. As is shown in figure 12, on the posts A and D, and B and C,
were bound two poles, e and f, at about two feet below the stage
floor; upon these were bound two other poles, g and h; the poles e,
f, and h were bound outside of the posts that supported them.
A long raw hide thong was used for the corner ties. The first pole
was raised in position and bound firmly to the post; and if a second
pole was to be laid over the first—as was done at two of the corners
—the thong was drawn up and made to bind it also to the post. We
always kept a number of these raw hide thongs in the lodge against
just such uses as this; they were strong, and served every purpose
of ropes; we oiled them to keep them soft.
 A tent cover was now fetched out of the lodge. Tents were of
different sizes, from those of seven, to those of sixteen buffalo cow
hides. A woman used whatever sized tent cover she owned; but a
cover of thirteen skins was of convenient size.

Figure 13

Around the curved bottom of the tent cover was a row of holes,
through which wooden pins were driven to peg the tent to the
ground. The tent cover was bound to the four over-hanging poles,
inside of the four posts, by means of a long thong woven in and out
through the holes, as shown in figure 13.
 Figure 14

Bound thus to the poles, and quite enclosing the space within
them, the tent cover made a kind of booth. The upper parts of the
cover, including the smoke flaps, that now hung sweeping the
ground, were drawn in and spread flat on the ground to make a
floor for the booth; and stones laid upon them weighted the cover
against the wing.
In figure 12 the four posts, A, B, C, and D, enclose one section of
the drying stage; the booth did not enclose the whole ground space
of this section, but about three fifths of it.
Figure 14, I think, will explain the arrangement of the booth. The
end corners, X and Y, were bound to opposite posts, M and N,
respectively, the lapping edges, at O, forming a door through which
the threshers entered the booth; P and P´ were bound to posts at p
and p´; the final corner, M, was left untied until the threshers had
entered and were ready to begin their task. (Compare with figure
12, in which, however, the posts are differently lettered.)
Before they did this they went above and removed the planks and
drying rods laid around the edge of the stage floor, and pushed the
corn back toward the middle of the floor into a long heap again, that
it might not fall over the edge, now that the planks were taken
away. One of the floor planks was now removed, at R. Through the
aperture thus made, corn was pushed down to left and right of R;
this was continued until there was a pile of corn just under the
aperture, and running the width of the booth, about eighteen or
twenty inches high.
The threshers now entered the booth and tied the corner at M,
closing the door. In my father’s family there were usually three
threshers, women; and they sat in a row on the floor of the booth,
facing the pile of corn. Each woman had a stick for a flail, with which
she beat the corn.
 Flails were of ash or cottonwood. An ash
flail would be about three and a half feet
long and from three quarters of an inch to
an inch in diameter, and was cut green. A
cottonwood flail was seldom used green;
and as it was therefore lighter than the
green ash, a cottonwood flail was a little
greater in diameter, but of the same length.
We were careful that a flail should not be
too heavy, lest it break the kernels in the
threshing. Kinikinik sticks were sometimes
used for flails.
A diagram (figure 15) has been drawn to
illustrate how I worked in a threshing booth
when I was a young woman. As shown, I
sat on the extreme left; one of my mothers
and my sister sat as indicated, on my right.
More than three seldom worked in a
threshing booth at the same time, at least
in our family; however, I have known my
sister, Not-frost, to make a fourth. I have
even known five to be threshing in the
booth of some other family in the village,
but never more than five.
To thresh the corn, I raised my flail and
brought it down smartly, but not severely, Figure 15
upon the pile of corn. The grain as it was
thus beaten off the dry cobs would fall by
its own weight into the pile, and work its way to the bottom; while
the lighter cobs would come to the top of the pile.
Beating the ears with the flails caused many of the kernels to leap
and fly about; but the tent cover, enclosing the booth, caught all
these flying kernels. It was, indeed, for this that the booth was built.
 As the cobs, beaten empty of grain, accumulated on the pile, we
drew them off and cast them out of the door of the booth upon a
tent cover, spread to receive them, under the middle section of the
stage. Many of these cobs had a few small grains clinging to them;
and these must be saved, for we wasted nothing.
Having paused then to throw out the cobs, we returned to the pile
and thrust our flails in under it, drawing them upward through the
corn, thus working the unthreshed ears to the top. As much as we
could, we tried to keep the unthreshed ears in the middle of the pile,
and the threshed grain pushed to right and left, as will be seen by
studying the diagram. To thresh one pile, or filling of corn in a booth,
took a half day’s work.

Order of the Day’s Work

Our habit was to begin quite early in the morning, enclose the
booth with the tent cover, and set to work threshing; finishing the
first filling, or pile, about midday. In the afternoon we began a
second pile, first heaping the already threshed grain to right and left,
and behind the threshers.
I have said that on the ground under the second section of the
stage, a second tent cover was spread to catch the cobs. A part of
this tent cover was drawn in under the edge of the booth to help
carpet the floor of the booth.
At the end of the day we turned our attention to the pile of cobs;
and with our thumbs we shelled off every grain that clung to the
cobs. From the cobs of a day’s threshing we collected about as many
grains of corn as would fill a white man’s hat. This was taken into
the booth and thrown on the pile of threshed grain.
We now disposed of the grain for the night. If we had gotten
through threshing rather early in the day, we bore the newly
threshed grain in baskets into the lodge, and emptied it into a bull
boat.
 If we had gotten through our threshing rather late in the day, we
made the door of the booth tight, and left the grain on the booth
floor throughout the night.

The Cobs

The day’s threshing over, we attended to the cobs. I have said

that we shelled off any kernels that clung to them after threshing, so
that they were now quite clean of grain.
All day long, as we threshed, we had watched that no horses got
at the cobs to trample and nibble them, or that any dog ran over
them, or any children played in them. Then, in the evening, if the
weather was fine, and there was little wind, one of my mothers or I
carried the cobs outside of the village to a grassy place and heaped
them in a pile about five feet high. A pile of cobs of such a height I
usually gathered from a day’s threshing.
In our prairie country, on a fair day, the wind usually dies down
about sunset; and now, when the air was still, I fired the cob pile. As
the pile began to burn, I could usually see the burning cob piles of
two or three other families lighting up the gathering dusk.
I had to stay and watch the fire, to keep any mischievous boys
from coming to play in the burning heap. Children of from ten to
fifteen years of age were quite a pest at cob-firing time. They had a
kind of game they were fond of playing. Each would cut a long,
flexible, green stick, and at the edge of the Missouri he would get a
ball of wet mud and stick it on his stick. He would try to approach
one of the burning piles, and with his stick, slap the mud ball smartly
into the burning coals, some of which, still glowing, would stick in
the wet mud. Using the stick as a sling, the child would throw the
mud ball into the air, aiming often at another child. Other children
would be throwing mud balls at one another at the same time, and
these, with the bits of glowing charcoal clinging to them, would go
sailing through the air like shooting stars. Knowing very well that the
children would get into my burning cobs if I even turned my back, I
was careful to stay by to watch.
At last the fire had burned down and the coals were dead; and
nothing was left but a pile of ashes. It was now night, and I would
go home. Early the next morning, before the prairie winds had
arisen, I would go out again to my ash heap. On the top of the
ashes, if nothing had disturbed them in the night and an unexpected
wind had not blown them about, I would find a thin crust had
formed. This crust I carefully broke and gathered up with my
fingers, squeezing the pieces in my hand into little lumps, or balls.
Sometimes I was able to gather four or five of these little balls from
one pile of ashes; but never more than five.
These balls I carried home. There were always several baskets
hanging in the lodge, ready for any use we might want of them; and
it was our habit to keep some dried buffalo heart skins, or some
dried buffalo paunch skins, in the lodge, for wrappers, much as
white families keep wrapping paper in the house. The ash balls I
wrapped up in one of these skins, into a package, being careful not
to break the balls. I put the package in one of the baskets, to hang
up until there was occasion for its use.
These ash balls were used for seasoning. I have explained
elsewhere how we used spring salt to season our boiled corn; and
that every day in the lodge, we ate mä´dạkạpa, or pounded dried
ripe corn boiled with beans. But in the fall, instead of seasoning this
dish with spring salt, or alkali salt as you call it, we preferred to use
this seasoning of ash crust.
In my father’s family, for each meal of mä´dạkạpa we filled the
corn mortar three times, two-and-a-half double handfuls of corn
making one filling of the mortar. Each time we filled the mortar, we
dropped in with the corn a little of the ash crust, a bit about as big
as a white child’s marble. Finally, a piece about as big, or perhaps a
little larger, was also dropped into the boiling pot.
 We Indians were fond of this seasoning; and we liked it much
better than we did our spring salt. We did not use spring salt,
indeed, if we had ash balls in the lodge.
We called these ash balls mä´dạkạpa isĕ´pĕ, or mä´dạkạpa
darkener.
We did not make ash balls if the dogs or horses had trampled on
the cobs; or if children had mussed in the fire; nor would we make
ash balls if the day had not been rather calm, for a high wind was
sure to blow dust into the cobs.
We burned cobs and collected ash balls after every threshing day,
unless hindered by storm or high wind. But even if the harvest was a
good one, the ash balls that we got from the burned cobs for
seasoning never lasted long. We were so fond of seasoning our food
with them that every family had used up its store before the autumn
had passed.

Winnowing

I have said that after the day’s threshing we stored the newly
threshed grain for the night, either in the booth or in a bull boat in
the earth lodge; and that we then fired the cobs that had
accumulated during the day.
The next morning we spread an old tent cover outside the lodge,
near the drying stage; and we fetched the loose grain of the
previous day’s threshing out of the booth, or the earth lodge and
spread it evenly and thinly upon the tent cover. The grain was here
left to dry until evening.
A little before sunset, and before the prairie wind had died down,
we fetched baskets and winnowed the grain. The basket was half
filled with grain, held aloft, and the grain poured gently out in the
wind. Wooden bowls were often used for winnowing, instead of
baskets; but they did not hold as much grain.
 The winnowing over, I would take up a few grains of the corn to
test with my teeth. If, when I bit a kernel in two, it broke with a
sharp, snappy sound, I knew it was quite dried; if it broke dull and
soft, I knew the grain needed another day’s drying; but at the most,
this second day’s drying was enough.

Figure 16

The winnowed grain, now well dried, was borne into the earth
lodge and stored temporarily in bull boats. In the diagram (figure
16), is shown where the bull boats full of grain used to stand in my
father’s lodge. Some years our harvest filled three bull boats of
threshed grain; some years it filled five. In the year illustrated by
this diagram, there were three bull boats standing between the
planks at the left of the door, and the fire; and two bull boats on the
other side of the fire, all full of grain.
The threshed grain, I have said, received its final drying and
winnowing upon a tent cover (or covers) spread on the ground near
the earth lodge. It was my own habit always to spread these tent
covers beside the drying stage on the side farthest away from the
lodge. However, the particular spot where the winnowing was done,
was determined by the convenience of the household.
We did not usually thresh consecutive days. We threshed one day;
dried the grain and winnowed it the second; and threshed again the
third day.

Removing the Booth

During these days the booth did not remain always in one place.
When the corn on the floor of the first section had all been threshed,
the booth was removed to another section. I will now explain how
this was done.
In figure 17 my son has diagramed the floor plan of my mothers’
stage and threshing booth, as I remember them.
The stage stands in front of Small Ankle’s lodge, which faces
toward the west. The stage is divided into three sections, A, B, C.
The posts upon which the floor of the stage rests are d, e, f, g, h, i,
j, k .
The booth was first raised under section A, based upon fg and
enclosing ground space lmfg.
Sometimes we got up early, bound the poles to the posts and
erected our booth before breakfast; then after we had eaten, three
or four of us would go out to thresh, one first going up to push
down the corn. She raised a plank along the side, fg, just within the
booth; this, if the door of the booth was on the side lm. The corn on
the floor of the stage in section A was then shoved down as wanted.
The corn pushed down for one threshing, made a pile running the
width of the booth, and about forty inches wide and twenty inches
high. When the pile was threshed one of the women went up and
shoved down another pile. The corn in one section was threshed in
about three such piles.
 Sometimes, if we
worked hard and had
plenty of help, we
threshed one whole
section in one day; but the
beating, beating, beating
of the corn was hard work,
and we more often
stopped when wearied and
rested until the next day. I
have already said that we
often spent the next day at
the lighter work of drying
and winnowing.
When the corn in section
A was all threshed, the
booth was moved over
under the floor of section
B, enclosing fgno; and
again a plank was taken
up to let down the corn.
Now this plank was always
Figure 17
taken up above the side of
the booth opposite the Ground plan of earth lodge here
door; and the door was accompanies that of stage to show relative
positions of the two structures. The stage
always placed down wind. always stood, as here, directly before the lodge
Thus, if the wind was from entrance. The figures are drawn to scale.
the north, the door would
be placed on the south
side of the booth, and the plank was taken up on the north side, just
within the booth. Corn was always threshed in the booth on the side
opposite the door.
Sections A and B of my mothers’ stage, as shown in diagram
(figure 17) contained only yellow corn. Section C, or a part of it,
contained white corn. Braided strings of corn were also hung all
around the railing above, but these were not to be threshed.
Section B having been threshed, the booth was removed to
section C, enclosing hiqp. I have said that this section had white
corn. Now this white corn was piled toward the south end of the
stage; and between it and the yellow corn was left a narrow vacant
place on the floor. Above this vacant place, meat was often dried;
but this meat was removed when we were ready to thresh.
Placing the booth to enclose hiqp, directly under the vacant place,
made it easy for us to raise a plank here to push down the white
corn. If we had placed the booth on the south end of this section,
we should have had to dig into the corn piled here, in order to raise
a plank.
Our family’s threshing lasted about five days in a year of good
yield; if the year was a poor one, threshing lasted only two or three
days.

Threshing Braided Corn

The strings of braided corn were stored in the cache pit (which I
will describe later) in the whole ear. If, during the winter, or the
following spring, I wanted to thresh a string of braided corn, I put
the whole string into a skin sack; and this sack I beat and shook,
turning it over and around until all the grain had fallen off the cobs.
The sack was then emptied.

Amount of Harvest

Our harvested corn, in a good year, lasted my father’s family until

the next harvest, with a small quantity even then unused. Some
years we ran out of corn before the harvest came, but not often. We
ate our corn as long as it lasted, not husbanding it toward the last,
because we knew there were elk and buffalo and antelope to be had
for the hunting. If we ran out of corn at all, it was about the first of
August; sometimes a little earlier. Sometimes when we had eaten all
our last year’s harvest there was a small quantity from the previous
season’s harvest with which we eked out our shortage.
My mothers, however, were industrious women, and our shortage,
if any, was never for long. Some families, not very provident, had
consumed all their harvest as early as in the spring; but such never
happened in my father’s family.

Sioux Purchasing Corn

The Standing Rock Sioux used to buy corn of us, coming up in

midsummer, or autumn. They came not because they were in need
of food, but because they liked to eat our corn, and had always
meat and skins to trade to us. For one string of braided corn they
gave us one tanned buffalo robe.

Varieties of Corn

Description of Varieties

We raised nine well marked varieties of corn in our village.

Following are the names of the varieties:

Atạ´ki tso´ki
Hard white
(White hard)
Atạ´ki
Soft white
(White)
Tsï´di tso´ki
Hard yellow
(Yellow hard)
Tsï´di tapa´
Soft yellow
(Yellow soft)
Ma´ïkadicakĕ
Gummy
(Gummy)
 Do´ohi
Blue
(Blue)
Hi´ci cĕ´pi
Dark red
(Red dark)
Hi´tsiica
Light red
(Light-red)
Atạ´ki aku´ hi´tsiica
Pink top
(White, kind of light red)

Our Hidatsa word for corn is ko´xati; but in speaking of any

variety of corn, the work ko´xati is commonly omitted. In like
manner, atạ´ki means white; but if one went into a lodge and asked
for “atạ´ki” it was always understood to mean soft white corn.
Of the nine varieties, the atạ´ki, or soft white, was the kind most
raised in our village. The ma´ïkadicakĕ, or gummy, was least raised,
as almost its only use was in making corn balls.
In my father’s family, we raised two kinds of corn, tsï´di tso´ki, or
hard yellow; and atạ´ki, or soft white.
The names of the varieties suggest pretty well their
characteristics. The atạ´ki aku´ hi´tsiica, or white-with-light-red,
was marked by a light red or pink color toward the top or beard end
of the ear. The name pink-top which you suggest for this variety will,
I think, do for an English name, if the literal translation of the Indian
term is, as you say, rather clumsy.
We planted each variety of corn separately. We Indians
understood perfectly the need of keeping the strains pure, for the
different varieties had not all the same uses with us.

How Corn Travels

We Indians knew that corn can travel, as we say; thus, if the seed
planted in one field is of white corn, and that in an adjoining field is
of some variety of yellow corn, the white will travel to the yellow
corn field, and the yellow to the white corn field.
Perhaps you do not understand what I mean by corn traveling.
Well, let us suppose that there are two fields lying side by side, the
one in yellow, the other in white corn. When the corn of the two
fields is ripe, and the ears are opened, it will be found that many of
the ears in the yellow rows that stand nearest the white field will
have white kernels standing in the cob; also, in the rows of white
corn that stand nearest the yellow field, there will be many ears with
yellow kernels mixed in with the white kernels.
We Indians did not know what power it was that causes this. We
only knew that it was so. We also knew that when a field stands
alone, away from other fields, and is planted with white corn, it will
grow up in white corn only; there will not be any yellow grains in the
ears. And so of any other variety.
Sometimes two women, owning adjoining
fields, would make an agreement; they
would divide their fields into sections and
plant the corresponding sections on
opposite sides of the division line alike.
Thus in the diagram (figure 18), A and A´
may be planted in a variety of yellow corn;
B and B´ may be planted in beans and
squashes; and C and C´ may be planted in
a variety of white corn; but even this did
not make so very much difference; still the
corn traveled.
We thought that perhaps the reason of
Figure 18 this was that the ground here was soft, or
mellowed and broken by cultivation. We
thought corn could not travel readily over
hard, or unbroken ground; and as you notice in the diagram,
although the two patches of yellow corn are separated from the
white corn by the two patches of squashes and beans, yet the beans
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