Patrick Rock has found three more brief portraits of Baltimore Black Sox players published in the Afro-American in 1924:  Connie Day (February 22), Bill Force (February 29), and O’Neal Pullen (March 7).  I missed these the first time around.  After being alerted by Patrick, I was able to find two more, for Bob McClure (March 14) and Percy Wilson (March 21). 

The Force bio is a little scanty; the Pullen, Day, and Wilson biographies are probably sources for their entries in Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (though Wilson’s gives a birth year of 1899, rather than the 1889 in Riley).  The McClure item, however, has some new (and conflicting) information, including details about his baseball career in Texas in 1917-19, and a much earlier birthdate of March 24, 1891 (Riley has 1903).  McClure’s bio, moreover, is in the first person (“started my baseball career in Beaumont…”), a clue that most of the information in these pieces probably came from the players themselves.

Something else interesting about the McClure piece: he says he played for the “Beaumont team in the Texas League in 1917.”  Could there have been an organized Negro League in Texas then?  It so happens that a team called the “Texas All-Stars” (also referred to as the “Texas League Stars” and the “Texas Stars”) visited both Indianapolis and Chicago in late July, 1917; the team featured future Negro Leaguers Jelly Gardner in left, Edgar Wesley at first, and Henry Blackman at third.  In Chicago, host Rube Foster (himself a Texan) held a special “Texas Day” to attract migrants from the state to the American Giants’ ballpark.  (The Texas All-Stars, by the way, dropped two games to the ABCs and three to Foster’s club.)