In Dave Wyatt’s 1917 piece for the Indianapolis Freeman called “Death in the Game,” he lists 38 prominent figures in black baseball who had died prematurely in the last ten years, with cause and place of death. One of the more unusual demises is that of Bedford of the Cuban Giants who was, Wyatt says, killed by lightning in Louisville.
Bedford’s death, as it happens, made the pages of Sporting Life (September 4, 1909, p. 6). It actually occurred not in Louisville, but in Atlantic City:
William Bedford appears in the 1900 census living in Cairo, Illinois, with his parents Sam and Frances Bedford and several siblings. He was born in December, 1885, in Illinois, meaning he hadn’t yet reached his twenty-fourth birthday when he was killed. Although I found his parents and some siblings still living in Cairo in the 1910 census, I don’t think William’s widow or children were among them.
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