(From the Agate Type newsletter.)

It was quite unusual for Negro league ballplayers to become team owners. Most who did—C. I. Taylor, Cumberland Posey, Rube Foster— started their playing careers in the pre-league era. A good number of former players became team officials, like Dizzy Dismukes, Bunny Downs, and Juanelo Mirabal. But the group of players-turned-owners is pretty small.

One rather obscure candidate to join Foster and company is another Rube, George A. Henderson of Cleveland, who played for the Cleveland Tate Stars and Chicago Giants of the early 1920s Negro National League. In 1929 Nat Strong sold the Brooklyn Royal Giants to Henderson, who was reported to have become a businessman on the East Coast.

Pittsburgh Courier columnist W. Rollo Wilson, who was skeptical (to put it lightly) of both Nat Strong and his ball club, found himself more than a little bemused:

Considering that Henderson’s known occupations were chauffeur and building superintendent, one might wonder how much cash he would really have had access to. It’s possible he was a kind of figurehead or stand-in for Strong, given the antipathy towards him in the Black press (and one presumes Black community at large). Or perhaps he accumulated money in illicit ways. The numbers business is the most obvious possibility, and the one with the clearest historical links to the Negro leagues, but there are of course other extralegal paths he could have taken.

There were actually two Black pitchers named George Henderson in the early 1920s—George E. Henderson of Charlottesville, Virginia, and George A. Henderson of Cleveland. Until recently we only had George E. Henderson in the database, until it became clear that at the same time he was pitching for the Madison Stars of Philadelphia in 1920, Rube Henderson was pitching for the then-independent Cleveland Tate Stars. From there it wasn’t that hard to track down George A. Henderson, who matched all that was known about Rube.

According to both the 1920 census and his World War I draft card Henderson was born in New York, but he was really from Austin, Texas. He lived in Cleveland in late 1910s and early 1920s, when he played for the Tate Stars (and briefly the Chicago Giants) and became known as “Rube.”

He started as a pitcher in local independent ball, and moved into league baseball when the Tate Stars joined the Negro National League. In 1922 and 1923 he seems to have been mostly an outfielder. His last known year as a ballplayer was 1923, still with the Tate Stars in the spring; Jim Riley says he was also with the Toledo Tigers, though I haven’t found any mentions of him with that team. By 1925 he was living in New York and working as a building superintendent.

I haven’t found any baseball involvement for Henderson between 1923 and his purchase of the Royal Giants in 1929. As the owner of the Brooklyn club, he kept the team independent and mostly maintained the existing roster, but he did make a few signings, including the young catcher Bill Perkins from the Birmingham Black Barons and the veteran shortstop Scrappy Brown from the Baltimore Black Sox. This article about his spring activities as Royal Giants owner makes ominous mention of Henderson being “indisposed with a little bronchial trouble”:

On December 20, 1929, at St. George Hospital in the Bronx, Henderson passed away of “pulmonary pthisis,” or tuberculosis.

This explains why the Royal Giants were back in Nat Strong’s hands by spring 1930, although I couldn’t find any commentary whatsoever on either Henderson’s death or Strong’s re-acquisition of the Royal Giants. Henderson’s foray into management seems not to have been remembered at all; it isn’t mentioned in Jim Riley’s brief entry on him in his Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 375).

The 1929 Royal Giants aren’t currently considered a “major league” team, and they aren’t likely to join that club in the foreseeable future; but Henderson does deserve at least a small footnote for having followed the more famous Rube as a player turned team owner.