On December 14, 2024, I gave a webinar for the Josh Gibson Foundation entitled “Who Were the Negro Leaguers? Avenues of Investigation in Biographical Research.” It examined the methods of Negro league research through the lives and careers of largely lesser-known and hard-to-find players. I’ll be presenting the text of the talk across several newsletters (the first is here), and will be reposting them here. The first part covers:

1. Introduction
2. Charles (Tom) Cox (1928 Cleveland Tigers)
3. Robert Lacy (1935 Newark Dodgers, 1937 Philadelphia Stars)
4. William Davis (1940 Newark Eagles)
5. Horace Davis (1938 Birmingham Black Barons)

1. Introduction

Before I start, I’d just like to thank Sean Gibson and the rest of the folks who are helping out with the Webinar series for giving me this opportunity. Also I’d like to thank my wife Christina Chia, both for her infinite patience and for making the slides for this talk (which itself required infinite patience). And also, thanks to Kevin Johnson, who worked to get our website updated in the past few days, since some of what I’ll discuss today comes from very recent research.

Hi, my name is Gary Ashwill, and I founded and maintain the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database. While I do a vast amount of work compiling and correcting statistics, I also work on identifying and researching players, managers, and officials. In fact, I consider the latter to be the most satisfying and most important work I do. Biographical research has identified hundreds of players who previously appeared only as names, sometimes even just last names in box scores, helping families track down and confirm the participation of their relatives in the Black baseball leagues—or sometimes to learn about their relative’s or ancestor’s baseball connection for the first time. Today I’m specifically concentrating on minor players, players that even pretty knowledgeable Negro league fans might not know. In most cases their careers at the top, in the elite circles of Black baseball, were quite brief. As the years have gone by, I’ve come to think that the story of the Negro leagues is just as much the story of these players, the journeymen, the backups, the minor league or independent stars who may have only spent a couple of seasons or a handful of games in the Black majors.

Of course even major stars in the Black baseball leagues can be hard to research. So you can imagine how much more difficult it is to find information on someone who appeared once or twice, or never attracted headlines or commentary. But it is not impossible. Today I want to talk about several of the avenues of investigation into the lives of Black ballplayers before integration. I don’t necessarily have a detailed “how-to” in mind—just a broad look at the places to go for information, which might carry with it hints about how we can map out Black professional baseball and its networks of teams and players. I’ll do this with a series of examples. On the off chance that any of you are familiar with my blog, Agate Type, what I’ve got for you today is similar to much of what I have written there—a series of accounts of how various players have been identified, mostly drawn from recent research, although in a few cases I’ll reach back into some work done in the past several years (or in one case 14 years ago). This will give a good idea of the wide range of sources we use and how they can be combined—from game stories and box scores to genealogical records like the census and military records like draft cards, to travel and immigration records, obituaries, newspaper articles, team files, personal letters, and so forth.

2. Charles (Tom) Cox (1928 Cleveland Tigers)

When researching obscure players, a good place to start is where they came from. Sometimes a brief reference to a player’s home town can be all you need to figure out his identity. (1) For example, a pitcher named Cox played for the Cleveland Tigers of the Negro National League in 1928. He was referred to as “Tom Cox” in one article. In another he was noted to have come from Joliet, Illinois, and had played previously for Peters’ Union Giants.

In my research I was able to find a pitcher named Cox (no first name) appearing throughout the 1925 season for Gilkerson’s Union Giants (a different, but related, team), but without a first name. So I turned to Joliet, but couldn’t find a Tom or Thomas Cox mentioned in any newspapers or genealogical records. But there was still another possibility.

Black newspapers of the era—which were nearly all weekly papers—were not just sold and read in the cities where they originated. They were sent out to many smaller towns and cities and sold through distributors there, and since they were geared toward these communities, they also made an effort to carry very local news, often compiled by the same agents who sold the papers. Many papers featured whole pages devoted to news from various smaller communities, such as this 1934 page in the Chicago Defender, devoted to towns in Illinois. (Note the ad for distributors in the corner.)

These pages can be valuable sources of very detailed, granular information on local communities and the people who lived there, including ball players. Here’s news for Rock Island, Decatur, Kankakee, Argo…and Joliet. Zooming in, we find this note: “Charles Cox, former pitcher of the Cleveland Tigers, entertained with a party at the Goodfellows club April 29.” It turns out that Charles Cox, and his wife Bessie, were pretty active in social circles in Joliet, and evidently well known to the Chicago Defender agent/distributor there, so they appeared a number of times in the Defender news columns, and are easy to identify in genealogical and other records.

Despite the difference in first names, which could be attributed to “Tom” being either a nickname or possibly a mistake by a reporter or a publicity agent, in my opinion we have found the Cox who pitched for the 1925 Gilkerson’s Union Giants and the 1928 Cleveland Tigers.

3. Robert Lacy (1935 Newark Dodgers, 1937 Philadelphia Stars)

Another example. A left-handed pitcher named Lacy played for the Newark Dodgers in 1935 and the Chicago American Giants and Philadelphia Stars in 1937. An April 1937 article in the Chicago Defender refers to “Lacy, a left hander, from Harrisburg, Pa.”, and a July 1937 article in the Philadelphia Tribune mentions “Lefty Lacey, a newcomer,” pitching for the Philadelphia Stars, though there’s no box score for that game, unfortunately. (There are several other mentions of Lefty Lacey in Philadelphia that year, but no box scores, to my knowledge.) Checking Harrisburg papers, we can find a clue in 1931, in a listing of grammar school graduates, where one of the students is “Robert Lacy, 654 Calder street, son of Frank Lacy,” whose school activity is listed as playing for the baseball team, and who intends to spend his summer vacation “play[ing] ball.”

It is easy to find a young Black man in Harrisburg named Robert Lacy, parents Frank and Mattie, living at 654 Calder Street, in census and other records. Then in a 1954 article in the Harrisburg Evening News, we find a mention of a pitching coach for the Harrisburg Giants of the (minor) Eastern Negro League named Robert Lacy, who “formerly played for the Newark Eagles and the Philadelphia Stars of the Negro National League.”

4. William Davis (1940 Newark Eagles)

Of course we can go beyond newspapers for information about players and their home towns. A rookie named “Davis” pitched briefly for the Newark Eagles in 1940. He had a very hard time–according to the box scores we have, he gave up 18 runs in 3 innings. Here’s a portion from an account of one of his games, describing him as “a youngster from Greensboro, N. C.”

The Newark Public Library has uploaded the papers of the Newark Eagles to the Internet Archive, and in this collection we find a letter to Eagles owner Abe Manley, dated January 4, 1941, from a young man in Reidsville, N.C., named William Davis, in which he introduces himself this way: “I guess you wonder what this is and who it is, [w]ell, I’m the fellow Davis who was with the team for a spell last season, and didn’t come through. Well my trouble for that was the lack of training, and I would like to go South with you this spring, if you would grant it. I’m sure I could come through if I got the proper treatment.”

This World War II draft card is for one William Nelson Davis, whose address—171 Carter St. in Reidsville NC—matches the address on William Davis’s letter to Abe Manley.

This photo of Davis shows him with the Goshen Red Wings, a team in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Incidentally, Tom Alston, first Black player for the St. Louis Cardinals, was a product of the Goshen Red Wings.)

The photo comes from a web page devoted to the Charlotte Black Hornets, one of the Red Wings’ rivals in the 1940s.

5. Horace Davis (1938 Birmingham Black Barons)

As the William Davis example shows, players will often have reached prominence first for their local teams. Before the middle of the twentieth century, local baseball clubs (independent pros, semipro, amateur) were a major source of entertainment, both in small towns where there were few alternatives, and in large cities, where tickets for independent teams were cheaper than say, the white major leagues. Because segregation in baseball reached down to the local level in most of the United States, many smaller cities and towns had their own independent Black ballclubs. So the identities of many players can be traced back to the local teams and leagues where they first made their names. One of the great hotbeds for Black baseball talent was in Birmingham, Alabama, where the industrial leagues produced many future Negro leaguers (Piper Davis, Artie Wilson, Willie Mays). Aside from the big stars, we can also identify cup of coffee players who cut their teeth there.

For example, on September 25, 1938, the Black Barons featured a second baseman named Horace Davis in a game against the Atlanta Black Crackers. Davis homered in what as far as we know was his only ever appearance in the Negro leagues. As it turns out he was a well-known player-manager for the Ensley steel plant team in Birmingham. The Ensley plant (Ensley is a neighborhood in Birmingham, formerly an independent town) was owned by the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, or TCI, which in turn was a division of the US Steel Corporation. (Ensley was in fact originally a company town founded by TCI in 1886.) Here is the World War 2 draft card for one Horace Davis, working at the Ensley plant for TCI.

And here’s a photo of the now-abandoned Ensley plant, from the website Abandoned Southeast.