This is another piece I had previously published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin (September 15, 2010) as part of a serialized history of the 1919 season in Black baseball, and recently revived for the Agate Type newsletter.

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While the Western blackball lineup in 1919 clearly presaged the coming of the Negro National League the following year, crucial events were unfolding in the East that would shape the direction of African-American baseball in that section for the next few years. “Upheaval in Eastern Baseball Expected,” warned the Chicago Defender on April 19:

Great things are actually under way in Eastern semi-pro baseball circles, that will startle the baseball world…At present we have been requested to hold the names of two certain promoters in this city [New York] who are backing the scheme. Several well known players of prominent teams are implicated and when the bomb is thrown it will be an Eastern link in the chain with Rube Foster, the world’s greatest baseball expert. Some white promoters of Race baseball teams have had their day and are slated to go, and the quicker the better.

There was really only one important “white promoter” in question here, and that was one Nathaniel Calvin Strong, owner of the Brooklyn Royal Giants and the Brooklyn Bushwicks, who through his booking business had established a virtual stranglehold on independent baseball in the New York area. Strong controlled, directly or through surrogates, the three biggest teams in eastern blackball: his own Royal Giants, the Lincoln Giants, and Alex Pompez’s Cuban Stars. If you wanted to book games in the major semipro parks, or play against the top black clubs and white semipros in New York, you had to go through Strong. Just the previous year, when James H. Williams, head of the Grand Central Station Red Caps in New York, had recruited a number of top players (several from Strong’s Royal Giants) and tried to make waves on the eastern baseball scene, Strong had retaliated by freezing them out of the parks he controlled. While the Red Caps continued to field good teams for a number of years, Strong succeeded in severely limiting their opportunities, and they never really broke through to the top rank of black baseball.

The article continued: “One certain Eastern booking agent, so it is said, made the statement a short while ago that a Negro ball player, regardless of how good, is only worth $60 a month.” The Defender had recently run a number of articles on how players were beginning to demand higher salaries and even hinting at a strike. So you have to wonder if this quote, whether or not Strong actually said it, was intended by someone (an informant or the sportswriter himself—the article was unsigned but may have been by William White, the Defender’s eastern sporting correspondent) as a shot across the bow and an incitement to players.

The following week (April 26) White broke the news: a consortium of black businessmen led by John W. Connor, founder of the Brooklyn Royal Giants, had taken over the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants and infused $100,000 into the club, “all of this Race capital.” They also, crucially, acquired a new park, leasing the old Inlet Park and constructing a new grandstand. As Connor explained, this would enable them to bypass Strong’s booking empire. Nat Strong had, several years before, used his booking muscle to stage what amounted to a hostile takeover of the Royal Giants. This was to be Connor’s revenge.

“This new state of affairs,” White wrote, “has come as a shock to the white owners of the Lincoln and Royal Giants,” which included Strong and his allies with the Lincolns, boxing promoter Charles Harvey and the team’s business manager, James J. Keenan. Together, “the Big Three,” as White called them, “have been a hindrance to the players financially, especially to stars like [Dick] Redding, Joe Williams, [Bill] Pettus, [Sam] Mongin and others.” The new Bacharach Giants, it was claimed, had already signed “several well-known players.” Connor and his partner Barron D. Wilkins claimed that Strong had complained to them “that they were making things bad by offering these ‘coons’ more money.” “Slavery Still in Existence—Even in New York,” the Defender proclaimed. A war of words ensued in the press, with Strong claiming that Wilkins owed him money and Wilkins threatening to sue Strong for defamation.

According to White, the new club was part of a movement in solidarity with Rube Foster in the West. “The East,” he wrote, “is lining up with the West in not allowing white men to own manage and do as they feel like doing in the semi-pro ranks with underhand methods.” “White Men the Boss—Why?” he asked in the May 10 Defender, chiding certain players who were on the fence about jumping to the new Bacharachs. “The ball players out west follow Rube Foster, not the white man.” By the end of the month, White was claiming that the Lincolns and Royals were now full of “many dissatisfied players.” He quoted Royal Giants’ center fielder Johnny Pugh blaming the unrest, not on Strong, but on player-manager Joe Williams, who, according to Pugh, was now echoing Strong’s earlier slander, insisting that “no Race baseball player is worth over $65 a month.” (Williams would later protest that he said no such thing.)

On Sunday, May 4, Cannonball Dick Redding, still with the Royal Giants, hooked up in a classic matchup with his great rival, Cyclone Joe Williams, at Olympic Field in Harlem. Redding scattered seven hits and had a shutout going through eight innings, but Williams no-hit the Royal Giants, and in the bottom of the ninth the Lincolns put over a run to win. Twelve days later, May 16, it was announced that Redding and his catcher, Ernest Gatewood, had jumped to the Bacharach Giants. By May 24, reporting on the Lincolns sweep of the Royal Giants in a doubleheader, the Defender crowed that “with the absence of Redding and Gatewood from the line-up they made a sorry showing and are practically shot to pieces. The same may be said of the Lincoln Giants. Remove Joe Williams and there would be no team.”

The Bacharach Giants had existed since 1916, when Tom Jackson and Henry Tucker brought the Duval Giants of Jacksonville, Florida, north to Atlantic City, and named the team after a popular local politician. Tucker allied himself with Connor and Wilkins, but at first Jackson resisted, incorporating the Bacharach Giants under his control in February. For a time it appeared that the Wilkins/Connor/Tucker outfit was going to call itself the “Colored Americans,” but in the end they settled on the “Bacharach X Giants.” This echoed an earlier moment in black baseball history, when rebellious players had defected from the old Cuban Giants in 1897 to join a new team, which called itself the Cuban X Giants, as in “ex-Giants.” The iconic Bacharachs logo, with its central “X,” obviously reflects this early form of the team’s name. It’s not clear that Jackson ever fielded his own team in 1919, and by June the two sides had come to an agreement, and the “X” was mostly dropped from the name—although it would be retained in uniforms for years. (It would reappear in the name as well, under different circumstances, in 1922.)

Opening day for the Bacharachs was scheduled for May 30 at Inlet Park against a team of white semipros called the All-Nationals assembled by Hal Chase. By now the disgruntled Pugh had joined the team, along with Charlie Earle, captain of the Grand Central Red Caps, and Ben Taylor and Fred Hutchinson all the way from Indianapolis, where Ben’s brother C. I. had declined to organize a team for 1919. Redding whitewashed Chase’s men 7 to 0, with ten strikeouts. The following Tuesday, June 3, saw another bombshell land, when John Henry Lloyd, player-manager of the Royal Giants, jumped to the Bacharachs. “This means the beginning of the end of semi-pro ball being controlled by white men in the East,” claimed the Defender. Eccentric leadoff hitter George Shively, another former A.B.C., arrived a few days later.

But the war with Strong continued, and the season proved overall a mixed success. Plans to bring white major league teams to Atlantic City were purportedly squelched through Strong’s efforts. Meanwhile the Bacharachs were loosely affiliated with Ed Bolden’s Hilldale Club, another team with ties to Foster, and played at least 12 games against them in 1919. The Bacharachs also squared off against the Cuban Stars, despite their alliance with Strong, and hosted them at Inlet Park for a half-dozen games, although the Lincolns and Royals unsurprisingly boycotted Atlantic City (as well as Hilldale). Pete Hill brought his Detroit Stars to Inlet Park for a couple of games in July.

The Bacharachs made plans to travel to the Midwest to play the Stars and American Giants, but the Chicago race riot and the subsequent occupation of Schorling Park by the Illinois National Guard caused the trip to be cancelled. When the American Giants toured the East themselves a few weeks later, solidarity proved to be a bit overrated, as Foster, despite spending considerable time in Harlem and playing several games there, could not reach an agreement with Connor and company.

Nevertheless, 1919 set a template which was to govern Black baseball in the East until the founding of the Eastern Colored League in 1923. The Bacharachs and Hilldales spent the next three years allied with Foster’s Negro National League, touring the Midwest and hosting a number of NNL teams back East. With a few exceptions in 1920, these two clubs did not play the three Strong-allied teams (Lincolns, Royals, and Cuban Stars). The cause of organized baseball in the East, however, foundered, as travel expenses were too great for Bolden and Connors to participate as regular members of the NNL, and Strong’s clubs proved impossible to marginalize. It wasn’t until Bolden and the Bacharachs were able to deal with Strong that the Eastern Colored League became possible.