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Shimer Colle e, SCDI co-sponsor‘“
Negro Baseba l League lecture

Shireen Gul
COPY EDITOR

David Shiner, Professor of Humani-
ties and the History of Ideas at Shimer College,
presented a historical overview on the Negro
Baseball League this past Thursday. This event
was organized by IIT’s Student Center for Di—
versity and Inclusion, and Shimer College in
Galvin Library, Cherry Room.

Shiner started the presentation by
giving a brief introduction about baseball his-
tory, especially Black baseball history. “The Sox
have a well-deserved reputation for preserving
the memories of the Black players and teams
that were pioneers of the modern game, going
back to the founding of the team in 1900 with
the birth of the American League,” Shiner said.
“The Sox were generous in permitting use of its
parks-South Side Grounds from 1900 to 1910,
and later their longtime home field, Comiskey
Park—to Black teams.”

Shiner was really excited to share his
knowledge with the audience. He was wearing

a great Negro League replica jersey and also
had some of them on display. “Back in 1908 the
[White] Sox hired a Black man, William Buck—
ner, to be the team’s trainer. He held the job for
most of the time until his retirement in 1933,
when he became the first African-American
to draw a pension from a major league club,”
Shiner said about the replica. “That was very
very unusual in those days. So in honor of the
Sox, I’ve included a Sox cap with the Negro
League caps.”

Baseball was played in the United
States, in some form, as early as 200 years ago,
and many of us might know a lot about the
formation and codification of the rules from
about the 1840s on, but we don’t know a lot
about the beginnings of Black baseball. The
earliest currently-known written record of two
teams of Black men playing baseball is from
Brooklyn in 1861, and from the outbreak of the
Civil War onward we have decent if somewhat
sporadic accounts of Black men playing ball,
both in segregated and integrated games.

Out of many facts, the one that was
really interesting was that baseball was the

sport of choice for men who could play sports
of any kind during the Civil War.

“There are records of Union and
Confederate armies calling a temporary halt
to their hostilities, playing a game of baseball,
shaking hands, and then going back to killing
each other,” said Shiner.

“At the end of the war baseball was
being played everywhere. Amateur teams
sprang up particularly in the northeast and the
Midwest, including Black teams,” he added.
“One of the Black teams, the Mutuals of Wash-
ington D.C., included the two sons of Fred-
erick Douglass, the famous former slave and
abolitionist.”

After the war, racial integration
came slowly and haltingly to the nation, and
the same was true of baseball. The audience
were really amused when he mentioned that,
“The first general baseball organization (not
really a league) the original National Asso-
ciation of Base Ball Players, formed in 1867,
banned Black athletes. Throughout the 18705
minor leagues were springing up everywhere.
Sometimes Blacks were permitted to play in

them; mostly they weren’t.”

Shiner shared with the audiences re-
ally interesting facts about the baseball league.
He also mentioned the National Baseball Col-
ored League, which was formed in 1887 with
teams from eight cities, none of which unfor-
tunately was Chicago. The first known League
of Chicago was the Chicago Union Giants,
which was founded in 1887.

The knowledge that he shared with
his audiences was too much to jolt down in
one piece. Overall, the presentation was thor-
oughly enjoyed by the audience. The good part
of this presentation was the presence of faculty
and staff, but there were only three students.

Such events are organized for stu-
dents, and their presence is really appreciated
by everyone around.

If you want to see such events or
there are some other events which you would
like to see on campus, please feel free to send
an email to Lisa Montgomery, who is the di—
rector of SCDI at scdi@iit.edu and share your
ideas with her. She would really love to cater to
your ideas.

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Photos by Shireen Gul