That's the old ballgame Shreveport, chapter 16 -- the integration issue

Chapter 16

Segregation, integration

    Interest in attending minor-league baseball games began to wane in the mid-1950s, and that certainly was true in Shreveport. And then a more perplexing and eventually damaging issue faced the Shreveport Sports.

    Baseball integration, or in Shreveport’s case, the lack of it.

    Twice in a five-year period -- after the 1957 and 1961 seasons -- Shreveport lost its spot in Organized Baseball. The Sports folded, and left town.

    A major reason: fewer people coming to the ballpark, less revenue in ticket and advertising sales. But there were two other major factors:

    (1) Shreveport teams were not integrated; management refused that option; (2) starting in 1957, because of a Louisiana law, African-American players were not allowed to play mixed with whites at Shreveport’s ballpark.

    That resulted in national attention for the state and for Shreveport … and not in a positive manner.

   There was no diminishing the racial issues, not in the Deep South of that era; the Jim Crow days were still in effect. And Shreveport was a stubborn holdout to racial progress.

    Integration in the Texas League had begun in 1952 (in Dallas, with pitcher Dave Hoskins). Through 1956, the Sports were the last of the eight TL franchises that did not have at least one black player on the roster.

    But from '52 through '56, black players did play in games at Shreveport's Texas League Park. That included major leaguers coming in with their teams for spring exhibition games and visiting TL players.

The most prominent TL visitors were two future Baseball Hall of Famers: Willard "Home Run" Brown (right) and Maury Wills.

    Brown had grown up in Shreveport and was a longtime Negro League star, a power-hitting outfielder who spent a brief, and unhappy time, as one of the American League's first black players (with the St. Louis Browns in 1948). He was in the TL from 1953 to 1956, with five different teams.

    Wills, future National League MVP with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was the shortstop for the Fort Worth Cats in 1955.

    Another shortstop, Andre Rodgers, was a dark-skinned native of The Bahamas who played for Dallas in 1956.

    The issue, though, was exacerbated by the Louisiana state legislature  when, in July 1956, it passed House Bill 1412 to prohibit interracial sporting events in the state.

    Here from the book Class at Bat, Gender on Deck, and Race in the Hole by Ron Briley (published in 2003) is how the chapter “The Limits of Baseball Integration: Louisiana, the Texas League, and Shreveport Sports, 1956-57” describes it:

    Despite protests from the NAACP and some concerns expressed by the business community regarding the economic consequences of this legislation, Governor Earl Long, explaining that he was "just a poor little old man going along with the majority," signed the legislation, which was to go into effect on October 15, 1956.

    (Note: Newsweek shortly thereafter predicted Shreveport would be expelled from the Texas League. Did not happen, but trouble was ahead.)

    So TL opponents had to come to Shreveport without their black players. League president Dick Butler tried to find compromise solutions -- such as Shreveport reducing its roster for home games -- but those were rejected by Sports' ownership.  

    So, for example, the Dallas Eagles were without first baseman Willie McCovey (another future Hall of Famer who was a Giants star), and Oklahoma City was without second baseman Elijah "Pumpsie" Green, who two years later became the Boston Red Sox's first black player (they were the last major-league team to integrate).      

    Again, from the Class at Bat book: The Houston Buffaloes’ general manager suggested his team would withdraw black players if Shreveport would reciprocate by benching equivalent starting players. Sports president Bonneau Peters waved off that possibility, asserting that “if these clubs want to play at Shreveport, they’ll just have to play under the laws of Louisiana. I’m not going to do anything about it.”

    TL visiting teams then were allowed to expand their rosters when they came to Shreveport, but some, like Houston and Dallas with five black players apiece -- were shorthanded.

    And yet, as the book points out, a story in The Sporting News in early 1957 said the Texas League was “one circuit with problems -- a rarity in these times.” Plus, there was no statement on the issue from Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick.

    From the book: “ … With minor league baseball apparently on its deathbed, the baseball establishment tried to keep the patient alive in Shreveport despite the moral ambiguities and compromises involved in working around the Louisiana segregation statutes.”

    By midseason, the Sports’ team was floundering badly -- on the field, and in attendance figures. At the midseason All-Star break, Peters announced the team was up for sale and would not operate in 1958. He insisted, as the book pointed out, that a black boycott had no effect on attendance or his decision to put the team up for sale.

    A Sporting News editorial later that year praised Peters’ efforts to maintain an independent organization, but said the days of independents were near an end (true). From the book: “Not once in this benediction to the entrepreneurial spirit of Peters was there any mention of the fact that Shreveport investors operated a segregated minor league baseball franchise in violation of the platitudes of racial harmony and equality espoused by The Sporting News and the baseball establishment.

    The book’s chapter on the issue concluded that “...  An examination of baseball’s response to sport apartheid in Louisiana with the case study of the Shreveport Sports of 1957 indicates that racial prejudice was still powerful within American society and the baseball establishment.”

    There was not much objection when, on Dec. 30, 1957, at a special meeting of Texas League directors in Dallas, the Sports' operators sold the franchise to the league. The sale price was $40,000; interests from Victoria, Texas, bought the team for the same price.

    Shreveport baseball would be back soon.

---

Beginning in 1949 -- two years after Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers integrated the major leagues -- some of the MLB teams visiting Shreveport for spring training exhibition games included black playes. The first was the American League's "color barrier" breaker, outfielder Larry Doby with the Cleveland Indians when they came to Texas League Park in April 1949.

Hank Thompson, a New York Giants' outfielder, was the next in 1950, and the future Hall of Famers to play in Shreveport later in the decade were Chicago Cubs rookie shortstop Ernie Banks in 1954 and Giants' superstar center fielder Willie Mays in 1956.

Mays missed the Giants' game in Shreveport in 1952 when he went home to Alabama to appeal a hardship case to his draft board (he had been drafted by the U.S. Army). Also missing that '52 game for the Giants was fellow outfielder -- and future Hall of Famer -- Monte Irvin (broken ankle).

While Shreveport's ballpark was empty for most of a year, there was talk of a possible connection to the Southern Association -- from which it had left in 1915. It remained an all-white league.

The connection was made soon after the 1958 season when the team in Little Rock, Ark., was sold to the Shreveport group again headed by Bonneau Peters.

So, for three more seasons (1959-61), there was all-white pro baseball in Shreveport. But the resistance to integration -- and again, poor attendance/finances -- led to the Sports folding once more ... and also to the Southern Association disbanding after 60 years.

The Southern League, which began in 1964, was a combination of South Atlantic ("Sally") League teams and former Southern Association members.

Shreveport was out of Organized Baseball from 1962 to 1967, then returned to the Texas League in 1968 as the Atlanta Braves' Class AA farm team and by now, in the midst of the heated, often violent civil rights years of the 1960s, baseball integration came to the city.

Outfielder Ralph Garr (left) -- from nearby Ruston, La., and Grambling College -- was the first prominent black Shreveport Braves' player.

Later that season he was joined in the Shreveport outfielder by Clarence "Cito" Gaston, who more than two decades later became the first black manager of a World Series-winning team (Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993).

---

Although coverage of Negro League baseball teams in Shreveport was scant in the city's two major newspapers, clippings trace as far back as early as 1918 and as late as 1949.

There were brief clippings in The Times about teams nicknamed the Black Gassers and Black Sports, and perhaps the most significant team was the Shreveport Acme Giants. That, according to a May-June 2012 Louisiana Life magazine story "Diamonds in the Rough" by Ryan Whirty, was a "barnstroming" squad which played games throughout Louisiana and then toured extensively into the Midwest and Canada.

It was with the Acme Giants that John "Buck" O'Neil began his baseball career. He became the longtime player-manager of the famed Kansas City Monarchs, later the major leagues' first black coach (with the Chicago Cubs), then a scout (among those he signed for the Cubs was pitcher Lee Smith, from Castor, Louisiana, and about to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame). And finally, Buck was the well-known national ambassador for the Negro Leagues' legacy and Hall of Fame.

In April 1937, the Monarchs -- billed as the "world champions" of Negro baseball -- held their spring training in Shreveport and played the Shreveport Tigers (who reportedly had won 51 of their 62 games in 1936) in a series of games. But city powers prevented the black teams from playing at Dixie League Park, at that time the top venue for baseball in the city.

A 1949 Shreveport Times story said the Shreveport Tigers would be part of a Negro league in which a 100-game season would start May 1. Billy Horne, who had played for the Negro League teams in Chicago and Cleveland, was the team manager. The league included teams in Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, New Orleans, Monroe, La., and Hot Springs, Ark.

---

(Note: Ron Briley's essay in the Class at Bat book was originally published in the North Louisiana Historical Association Journal, 28, Fall 1997, 153-162.)
---
John Ridge added this note: The Homestead Grays, with Hall-of-Famers Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, played an exhibition game at Palace Park, located in the back of Allendale. From The Times, 05-Apr-1938, Page 11)