When black ballplayers barnstormed ‘Up South’: Morris County historian gives Hall of Fame talk

Jan Williams, a historian for the Morris County planning department, with mementos from her Hall of Fame talk. Photo by Kevin Coughlin
Jan Williams, a historian for the Morris County planning department, with mementos from her Hall of Fame talk. Photo by Kevin Coughlin
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Jan Williams summed up her first memory of America’s national pastime in one word:

“Terror.”

It was the night Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record. Williams, 13 at the time, was at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

“The thing I remember was snipers on the roof. It was the first time I ever saw machine guns, and bomb-sniffing dogs,” recounted Williams, now a cultural and historic specialist for Morris County.

“Cops were with [Aaron]. That was a lasting impression. It gave me the idea baseball was a dangerous and frightening undertaking.”

Fast-forward 43 years. Williams, who hadn’t thought too much about baseball since that momentous night in Atlanta, was invited this month to speak at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

King Solomon 'Sol' White was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, more than a century after his pioneering career. He wrote one of the first books about life in the Negro Leagues.
King Solomon ‘Sol’ White was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, more than a century after his pioneering career. He wrote one of the first books about life in the Negro Leagues.

She revisited the issue of race– this time, focusing on risks and challenges faced by black ballplayers in Morris County during the game’s segregated infancy.

Posing as Cubans, barnstorming African Americans handily defeated white teams from Boonton, Dover and the Greystone Hospitlars, to name a few, in the late 19th- and early 20th centuries.

“They walked knowingly into the lion’s mouth,” said Williams, who considers early black stars such as King Solomon White to be “like Hank Aaron or Rosa Parks. That’s about as brave as it gets.”

Williams’ talk, Crossing Bats ‘Up South’ — When the Negro Leagues played in Morris County, New Jersey, was presented at the Hall of Fame’s 29th Symposium. The theme:  Base Ball and American Culture.

“It is very important work because this time period of baseball history is an area that continues to need attention,” Ray Doswell, curator of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., said of Williams’ paper.

When Williams shared her findings with him, Doswell put her in touch with the Hall of Fame. The symposium draws academics, scholars, and historians who discuss baseball’s role in culture and society, from art and architecture to civil rights, economics music and literature. It covers “everything except baseball on the field,” said Jim Gates, the Hall of Fame’s librarian.

Williams’ work evolved from her research for next year’s 175th anniversary of Bethel A.M.E. Church in Morristown. The first pastor there, Bishop Willis Nazery, was part of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the South prior to the Civil War.

Morris County’s prior claims to baseball fame involved Freeholder Billy Dee, erroneously credited with tossing the first curveball; and the sport’s purported founder, Abner Doubleday, settling in Mendham after the Civil War. Lou Gehrig moonlighted with a Morristown team in the early 1920s before he became a Yankees legend.

MINING NUGGETS FROM ‘THE IRON ERA’

Bethel A.M.E.’s connection to black baseball was through its pastor of 1871, the Rev. William T. Catto, a freed slave whose son Octavius Valentine Catto –equal rights advocate, classical scholar and Civil War veteran — helped start Negro League baseball in Philadelphia. Octavius Catto also helped desegregate that city’s trolley system. He was murdered there while attempting to vote.

While poring over yellowed copies of The Iron Era, a long-defunct Dover newspaper, Williams was struck by accounts describing exploits of the Cuban Giants.

Throughout the late 1800s, the publication routinely interspersed disparaging depictions of African Americans with reports of lynchings and minstrel shows. New Jersey was the last state to abolish slavery, and nostalgia for the “Ol’ South'” was evident in The Iron Era.

Such attitudes caused African Americans to dub the Garden State “Up South.”

Yet Williams noticed a gradual change in the newspaper’s coverage of African American ballplayers.

“Early baseball columns are written in ill-concealed disdain. Players were referred to as the colored second baseman, colored pitcher, without surnames. The tone shifts to unadulterated appreciation of their skills…,” she said in her presentation.

The Cuban Giants “were like the Harlem Globetrotters. And everyone else were The Generals,” she said, referring to the lopsided basketball “rivalry” that has entertained generations.

In 1893, the Cuban Giants trounced Boonton, 13-6. That same year, they bested the Greystone psychiatric hospital staff, 22-16.

According to Doswell, “for some of these communities, having one of these teams come through town was the closest they would get to seeing Major League caliber play, and these may have been annual or semi-annual events.”

‘RAY OF HOPE’

Williams’ efforts documenting historic structures for the Morris County planning department won the New Jersey State Historic Preservation Award for Innovation in 2013. She also is certified by the Library of Congress to record histories of veterans, and has compiled the Morris County Veterans Compendium.

Now she is writing a piece for Black Ball, a peer-reviewed journal about the Negro Leagues.

Williams said she was moved to discover that black ballplayers visiting Morris County in the late 1800s garnered “respect seldom bestowed upon the local citizen of color who read The Iron Era.

“To a lot of people, these guys were a ray of hope,” she said. “They were the bravest people in their worlds. 

“For the African American community to watch the Cuban Giants beat the pants off people who disrespected them a million times a day, it had to be funny.”

If you have information about the early days of Morristown's Bethel A.M.E. Church, the church requests your help.
If you have information about the early days of Morristown’s Bethel A.M.E. Church, the church requests your help.

 

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