Bud Fowler

Abstract

The speech upon which this article is based was delivered at the 2013 Fred Ivor-Campbell 19th Century Baseball Conference in Cooperstown.This year, 2013, marks the centennial of the death of John W. Jackson, better known by his playing name of Bud Fowler, who is generally considered as the first profes- sional African American baseball player. He grew up here in Cooperstown, and as you know, our mayor will later today be formally designating a small and hitherto unnamed street leading from Chestnut Street to Doubleday Field as Way.Bud Fowler's 30-year career in baseball has been summarized in every recent book on early baseball, and in many recent articles. Some of them cover his whole career, like that of the Baseball Biography Project of the Society of American Baseball Research,1 others concentrating on specific periods in his long and complicated life.2 The first book- length biography, Jeffrey Laing's Bud Fowler: Baseball's First Black Professional, is scheduled to appear in July.3I shall not today try to go over Fowler's baseball career in detail. Much of it has already been told, mostly from contemporary newspaper stories. Rather, I want to consider Bud Fowler as the human being, whom we are honoring in Cooperstown today.ChildhoodBud Fowler was born on March 16, 1858, as John W. Jackson, in the Mohawk Valley town of Fort Plain. As an infant he was brought by his parents to the overwhelmingly white community of Cooperstown. In 1860 it had only 28 African Americans, and only six children under 18, out of a population of about 1,600. In 1870, 13-year-old Bud was one of only six black children attending the local public school.4 A schoolmate-James Fenimore Cooper, the grandson of the famous author-would later recall: There played with us a little black boy, Johnnie Jackson, who felt his color so much that he used to say that, if it would make him white, he would willingly be skinned alive. What became of Johnnie ... I don't know-[he] just faded out of life.5Ironically, perhaps, this James Fenimore Cooper would in 1936 become the first President of the National Baseball Museum.6 However accurate Cooper's recollection may have been, the anecdote reflects something important about Bud Fowler: He had grown up with white companions-and for the rest of his life he wanted to live as an equal among America's majority racial group.Bud Fowler said he learned to play baseball, undoubtedly with white companions, on the grounds of the Cooperstown Seminary on Chestnut Street,7 which in 1869 would become the Cooper House Hotel.8 A hotel poster, printed after 1879, shows young men playing a very informal game of baseball in a field to the left of the hotel.9A Knight of the RazorWhat lay behind this unusual man? Everything written about Bud Fowler notes, if only in passing, how he continued to practice the barber trade he had learned from his father. Many contemporary newspaper stories mention it.10 But what baseball writers have overlooked is that this made him a Knight of the Razor-a black barber who shaved white customers. Like his ancestors, Bud Fowler was a member of a unique fraternity- almost a medieval guild-in 19th century African American culture.His father-John Henry Jackson-was a barber who practiced his trade in Cooperstown and Oneonta for at least two decades. His mother was the daughter of a barber, and they had many barber cousins in towns like Fort Plain along the Mohawk Valley.What was this guild of barbers, who dominated the barbering trade during much of the 19th century, competing successfully against whites, and forming a great percentage of the small African American middle class? How did they succeed in a nation filled with racial discrimination? In the words of one modern scholar: Barbering was servile. White customers felt comfortable being shaved by a black barber. The proprieties were preserved. The black man was in deferential attendance on the white man. …