Effa Manley, the Woman in the Hall of Fame

Abstract

Effa Manley, the Woman in the Hall of Fame James E. Overmyer (bio) Effa Manley was a baseball club owner who put her Negro League team squarely in the public eye. She was one of the few female executives in professional baseball in her day, and the most influential. As a public-spirited leader, she gave continuously to the African American communities in which she lived. All this made her a well-known businesswoman and a society figure. But this did not ensure the full measure of respect due her from her peers in Black baseball's male-dominated executive ranks. This was no less true for her, and true for her Negro League colleagues, as well, when it came to dealing with white baseball executives. For example, more than once she recounted her attempt to meet with Minor League President George M. Trautman in a quixotic attempt to save the Black leagues when professional baseball integration was coming on fast. Trautman's initial response when Effa showed up at the hotel where white magnates were meeting was to send his wife downstairs to meet with her, thus executing a gender and racial double brushoff.1 Sometimes it takes a long time for people to get their due. By the late 1970s Effa, one of the last surviving Negro League executives, had become an often-interviewed source for historians and writers rediscovering the dead Black leagues. She herself died in 1981. Eventually, posthumously, Effa gained arguably the highest level of recognition that baseball can provide, election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Ms. Manley is the only woman with a plaque in the Hall. As her niece, Connie Brooks, observed when accepting the honor for her late aunt at the 2006 induction ceremony, "This is a man's thing here."2 All major league players have been men. Management in the majors is still mostly male (although women have recently been hired as specialty and minor league coaches, and Kim Ng became the first Major League Baseball female general manager in late 2020). Effa Manley, having been voted in by a special Hall committee on Black players and executives, primarily won her place in the Hall's "Plaque Room" by succeeding in the face of segregation. In the process, though, her induction was an important, albeit rare, success story for women in the sport. But she was not chosen just because she represented [End Page 128] underrepresented classes in the Hall's membership. She easily meets the first and most important qualification for baseball executives—her team was good. There are twenty figures in the Hall from the white and Black majors whose primary qualification is as a team owner or top-level executive. All their teams won pennants, and most of them enjoyed at least one World Championship. The Eagles were the Negro National League pennant and Negro World Series winners in 1946. Effa was co-owner of the Eagles with her husband Abraham L. Manley from 1935 through the end of the 1948 season. Then they sold their franchise when integration channeled their fans' attention and admission dollars to the white majors. Abe came into baseball with capital raised primarily through his dominance of the then-illegal numbers lottery business (today's legitimized state lotteries) in Camden, New Jersey. The Manleys paid their players good salaries and paid regularly. By and large the couple were good businesspeople, as demonstrated by the decision, which was mostly Effa's, to pull out of Black baseball as it began its fatal decline after 1947, while their franchise still had some value.3 It must be said that Abe had most of the technical baseball knowledge for the pair. But in most Negro League seasons financial survival was a chancy thing. Teams were undercapitalized. The owners, like their counterparts in other Black endeavors, had a hard time getting business loans, supported as they were by fans from a minority group whose members, even those with college degrees, made significantly less than their white counterparts.4 Some teams did not have the financial cushion to get through a bad season, and few could afford to build their own ballparks. Abe liked baseball...