The Fading of the Greys: Black Baseball and Historical Memory in Little Rock

Abstract

HISTORY IS NOT WRITTEN BY WINNERS. It's written about them. And if the quality of victory is measured by the volume of such writing, southern black baseball in the first half of the twentieth century is a compendium of loss. The stifling consequences of segregation colluded, with some notable exceptions, to keep various southern leagues decidedly minor. Some of these black teams survive in historical memory; others are well nigh forgotten-their respective fates depending largely on baseball's ultimate arbiter, wins. Nothing illustrates this better than the obscurity of a black team of the early 1930s, the Little Rock Greys, as compared to one of their rivals, based barely 150 miles away. Little Rock, Arkansas, maintained various minor-league black baseball teams throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Though they appeared under a variety of owners and ownership groups and played in different parks in Arkansas's capital, the teams are almost uniformly remembered as the Little Rock Black Travelers, mirroring the name of the city's white minor-league team. In 1932 and 1933, however, the team in Little Rock played as the Greys. At the same time, 153 miles away a relative newcomer to Negro Leagues baseball, the Monarchs, played in the much smaller town of Monroe, a hub of rural northeast Louisiana. Little Rock would briefly revive minor-league black baseball in 1945, while the Monarchs would cease to exist after 1936. But during the early 1930s and in the historical record, the Monroe Monarchs would be far more prominent. In 1996, for example, Roosevelt Wright, a black playwright and newspaper editor in Monroe, authored The Game, a two-act play about the 1932 team. In 2005, two former Monroe residents living in Dallas, Texas, founded the Monroe Monarchs Historical Association, which lobbied successfully for a historical marker to be placed near the site of the team's park.1 No comparable celebrations of the Greys have developed. On the rare occasions when Little Rock's Negro Leagues experience resurfaces, it is the Black Travelers of 1945 who are recalled. There are a number of reasons that the Black Travelers are better remembered, but an important one is simply that they won more games. A black team in a hostile white community needed to have the support of the black population, and it needed to be able to win. Winning provided the white press with a reason to pay attention to the team. It also encouraged the African-American press in other regions to cover the team. It instilled a sense of stubborn pride in a black community groaning under the weight of both depression and racism. The Monarchs won and so survived the 1932 season. They survived in the cultural memory of both Monroe and Negro Leagues historiography. The Greys did not. They didn't win. Both teams operated in southern cities cloistered by Jim Crow, but the demography of the two communities differed. Little Rock was Arkansas's capital city and, as far as the U.S. census was concerned, the only metropolitan area in a state with a population of less than 2,000,000. Just under 26 percent of Arkansans were black in 1930. In Pulaski County as a whole, 40,215 of the 137,727 citizens were African-American, and 19,030 of those were employed. Almost 11 percent of those ten years of age and above were unable to read and write. In Little Rock itself, African Americans constituted 24.1 percent of the city's 81,679 residents. Of the city's 19,698 black citizens, 10,727 maintained steady work, and slightly less than 10 percent were illiterate.2 Monroe was much smaller than Little Rock, but its 10,112 African Americans constituted 38.9 percent of the city's 26,028 residents. Almost 5,800 of the city's blacks were gainfully employed, and almost 17 percent could not read. Of Ouachita Parish's 54,337 residents, 19,041 were black. Close to 10,000 of them had regular employment, and slightly more than 3,000 were illiterate. Monroe's smaller size stood in contrast to the state's larger population (a quarter million more people than Arkansas), but its relatively high percentage of African-American citizens mirrored the 36. …