The Little League Champions Benched by Jim Crow in 1955: Resistance and Reform after Brown v. Board of Education

Abstract

The Little League Champions Benched by Jim Crow in 1955: Resistance and Reform after Brown v. Board of Education DOUGLAS E. ABRAMS Introduction Little League Baseball, Inc. calls them “the most significant amateur team in baseball history.”1 The Boston Globe calls their story “one of baseball’s crudest moments.”2 ABC News says that their story is “[n]ot about man’s inhumanity to man but man’s inhu­ manity to children.”3 They were the Cannon Street YMCA All Stars, a team of eleven- and twelve-year-olds who went to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. in 1955 after winning the Charleston, South Carolina city champion­ ship; the South Carolina state championship in Greenville; and the southern regional championship in Rome, Georgia. They did not lose a single game.4 The Cannon Street All Stars were also the only team that ever went to Williamsport but was forbidden to play there for the World Series title. They attended as Little League’s guests, but they sat in the stands and watched, barred from competing because they had won the city, state, and regional titles by forfeits.5 The All Stars were “the team that no one would play.”6 Every other Charleston Little League team refused to take the field against them in the city championships. All sixty-one other South Carolina teams eligible for the state tournament joined the boycott, and so did all seven other state champions that qualified to play for the southeastern regional title, the final step on the road to William­ sport.7 In the wake of the mass boycott and forfeits, Little League’s national office recog­ nized the Cannon Street All Stars as the city, state, and southeastern regional champions.8 None of the other teams—more than seventy in all—ever suggested that the Cannon Street All Stars played dirty. None ever suggested that the All Stars violated any 52 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY The Cannon Street All Stars traveled from Charleston, South Carolina, to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to play in the Little League World Series in 1955. They were not allowed to play, however, because they had won their place in the World Series through forfeits—the other teams had all refused to play them because of their race. Little League rule. The several dozen teams refused to play them for only one reason—all the kids playing for the All Stars were black and every other southern Little League team with eyes on Williamsport was all white. Jim Crow laws had enshrined statesanctioned racial segregation in the Deep South for decades,9 and race relations remained especially tense in the summer of 1955. Barely a year had passed since May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board ofEducation held that racial segregation in public elementary and secondary schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.10 Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III calls Brown “the story ... of a thousand tales of human suffering and sacrifice subsumed in the winning of a principle.”11 The story of the Cannon Street All Stars belongs in this vast array, but the story has evidently gone untold in extended studies of the Court’s landmark decision. The All Stars and their young prospective white opponents in the Deep South were The Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public elementary and secondary schools violates the Equal Protection Clause on May 17,1954, barely a year before the All Stars were kept out of the World Series. THE LITTLE LEAGUE CHAMPIONS BENCHED BY JIM CROW IN 1955 53 caught in a drama that transcended Little League baseball. Black and white South Carolina children often played informal pickup baseball games together on local sandlots, at least until police broke up the contests.12 The prospect of integrated Little League tournaments, however, struck a raw nerve among white parents enraged by Brown’s threat to the existing legal and social order. The Supreme Court confined Brown’s holding and rationale to public elementary and secondary education, without explicitly dismantling official segregation in all walks of American life. Southern whites who dug in their heels, however...