Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball's Greatest Forgotten Player
472
Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball's Greatest Forgotten Player
472eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
2019 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year
Buck O’Neil once described him as “Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one.” Among experts he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America’s most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.
In a long career spanning from 1915 to 1954, Charleston played against, managed, befriended, and occasionally fought men such as Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jesse Owens, Roy Campanella, and Branch Rickey. He displayed tremendous power, speed, and defensive instincts along with a fierce intelligence and commitment to his craft. Charleston’s competitive fire sometimes brought him trouble, but more often it led to victories, championships, and profound respect.
While Charleston never played in the Major Leagues, he was a trailblazer who became the first Black man to work as a scout for a Major League team when Branch Rickey hired him to evaluate players for the Dodgers in the 1940s. From the mid‑1920s on, he was a player‑manager for several clubs. In 1932 he joined the Pittsburgh Crawfords and would manage the club many consider the finest Negro League team of all time, featuring five future Hall of Famers, including himself, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, and Satchel Paige.
Charleston’s combined record as a player, manager, and scout makes him the most accomplished figure in Black baseball history. His mastery of the quintessentially American sport under the conditions of segregation revealed what was possible for Black achievement, bringing hope to millions. Oscar Charleston introduces readers to one of America’s greatest and most fascinating athletes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496217820 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 472 |
| Sales rank: | 531,932 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Batboy, 1896–1912
It is not easy to reconstruct Oscar Charleston's life, especially his childhood and adolescence. The trail is cold. Nearly all of the firsthand witnesses are dead, and the record is often spotty or contradictory. Assorted half-truths and legends further cloud the picture, as does the fact that the public officials charged with documenting the mundane facts of blacks' lives a century or more ago were not always sticklers for accuracy.
What we know for certain is that Oscar Charleston's childhood was shaped decisively by the legacy of slavery, by the challenges presented by a fast-growing industrializing society, and by poverty. The Charlestons, like virtually every other large black family at the fin de siècle, lived on the margins. Their lot was never easy, and their passionate natures sometimes made things worse.
* * *
Oscar McKinley Charleston was born in Indianapolis on October 14, 1896. His family had arrived earlier that year, migrating to Indiana by way of Tennessee, the home state of Oscar's mother, Mary Jenny Thomas. Mary was born on March 6, 1872, seven years after Appomattox, to Jeff Thomas and Martha McGavock. This information is gleaned from Mary's death certificate, and it is the most definite evidence we have concerning Mary Charleston's family background. We have even fewer definite facts about the family background of Oscar's father, Tom Charleston. According to the 1900 census, he was born in South Carolina in October 1867. According to that same census, Tom's mother was a native South Carolinian, but his father had been born in France. That, to put it mildly, is surprising.
As they pertain to the Charleston family, the facts given in that 1900 census are not always accurate. Several birthdays are wrong, and one Charleston child is completely unreported. But let's consider for a moment the possibility that Tom Charleston's father — Oscar's paternal grandfather — really was born in France. That would presumably mean that Tom's father was white. In the social context of Civil War–era South Carolina, how plausible is it that a white Frenchman would have married a black South Carolinian? (Tom himself is recorded in the census as being black, and he is described in newspapers of the time as "colored," so we can be reasonably sure his mother was black.) Not very. Yet it seems just as unlikely that Tom's father was a black Frenchman.
Is there any way we can make sense of this datum? Possibly. According to a letter written much later by Oscar Charleston's niece Anna Charleston Bradley, Tom Charleston "came from the Sioux tribe." Oscar himself never seems to have publicly claimed to be part Native American — no one, in fact, other than his niece ever made such a claim even privately, as far as we know. Rodney Redman, whose family was very close to two of Oscar's siblings, told me that a Native American heritage for the Charlestons was never mentioned. But he also said that such an ancestry is not implausible, based on the Charleston family's physical characteristics. The Charlestons "were a little fairer-complected than most." They also had unusually straight hair. Redman recalled that Oscar's brother Shedrick "used to brush his hair straight back." And "Miss Katherine," Oscar's sister, "had beautiful hair" that was also rather straight. The same — a lighter complexion, straight hair — can be said of Oscar's letter-writing niece Anna.
Did Oscar Charleston himself have American Indian features? One black journalist did refer to Oscar as "Indian-colored," and another recalled his "creamed-coffee complexion," for whatever those observations are worth. The reader can examine the photographs reproduced in this book, as well those found online, and decide. In any case, perhaps the idea that Tom Charleston was part Sioux can help make sense of the notion that his father was born in France. For example, Tom Charleston's father may have been a French trader or trapper who married a Sioux woman he encountered in the tribe's homeland west of the Mississippi; it would not have been an unusual place for a Frenchman to be in the 1850s or 1860s. Perhaps Tom's father then moved with this Sioux woman to South Carolina, where a substantial French community flourished, especially in the city of Charleston, in the mid-1800s. And perhaps this explains the family surname of Charleston, which could have been taken by Tom's French father or by Tom himself in the hope of better assimilating into American society.
As the offspring of a Native American mother and white father, Tom could have been considered non-white in the post–Civil War south. His unconventional ethnic ancestry would have placed him on the social margins, and his marrying a black woman would therefore not have been scandalous or even particularly surprising. As for Tom being referred to as "Black" and "colored" in public documents, this could reflect little more than the fact that he wasn't lily white and had a black family. On the one hand, this is an extremely speculative hypothesis. On the other hand, it would seem odd for Anna Bradley simply to invent a claim of Sioux ancestry. However it came about, it is quite possible — and that is as strongly as I would be comfortable putting it — that Oscar Charleston was ethnically part Native American on his paternal side.
Negro Leagues historian Larry Lester, to whom Anna's letter was written, was the first to report — in The Negro Leagues Book, published in 1994 — that Tom Charleston was a Sioux Indian. A few other writers have since repeated the claim, and as a result Oscar Charleston gained an entry in the reference work Native Americans in Sports in 2004. It is surprising that Charleston's status as part Sioux was so readily accepted by such a reference book without qualification. In any case, if Oscar was really part Sioux, his competition as greatest American Indian athlete in history consists primarily of Jim Thorpe and Tiger Woods. He has a stronger claim to greatness than any other Native American baseball player, including Charles "Chief" Bender, Zack Wheat, Johnny Bench, Willie Stargell, Cool Papa Bell, and Smokey Joe Williams (a Negro Leagues legend whose American Indian heritage is even more speculative than Charleston's) — all Hall of Famers. And he has a significantly better claim to overall athletic accomplishment than any part–Native American star in other sports, such as NFL quarterback Jim Plunkett. In short, if Oscar Charleston was part American Indian, it makes his story all the more noteworthy. But as with his life as a whole, the assertion that Oscar had a multiethnic heritage has not attracted much notice.
* * *
At some point Tom Charleston made his way from South Carolina to Tennessee, where he met young Mary Thomas. Mary's father was allegedly employed in construction at Fisk University. This is believable enough in that Fisk, a black college founded in 1866, went through a major construction phase in the 1880s. Given that Tom is said to have worked as a construction worker for most of his life, this could explain how he came into contact with Mary's family.
Fisk's most famous alumnus, W. E. B. DuBois, arrived in 1885. DuBois studied Greek and Latin, but as Tom Charleston was illiterate, there is little chance that he swapped Juvenalian bon mots with DuBois as the latter strolled by his worksite. His illiteracy did not prevent Tom from marrying Mary, who could read and write, sometime in the latter half of 1886 or the first half of 1887, when he was between eighteen and twenty and she either fourteen or fifteen. Tom and Mary made their home in Nashville, and soon children began to arrive: Roy Stanley in January 1888; Berdie (later known as Berl) in March 1890; and Shedrick in February 1892.
Whatever else it may have offered, late-1800s life in Nashville was filled with frustrating economic and social realities for poor black families like the Charlestons. There were more opportunities in the North, at least in the larger cities. Industrial growth there meant jobs were plentiful. And while there was certainly no racial equality north of the Mason-Dixon Line, there was more social freedom, fewer occasions in which men and women of color were forced to swallow their pride, and fewer occasions on which they had stoically to endure humiliation. That aspect of northern life may have been particularly attractive to the Charlestons. They were not a clan naturally inclined to meekly accept the insults of others.
So in 1896 Tom and Mary picked up and moved, taking their three sons and joining the wave of black migrants from the South that was already washing over the industrial Midwest. The Indianapolis to which they came was a bustling, smoke-filled, rapidly growing place brimming with the spirit of boosterism and proud to be "the 100 Percent American City!" The town had witnessed a sixfold increase in its population between 1860 and 1890, when it reached 105,436. With migrants like the Charlestons arriving at a brisk pace, Indianapolis would again triple in size, to 314,000, by 1920.
Most of the Hoosier capital's new residents in these decades came from the countryside and nearby states, especially the upper South. A large number of those from the South were black. Although it was not exactly a point of pride for its boosters, Indianapolis was becoming an unusually black city; by 1910 it would contain a higher proportion of African American residents than any other urban center north of the Ohio River. The black population reached 15,931 in 1900 — nearly 10 percent of the city's total population. A decade later the number of black residents would increase to 21,816 (9.3 percent of the total population); by 1920 it would rise to 34,678, and by 1930 it would reach 43,967 (12 percent of the total population). By contrast, in 1910 blacks constituted just 1.9 percent of New York's population, 2 percent of Chicago's, and 1.2 percent of Detroit's. Indianapolis's African American community was served by a handful of black newspapers, including the Indianapolis Colored World, the Indianapolis Recorder, and the Indianapolis Freeman. Many subscribers lived in the city's two principal black neighborhoods. The first was concentrated on the near west side, north and south of Indiana Avenue, a thoroughfare that runs northwest from downtown and was the black community's main shopping and business district. Later, in the late 1910s and into the 1920s and '30s, Indiana Avenue would become a major venue for blues and jazz performers, its clubs helping to establish the city's strong musical reputation.
The second principal black neighborhood was clustered along Martindale Avenue (now known as Dr. Andrew J. Brown Avenue), a few miles northeast of downtown. This area was both an industrial and a residential center that in the decade or two before the turn of the century became increasingly populated by African Americans, their churches famously lining Martindale Avenue (then called Beeler Avenue; the road's name has a confusingly shifting history). The neighborhood's major employers included the Monon Railroad yards, the National Motor Vehicle Company, Eggles Field Lumberyard, the Indianapolis Gas Works, and Hoosier Sweat Collier Factory. In most years, most of the time, there was work here for black laborers.
Martindale was where the Charlestons rented their first home when they arrived from Tennessee in 1896. Their presence in Indiana was first mentioned in the newspapers after Oscar was born that October. The front page of the October 21 issue of the Indianapolis News was devoted to coverage of that November's presidential contenders, Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley. A few pages later, under "Birth Returns," it was reported that to Thomas and Mary Charleston, living at 287 Yandes, a boy had been born. No name was reported, but Thomas and Mary let it be known where their electoral sympathies lay when they made the Republican candidate's surname the middle name of their newborn child.
* * *
The Charleston family home on Yandes Street was a small frame dwelling. Across the street to the west was the Talge Mahogany Company Veneer and Sawmill. The Indianapolis Stove Company's large plant was just a few hundred feet to the east. The tracks of both the Monon Railroad and the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railway were fewer than two blocks away. It was not a quiet neighborhood.
The Charlestons didn't stay on Yandes long. They didn't stay anywhere long. The year 1898 found them a few blocks away on Martindale Avenue, just north of Twentieth Street, in a little one-story house hard by the massive, smoky Atlas Engine Works. The following year found them in another home, in the adjacent southern lot, on Twentieth Street itself, and in 1900 they were living in a rented two-story dwelling on tiny Guffin Street between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. All of these homes were in the Martindale neighborhood, but whether because of their need for ever more space, better living conditions, cheaper rent, or more understanding landlords, the Charlestons drifted constantly from one place to another.
As more children were born — a fifth boy, Casper, in 1898, followed finally by a girl, Clarissa, in 1901 — Tom Charleston supported the family as best he could by working in construction. There was plenty to be built. In 1888 Harper's Weekly had praised Indianapolis as a "solid, pushing city." The new State House and Union Station were both dedicated that year. High-rises like the ten-story Majestic Building (1896), the ten-story Indianapolis News Building (1897), and the eight-story L. S. Ayres Department Store (1905) shot up downtown. The iconic obelisk of the 248-foot State Soldiers and Sailors Monument was dedicated in 1902. Construction workers like Tom worked long days for low pay on worksites where their safety was not necessarily a priority, but at least they worked.
Industry was flourishing, too, at the turn of the century, as Indianapolis experienced a natural gas boom followed by the advent of the automobile industry. The city's manufacturing output doubled between 1900 and the advent of World War I, when Indianapolis ranked twentieth in the nation in the value of its manufactured goods. The good times meant not only jobs for blue-collar workers, but also pollution in increasingly prodigious amounts. Soot was beginning to fill the Indianapolis air. In the early 1900s dirty smoke would become so integral to the city's landscape that it served as a literary device in the novels written by Indianapolis native Booth Tarkington. Black soot streaks the city's statues and residents' curtains in The Magnificent Ambersons. At times it is so thick that it can be shoveled.
In Indianapolis, as elsewhere, smoke was regarded as a tangible symbol of progress — and Indianapolis had progress in spades. As one resident recalled, smoke fell from the sky so thickly that "if you rocked on the back porch all morning and then went in for lunch, when you went out again after lunch you had to clean the chair thoroughly again." The anti-smoke ordinances passed in the late 1890s and early 1900s provided little if any abatement of the nuisance.
The city's ubiquitous smoke signified an obsession with growth. In Tarkington's portrayal, turn-of-the-century Indianapolis was fairly frenzied by a "profound longing for size." "Year by year the longing increased until it became an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger! Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen." The factories and, just a bit later, the automobile were the primary instruments by which the "thing began to happen," argued Tarkington. Together they brought "Death [to] the God of Things as They Are." It was a period of profound optimism — and profound social dislocation.
* * *
The Charlestons' travails illustrate both the problems endemic to such upheaval and the spirit necessary to confront it. The years 1899–1903 were especially full of trouble. First, Tom was injured in a bicycle accident bad enough to make the papers. On May 14, 1899, he was cruising across the railroad tracks near the family home when the bike's front fork snapped in two, launching him headfirst onto the unforgiving ground. Onlookers called for help, and soon a doctor arrived. Tom suffered severe cuts all over his body, including his face, but thanks to the doctor's aid he was able to avoid the hospital.
Then Tom experienced trouble finding, or keeping, a job. By June 1900 he had been unemployed for at least the last six months. One wonders if his bicycle accident had anything to do with it. In an age that had only the skimpiest of social safety nets, the family must have found it difficult to survive.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Oscar Charleston"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Illustrations,
Preface,
Introduction: Craftsman,
1. Batboy, 1896–1912,
2. Hothead, 1912–1915,
3. Riser, 1916–1918,
4. Star, 1919–1922,
5. Manager, 1922–1926,
6. Leader, 1926–1931,
7. Champion, 1932–1938,
8. Scout, 1939–1947,
9. Legend, 1948–,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Appendix: Statistical Record,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
