The journalist’s dream is to find a story nobody else could find and tell it better than anyone else could tell it. With the publication of his book, The Negro Southern League, William J. Plott, whom we will call Bill for the rest of this column, has had his dream come true. And it took him only 40 years.
Bill’s white whale was black baseball, specifically the kind played by minor league teams in Southern towns such as Memphis, New Orleans, Montgomery and Birmingham. Though organized baseball was considered the national pastime in the first part of the 20th century, it was segregated. Black folk, not permitted to play alongside whites, had to settle for leagues of their own. They played the game at remarkably high levels, but their exploits were lost to posterity until 1971, when researchers like Bill started sifting through what few records remained.
Satchel Paige and Willie Mays became the most famous alumni of the Negro Southern League, but Bill wanted the world to know about no less worthy local heroes such as “Steel Arm” Dickey, “Mule” Suttles and “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Ultimately, it took a Herculean research effort to assemble the saga and a storyteller’s touch to frame it on a page.
Weld: How big a baseball fan were you when you were a kid?
Bill Plott: I wouldn’t say huge; I liked all sports. My real interest in baseball started in the late 1960s. I was working at The Anniston Star and I became intrigued with the information that Ty Cobb had started his career in Anniston. I started researching that and I became friends via correspondence with Lee Allen, who was the historian at the [Baseball] Hall of Fame in Cooperstown….I got interested in baseball, particularly the minor leagues, obscure things that nobody else really knew much about.
It was while I was still in Anniston in the spring of 1970 that Robert Peterson’s book, Only The Ball Was White, came out, and that was groundbreaking. Nobody knew anything much about the Negro leagues and the barnstorming teams and all of that, because they were, for the most part, 15 to 20 years in the past at that point. I got Peterson’s book and I was just intrigued with it. I looked through those rosters he had in there, and here are these references to the Birmingham Black Barons and the Montgomery Grey Sox. It just kinda started an ongoing research project that went on for 30 years or more.
Weld: You’ve been in journalism a long time. What was it about this particular story that was so difficult to let go?
BP: Well, I got intrigued with the idea of trying to compile the history of the Negro Southern League. There’d been no statistics of any kind published to speak of and not even final season standings very often. I love research, and I particularly love research in obscure areas. I mean, does the world really need another biography of Satchel Paige or Willie Mays at this point? I was intrigued with the obscurity of this particular area that nobody else had really researched or had any great interest in. That was the fun of it: putting these little pieces of the puzzle together over the years. It was just fun to me. I enjoyed doing the research.
Weld: How big a part of baseball history was the Negro Southern League?
BP: It was a huge part, inasmuch as it provided an initial starting point for Satchel Paige and Willie Mays and a couple of other people. Not to say that they wouldn’t have found their way in otherwise; they likely would have, but the Negro Southern League happened to be right place, right time.
Weld: Did your research reveal how big a part the Negro Southern League played in the community life of the cities where its games were played?
BP: Well, I think it was big in most of the places. At least it was big for a few months. Of course, it was very unstable. The league would frequently disintegrate before a season was completed. Yeah, you read the opening day planning—who was to throw out the first pitch, bringing in bands and all of this sort of thing. It was a big event for these communities, not unlike high school football is in small towns today.
Weld: You say you like research, but I can’t imagine how deep you had to dig to uncover the lost history of this league.
BP: It was difficult, because it was even less documented than the so-called Negro major leagues—the Negro National League, the Negro American League. My primary resource was newspapers, and there were some years where the coverage was extraordinarily good in some cities. It was really surprising to find box scores and things like that.
There were other years where there was virtually nothing. For example, I remember wasting a couple of hours in Owensboro, Kentucky, doing research, because Owensboro was in the Negro Southern League two times. There was virtually nothing. I think I found one or two newspaper articles for the entire two seasons. That was very frustrating. I didn’t even find the name of a player, as I recall.
One thing that struck me was that when you found an account of a game, in 99 percent of the times that I found these, the games were treated simply as baseball games. You knew that there was a lot of clowning going on. There was often a looseness to the way the black guys played the game, that led to things like the Bingo Long movie [The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings from 1976, directed, incidentally, by Birmingham’s own John Badham] that were just a lot of fun, but the games were treated by sports writers as simply very good baseball games. I found that interesting. Baseball was the national pastime at that time, so a baseball game was a baseball game, and it was treated with — I suppose “proper reverence” is a bit over the top, but, still, it was treated that way.
Weld: You augmented your newspaper research with live interviews. Is this right, that the first interview you did was with Bob Veal in 1983?
BP: In a roundabout sort of way. Sid Vance, an English professor at Montevallo, and I were real good friends while I was on the staff at Montevallo, and we developed a sports literature class, with its main focus on baseball. There were a lot of novels coming out at that time that dealt with different sports, and some good books of essays that came out in those years. Sid and I developed this class and team-taught it, and one of the assignments was that the students had to do an oral history. They had to interview a baseball player, we didn’t care at what level. It could be somebody recollecting Little League years, it didn’t make any difference to us. As sort of part of that particular assignment, we brought Piper Davis and Bob Veal down to Montevallo, and the kids had a wonderful afternoon with those two as they were telling stories.
Weld: Of all your live interviews, which one was the most satisfying?
BP: “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Without a doubt. I went down to Montgomery—they had a big card show down there—because he was going to be one of the guests, and I wanted to interview him because I was doing a “Where Are They Now?” column for The Birmingham News at the time. I figured Radcliffe would be a great one to interview, because he was the guy who would pitch the first game of a double-header and catch the second game. He got the nickname “Double Duty” from [legendary sports writer] Damon Runyon, who saw him play in New York in a double-header.
Radcliffe was something of a reprobate, I suppose you might say. He was 90-something years old when I interviewed him. We’re sitting in the lobby of this hotel in Montgomery, and some relatively attractive middle-aged lady gets out of the elevator and is walking across the lobby. Radcliffe says something like, “My goodness, I could go for her!” Ninety-something years old, and he’s still got it.
The guy was an extraordinary baseball player. He did pitch and catch, he did very well at both and he managed, too.
Weld: The way that the Negro Southern League operated suggests that there were some pretty outsized personalities in the front office, too.
BP: Yeah, there were. I’ve gotten back to working on a book about the Black Barons, which I still hope to get finished one of these days. There were indeed some colorful characters in the front office and in the ownership of the Black Barons. I have determined that one of the owners was apparently one of the most prominent numbers racket guys in the area at one time.
Weld: Were there ever white financial interests operating in the ownerships of the Negro Southern League?
BP: There were at times, yes. In fact, whites owned a couple of them outright at various times, but most of your owners were black businessmen, often in insurance or funeral homes or hotels. Those three businesses in particular showed up a number of times. They loved sports and they were interested in this and they figured it was a way to make money. But I don’t think the support was ever really what it should have been for most of the teams. It was almost like this was an afterthought, it seems like, to most of these businessmen.
Weld: Before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball did players at the level of the Negro Southern League dare to dream about getting to The Show?
BP: They certainly dreamed about it, and there were a number of barnstorming teams, major league all-star teams that would be put together by some player, that would travel and play against black teams. There were a lot of those games played, in the 1930s and 1940s especially.
If you get into the black press, particularly in the 1940s, you see columnists are writing about players deserving opportunity and this sort of thing. I think the Pittsburgh Pirates had a tryout for three players in the 1940s. No one expected it to go anywhere, but it was done, nevertheless. Yeah, I think the hope was always there. And the interesting thing is, the day that Jackie Robinson signed his contract was the day the death knell sounded for the Negro leagues.
Prior to that, baseball got good coverage in papers like The Chicago Defender and The Pittsburgh Courier, but after Jackie signs, and when he’s in Montreal [with the minor league Royals], the top of the sports page in almost every issue is about what Jackie did the previous week. You can understand why the black community embraced this the way they did, especially when he got to Brooklyn with the Dodgers, but the interest in the Negro leagues certainly began dropping within two or three years after that. Attendance falls off, coverage in the papers is poor—we don’t even have box scores for a couple of years of the Negro World Series in the late 1940s.
Weld: So how many research miles do you figure you put in on this book?
BP: Oh, Lord. I spent an awful lot of time eating dust from bound volumes of newspapers and straining my eyesight on microfilm. I had some really wonderful help from librarians, getting inter-library loans for me, particularly the last two or three years. A young lady named Kala Petric over in Columbiana at the Harrison Regional Library answered every request for me. I really appreciate that. But I did drive a lot of miles. I planned research trips to different cities, went to Atlanta and Chattanooga a number of times…and stayed in quite a few cheap motels to save money.
Weld: I hope you’re satisfied with what you accomplished with this book. It’s the rare book that becomes definitive as soon as it’s published, and yours is now the authoritative work on the history of the Negro Southern League.
BP: I’m very proud of it. You know, McFarland’s an academic publisher, every step of the way was wonderful, and they let me write anecdotally to a certain extent. I didn’t have to be pedantic about the thing.
Weld: No, this is a good read. It reminds me of the Bill Stern books I read when I was a kid: you get the facts and information you want, but you also get the human dimensions of players.
BP: Well, that’s really what I wanted, and also to be able to publish the yearly rosters of these teams. That ate up a lot of pages. I did not know how McFarland would react to that, but fortunately, the guy I worked with from the beginning thought that was extremely important.
Weld: I think so, too, because otherwise these names vanish from history. You get Satchel and Willie and the famous guys, but the guys who were the underpinnings of the league lose all recognition without this book.
BP: But even a lot of the famous guys — if you go to baseballreference.com or some of these web pages, and you call up these guys’ names, you will see blank years. Now, all of a sudden, some of those years have been filled in with this book, because I found where they were in 1931 or some such, when nothing had shown up in their record. I’m proud of that, and I do think it also will provide a lot of black families with a historical footnote to their own family information that was not available to them before.
Weld: Well, better get ready for your own slot in Cooperstown, because this is a great piece of baseball work that you’ve done here.
BP: I appreciate that, but I’m just satisfied to have gotten it done. It’s a great sense of accomplishment.
The Negro Southern League: A Baseball History 1920-1951 is available online at www.mcfarland.com, by phone at 800-253-2187 or wherever you shop for authoritative works of baseball lore.