I’ve hemmed and hawed about trying to monetize my blog for a long time. I’ve worried that doing so might cheapen it, because it truly has been a labor of love for, wow, a dozen years. I’m finally deciding to open it to voluntary donations. If you want to give a couple bucks, I’d be grateful, but if not, it’s no problem at all. I’ll keep doing this thing for the foreseeable future, whether it makes me money or not. I love it too much. What are your thoughts on opening this up to donations? Does it lessen what I’m doing?

The recent Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference in Louisville concluded informally with, as we say here in New Orleans, a lagniappe of baseball history and paying of respects to a legendary local Negro Leaguer who many believe belongs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

About 15 or so people gathered at Louisville Cemetery on Sunday, Aug. 10, to dedicate a new tombstone on the grave of Sammy T. Hughes, one of the best, most well rounded second basemen in Black baseball in the 1930s and ’40s.

The headstone was the product of SABR’s Pee Wee Reese Louisville Chapter, said chapter president Chris Betsch. Discussion of such a project began a couple years ago, Betsch said, but the effort really picked up steam when the Louisville Chapter learned that it would host the 2025 Malloy conference.

The small gathering at Hughes’ grave began with SABR Negro Leagues Committee chair Leslie Heaphy reading a proclamation from the City of Louisville declaring Aug. 10 as Sammy T. Hughes Day in the city.

Betsch, during brief comments to those gathered at the cemetery that day, then said he first learned about Hughes a few years ago, when a similar effort resulted in a new headstone being placed at the grave of another Louisville Negro Leagues great, Felton Snow, in Eastern Cemetery.

Betsch said Hughes was one of the top three keystone sackers in Black baseball history, and, as such, deserves to be inducted in Cooperstown.

“Maybe someday we can rectify that,” he said.

He added that if Hughes had had such a beautiful new headstone years ago — as well as long deserved recognition from baseball and its fans — Hughes might have received the call from the Hall of Fame already.

“If he had this year’s back,” Betsch said, “maybe Louisville would be honoring Hall of Famer Sammy Hughes. You never know.”

Unfortunately, he added, “[h]e died at a time when a lot of Negro Leaguers were being forgotten.”

Hughes died on Aug. 9, 1981, in Los Angeles at the age of 70. He began his semipro baseball career in his teens on local Louisville teams in the late 1920s before becoming a major leaguer in 1930 when the Louisville Black Caps joined the Negro National League.

He eventually landed with the NNL’s Nashville Elite Giants and established himself as a star second baseman with the franchise for the next decade as the team moved to Columbus, then Washington, then, finally, Baltimore in 1938.

Hughes helped the Elites with the second Negro National League pennant in 1939, over time playing with several other sterling handball heroes on the Elites like Snow, Roy Campanella, Biz Mackey, Leon Day, Joe Black and Jim Gilliam, the last of whom Hughes tutored at second base before Gilliam went on to star for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers. Sammy also ended up being voted to eight East-West All-Star Classics and played in five of them.

Hughes also starred for several all-star exhibition teams over his career, including an aggregation of the some of the best players in Black baseball that crushed the competition and won the title in the prestigious Denver Post Tournament in 1936.

Sammy also shined in other leagues across North America, including the trailblazing California Winter League and the upstart Mexican League. But perhaps Hughes reached the most recognition in his lifetime in 1942, when he was one of three Negro Leaguers — the others were pitcher Dave Barnhill and Baltimore teammate Campanella — invited to a tryout with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

At the time, Hughes was viewed as solid candidate to crack the color line. Norfolk New Journal and Guide sports columnist Lem Graves Jr. wrote that Hughes “is rated as one of the best in the business,” adding that the second baseman “gets our stamp of approval for this opening try.” The Cleveland Call & Post likewise stated that “Hughes is brilliant at his fielding position and is good with the stick as well.”

Unfortunately, and also perhaps unsurprisingly, the tryout never happened, meaning Hughes came agonizingly close to becoming the one who would integrate Organized Baseball, several years before Jackie Robinson did.

After a two-year stint in the Army during World War II, Hughes, despite trying to restart his baseball career, never played at his peak level again, retiring after the 1946 season and settling in Los Angeles for his later years.

Although never receiving adequate due for his baseball greatness during his lifetime, in the years since Hughes has gradually been recognized more and more as the Negro Leagues have gained their own long-overdue recognition and honors.

In his autobiography, “20 Years Too Soon,” longtime Negro Leagues catcher Quincy Trouppe named Hughes as one of the Blackball players who could have made the Majors if given the chance. Trouppe also listed Hughes as a utility infielder on Trouppe’s “Number One All-Time Team.” (George Scales was the assigned second baseman on Trouppe’s team.)

In a 1978 newspaper article, groundbreaking author John Holway listed Hughes as one of the 10 Negro Leaguers “most eligible” for induction into the NBHOF, writing that Hughes was “one of two top second basemen in blackball annals — Campanella says the best.” (Holway also interviewed Hughes for the former’s most influential books, “Black Giants.”)

The Baltimore Sun, in a retrospective of that city’s connections to and involvement in the Negro Leagues, stated this about Hughes: “The premier second baseman in the Negro Leagues was a solid contact hitter and magnificent fielder.”

I think a lot of people’s feelings about Hughes can be summed up by writer and artist Gary Cieradkowski, who wrote an excellent biography of Sammy T. at his Web site, in which Gary powerfully advocates for Hughes’ inclusion in the Hall.

“Every time the Hall of Fame convenes one of their Negro League committees,” Cieradkowski wrote in April 2024, “Sammy T. Hughes’ name makes the conversation, but he’s always pushed aside for players of seemingly lesser talent who played for better-known teams or had friends among the powers-that-be. Someday the Elites’ second baseman may get the recognition he deserves, but until then, Cooperstown is not complete because Sammy T. ain’t in there.”

I’ve been delaying this post to account for all the most recent progress made on this project, but I think I can finally provide a substantive update on the effort to place a new marker at the grave of New Orleans athletic legend and Chicago American Giant John Bissant.

It’s going to happen.

We have all the key players in step with the project.

Jeremy Krock, founder and president of the famed Negro Leagues Baseball Grave Marker Project, says that once the group has funding open up – probably after the start of the New Year – the Bissant grave will be one of the markers slated by the NLBGMP for 2026.

Charisse DeLois Smith, John’s granddaughter, has given her support and help on the part of Bissant’s family.

And Jessica Strawn, Acting Cemeteries Superintendent at the City of New Orleans’ Cemetery Division, has connected with the team to provide information that will help move the project along and to offer moral support for the grave marker effort. She also said City staffers can assist in placing the new marker once it’s ready.

John Bissant is buried in Carrollton Cemetery No. 1, in the city’s Carrollton neighborhood near Tulane University. He’s interred in the same grave as two other family members, his wife Delores and his daughter Barbara.

(For earlier posts about Bissant, his grave and Carrollton Cemetery, check out this, this and this.)

Several years ago I pitched the idea of a grave marker for Bissant to Jeremy, and, after some discussions, he decided to climb on board with the project. There’s never been an NLBGMP marker placed in or near New Orleans, I wanted to generate more recognition for New Orleans Black baseball, and Jeremy said he’d been thinking about getting an effort going in the South. It all dovetailed.

(Although there’s never been an NLBGMP marker placed in this region, there has been a similar project taking place here. In 2013, a group effort helped place one on the grave of Wesley Barrow in the City of Gretna, just across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans.)

Meanwhile, I was able to connect with Charisse to learn more about John Bissant, and to raise the possibility of placing a new marker at her grandfather’s final resting place. As it turned out, she and her family had been working independently to honor John’s memory and get his name out into the public, including producing amazingly cool Bissant jerseys.

Getting the City of New Orleans on board was the most challenging venture. After months and months of trying to contact anyone at the Cemeteries Division to frustratingly no avail, I used my connections as a news reporter for The Louisiana Weekly, I emailed City Councilman Joe Giarrusso, whose Council district includes Carrollton Cemetery (it also includes my neighborhood, coincidentally), and whom I’d interviewed a few times for news stories for The Louisiana Weekly.

That unclogged the pipeline, and a City grounds employee called me within a couple days, which set in motion a process that led to Jessica emailing me and offering her and the City’s full help early this year.

Some more email correspondence, a phone call and Zoom session or so, and we scheduled and attended a group meeting in front of John’s grave in Carrollton Cemetery on April 2 of this year. We all introduced ourselves to each other, then touched base about what was left to be done to make a new marker a reality. (Jeremy, who lives in Peoria, Ill., obviously wasn’t able to attend, but I emailed him with details of what happened at the gathering.)

The biggest sticking point was the fact that the grave included two other people besides John, but a little hashing it out seems to have solved the issue – Jeremy and I will work on getting the marker for John Bissant produced (me doing a draft of the text, him securing funding), and Charisse said she and her family would investigate a smaller marker or something similar acknowledging her other two family members.

It must be noted that a tombstone does already stand at the grave, but it’s been so exposed to the elements and worn down by the weather that the text on it is completely obscured and illegible.

And that’s basically where things stand at this point. I’m working on the text, Charisse is looking into the other stone, Jeremy is waiting for funds to free up, and Jessica is coordinating on the City’s end and offering to assist whenever possible. I’m hoping that when we can get the marker installed, we might be able to do an unveiling or dedication event at the grave.

I actually spoke with Jeremy a couple weekends ago, when we both attended SABR’s Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference, which was held this year in Louisville. He and I were able to touch base in person and coordinate a bit on what the next steps are. Plus, it was just really good to see him.

Plus, last month I attended the regular meeting of the Schott-Pelican New Orleans chapter of SABR, where I updated attendees about the Bissant grave project, and I made a pitch for any assistance or support the chapter wanted to provide, including possible additional funding. (The chapter recently received a $500 grant from SABR headquarters, and for the last few local meetings, we’ve talked about how we can recognize and honor Black baseball in New Orleans, including getting a historical marker placed somewhere in the city. But hopefully more on that later.)

Clarence Gordon is dedicated to a singular goal.

“My passion is to try to hold baseball accountable, and to particularly hold Major League Baseball accountable,” Gordon said Saturday at the 25th annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference in Louisville, “for why there aren’t more African-American kids in the sport.”

Gordon was attending his second Malloy conference after last year’s in Cooperstown, and on Saturday, he acted as emcee for the slate of presentations in the afternoon. However, he was soon called to do even more – because one scheduled presenter had to cancel at the last minute, Gordon was asked to pinch hit and fill in the vacant time slot.

He crushed it.

Using swift improvisation skills, he talked about his time as an educator and a youth baseball coach and how he’s seen a continuous dearth of diversity in the national pastime, beginning with youth teams and Little League and running right up through Major League Baseball.

He noted that on Opening Day 2025, only 6.2 percent of MLB rosters consisted of American-born Black players. He said that after Organized Baseball gradually increased in diversity post-1946, a process that peaked on Sept. 1, 1971, when the Pittsburgh Pirates fielded an all-players-of-color lineup in a game.

However, in recent decades, that progress has gradually reversed to the point that aspiring young, Black baseball players have fewer and fewer role models in the big leagues.

“That [gradual change] also happens when [diversity] is taken away,” he said. “You take a little, then you take a little more, you take a little more …”

The key to stopping that gradual decrease is access to the best learning, training and playing opportunities on the youth level – particularly the elite, regional travel teams that attract pro scouts and coaches.

And that access usually only comes with resources – particularly money. Money to be able to afford all the equipment, the travel expenses, the membership fees and the registration costs that come with those elite programs.

“If you don’t have any resources [to travel],” Gordon said, “you won’t be seen by a scout or by a college coach.

“The key word,” he added, “is access.”

Gordon cited the Cincinnati-area travel team he coached after the Covid pandemic. He said that because there were no other such teams within a 300-mile radius of Cincinnati, the squad turned out to become the best he’s ever coached and one of the best in the Cincy area in general.

He said the team was also one of the most diverse teams he’s ever piloted, with a roughly 50-50 split between white players and players of color, even though the costs of maintaining the team was unbelievably expensive – one road trip cost $10,000 just for lodging, reflecting the hurdles players, their families and their supporters must clear.

For a lot of aspiring Black players, such expenses are impossible to meet.

“The social and economic restrictions are extremely prevalent in baseball,” he said. 

Gordon added: “Baseball has become a country club sport.”

The result is that many Black kids, especially those from urban areas, just can’t get the exposure and training to build any potential career in baseball.

“If you don’t put them in these opportunities and give them these experiences,” Gordon said, “they’re not going to get the access they need.”

He said that creates a reality that can’t be denied.

There’s still a racialization in baseball. We all know it’s true.

Clarence Gordon

“There’s still a racialization in baseball,” Gordon said. “We all know it’s true.”

In addition, many young players of color often have their enthusiasm for the sport crushed by coaches who still hold stereotypes about Black players. For example, a young kid might love playing a heady position like shortstop, but their coach tells them to switch positions, still believing that Black players are best in supposedly less brainy, more athletic-ability-based spots on the field.

“That joy gets killed,” he said. “You always get moved from shortstop to the outfield, and you’re not having fun anymore. You lose that joy.”

Part of the fix for these challenges in increasing diversity in baseball is finding ways to inspire youth of color to pursue baseball and infuse them with faith in themselves.

That’s where the Negro Leagues can come in, Gordon said. By learning about the Negro Leagues and all the talented, legendary players who filled their ranks, African-American kids can see that players who look like them can, in fact, succeed in baseball. That gives them the faith and ambition needed to succeed themselves.

“We need to get the information to them,” he said.

He added, “We should retain them by sharing our knowledge, telling our stories, allow them to see their heroes.”

Moreover, spreading knowledge of the Negro Leagues to adults – from parents to coaches to funding donors of all colors and ethnic backgrounds – those adults can see that enthusiasm for and talent in the Black community can exist and and, as a result, be encouraged to invest their own time and financial contributions.

“We need to have the people to make these changes happen,” he said.

So far, the 2025 Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference being held in Louisville has knocked it out of the park, as it were, and I’m planning on writing/posting more over the next week or so, but I wanted to highlight one special happening in particular right now …

Yesterday (Saturday, Aug. 8), the slate of presentations and panels concluded with a visit from a surprise guest — former MLB star outfielder (and oughta-be Hall of Famer) Kenny Lofton, who helped put together and produce a fantastic documentary, “I Forgot to Tell You: The Story of the Cleveland Buckeyes,” which was screened for us attendees in the afternoon, followed by a four-person discussion panel.

The quartet of panelists included Lofton; Evelyn Pollard-Gregory, the director of the documentary; and Cleveland baseball historians Vince Guerrieri and Wayne Pearsall, whose lively and quite informative presentation on the history of the Buckeyes, who were members of the Negro American League during the 1940s and won the 1945 Negro World Series, preceded the screening and panel.

While all four panelists offered excellent thoughts and comments — and I hope to eventually post a detailed follow-up interview with Pollard-Gregory about the film — Lofton was the star of the session, not just because he was a former baseball All-Star, but also because his input and insights were captivating and quite colorful.

One of the main thrusts of his comments during the panel was his, Pollard-Gregory’s and other filmmakers’ primary goal with the documentary — at a time when the notions of diversity, equality and justice are being attacked by reactionary politicians, educators and governmental operatives across the country, it has become more important than ever to keep history, and African-American history specially, explored and alive.

“For me, knowing what’s going on in society right now, I didn’t want this history to be forgotten,” he said. “I didn’t want the younger generations to forget it.”

That’s why he wanted to help Pollard-Gregory and the rest of the filmmakers assemble “The Story of the Cleveland Buckeyes.” Once he learned of the documentary and saw the outstanding work of Pollard-Gregory and others, he jumped right in through his own film production company, FilmPool, Inc.

“I told them, ‘You really have something here, but it could be a lot better,’” Lofton said.

Lofton said the process of editing down all the phenomenal and selecting the best content for the film was a long, exhausting but ultimately rewarding experience.

“I sat there for hours trying to figure out what stuff I could use in this project,” he said. “I ended up putting together this great product.”

Lofton, who himself played for the Cleveland Indians (now the Guardians) for about 11 and a half years total, added that the documentary “has to flow. There was a little bit of extra stuff we had to do to get it to flow.”

Lofton said it’s especially important to do all we can to preserve and honor the fight for diversity, justice and equality that got us to this point. He said that must happen even with current threats – both governmental and corporate – to that process occurring now.

Passing the flame to youth, he said, is a top priority.

“We’re trying to find ways to get that process to the kids,” Lofton said.

He added: “Once we do something, it has to be successful. We can’t do it just to do it.”

Exactly 100 years ago today – Aug. 1, 1925 – a baseball team owner was lynched by two deputy constables in St. Louis County, Mo., when a racism-fueled traffic stop ended with a beating and fatal shooting of a Black man on his way to one of his team’s games.

And make no mistake about the way Fred Goree died that night – it was cold-blooded murder at the hands of St. Louis County deputies Clarence E. Bennett and Charles J. Schuchman, both of whom escaped their crime without any legal or service consequence.

I previously blogged about Goree’s death here and here, but my reporting in those posts contained inaccuracies and left out some key pieces of the picture of Fred Goree’s life and death. I tried to be as accurate and factual as I could given the resources and information I had at that time, but the picture I painted was incomplete and not in focus.

I also wasn’t able to speak with or interview any of Fred Goree’s family members, which was absolutely detrimental to my blog posts.

An example: I previously reported that Goree was about 24 and a half years old when he was killed, but that was inaccurate – he was actually 33. I based my first age estimate on his death certificate, which lists his date of birth as Jan. 6, 1901 when it was actually 1892. To make matters more confusing, his World War I draft card lists his DOB as Jan. 1, 1891.

A much fuller, more accurate and more comprehensive article about that tragic night a century ago can be found here. It includes interviews with two of Goree’s granddaughters, which obviously provides it with much richer details and more complete accuracy, tone and meaning.

It also places Goree’s death into a larger historical context, such as his family’s move north from small-town Louisiana to the metropolis of Chicago as part of the Great Migration; the constant, oppressive threat of violence and death facing African Americans at the time; and the biased, one-sided way the contemporaneous mainstream media of the day painted such events as Goree’s murder with a coat of whitewash and quite often portrayed Black residents in a pervasive, insidious way.

It’s an excellent article, but a good chunk of it is dedicated to describing and explaining many of the basics of Negro Leagues history – something that many readers of this blog already know pretty well.

The article also does leave a few questions and mysteries left unanswered and unsolved. For example, the identity of the deputy county constable who assisted Bennett in killing Goree is not revealed, and the fates of these two law enforcement officers following the murder remain unexplored. In addition, the article lacks any details about Goree’s baseball team, the Chicago Independent Giants, for which little has been discovered in the near-decade since the story’s publishing; and only St. Louis-area media outlets are cited by the writer.

In the next weeks and months, I’m going to try to provide a little more clarity to such questions in periodic posts about Fred Goree and the story of his brief life and brutal, tragic death. I’m also hoping to interview one or more of Fred Goree’s descendants this time around.

****************

While I’m hoping to go into more detail about these soon, there are a few things that I’ve found that I hope can add to the Fred Goree story.

The first is the identity of the second St. Louis deputy constable who joined the primary perpetrator, Clarence Bennett, whose role in the murder was well reported and known at the time, as was his galling exoneration by an all-white grand jury that took just three minutes to officially slander Fred Goree’s name and paint Bennett as a hero acting in self-defense.

Articles about the incident both at the time and in more recent years only referred to the second officer’s last name, if he was named or identified at all. But I was able to uncover his name – Charles J. Schuchman (or Schuchmann), who was apparently a mere 17 years and 11 months old at the time of the murder.

In addition to his youth, Schuchman himself died in a very sudden, violent way – according to his death certificate, he was just 21 when he died from a gunshot wound to the head on Oct. 3, 1928 in what the coroner ruled an “unavoidable accident.” Below that cause of death, the word “Inquest” is scribbled on the document.

I’ve been unable to find any information about Schuchman’s death in the newspapers of the time, aside from a small obituary in the “deaths” section that stated that he died “suddenly.”

But Schuchman wasn’t the only one of the homicidal pair to meet with bloody violence in the years after they killed Fred Goree – Bennett himself also ended up meeting the business end of a bullet.

Less than a year after Goree’s killing, in May 1926, was shot in the face, with two fragments of the bullet lodging in his jaw, after breaking up what was reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a robbery. 

Unlike Schuchman, however, Bennett survived his encounter with violence and, in fact, went on to a lengthy, successful career in law enforcement and criminal justice before passing away in Ruskin, Fla., in 1971 at the age of 76.

I also found several references in contemporaneous media of what could of what could be Fred Goree’s baseball team, whose barnstorming slate led him to drive from his home in Chicago to St. Louis County that day and night.

In the spring of 1925, a small handful of newspapers referred to one or more semipro teams as the Chicago Independents or the Independent Giants. The May 3, 1925, issue of The Chicago Tribune lists an upcoming game in something called “Bob Figg’s League” between the Chicago Independents and a team named the Mason Parks in Evanston, Ill.

Then, on May 17, the Tribune, in its listing of slated semipro games, refers to a contest between the Independent Giants and the Cragens, while in mid-June The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., reported on a clash between the hometown team and the Chicago Independents that was won by the townies, 8-2. The Herald article included this description:

“The Chicago club lived up to their name when practicing before game time, displaying some nifty and fast playing acting independent as five at the same time. It sure looked as if the Heights boys were in for a beating, but as the game started our boys were there with the smoke, which changed the opinion of some three hundred fans who turned out to witness the combat.”

The paragraph seems to describe the Independents performing some quick trickery with the ball before the contest started, perhaps shadow ball, something Black teams of the day often undertook at games in order to draw in and entertain fans.

Also in mid-June 1925, The Bremen Enquirer of Bremen, Ind., reported that a team called the Chicago Independents will play a local team from South Bend, Ind.

Now, granted, none of that was major news; it was all just quick jottings, a line or three about semipro teams here and there. In addition, none of the newspapers explicitly stated that the Chicago Independents or Independent Giants were African-American teams. But the brief mentions at least provide a couple small leads in the quest for information.

Finally, while the Aug. 7, 1925, edition of The St. Louis Argus, an African-American newspaper from that city, contained a more detailed and more graphic article on Goree’s murder, the nation’s leading Black publication, The Chicago Defender, published an article about the incident as well on Aug. 8.

The Defender story noted that Goree and his team had been motoring from their home base in the Windy City to the St. Louis area to play a local team from St. Charles, Mo., a St. Louis suburb. However, the paper stated, one of the team’s cars had broken down on the way in Effingham, Ill., forcing Goree to turn his new Buick around and return to Effingham to rendezvous with his stranded team members.

It was on that back-tracking venture that Goree and the other occupants of his vehicle were followed and pulled over for what Bennett said was “speeding,” a development that led to the lynching.

The Defender article also named the two passengers in Goree’s car at the time – 22-year-old Pullman car-washer Frenchy Henry of Chicago, and Harry Gaulden of St. Charles.

For now, I’ll leave things here, with hopefully more to come gradually in a while. With any luck, I’ll be able to do a more thorough and accurate job this time. Fred Goree and his memory deserve nothing less.

Update, July 18, 2025: Since first posting this a few days ago, I’ve gathered a lot more information — namely, game coverage and box scores — that fills in Alexander Albritton’s baseball career significantly. A more detailed explanation can be found later in this post, and I plan on eventually doing an additional, separate post that includes a bunch of newly gathered stuff about Albritton, the baseball player. For now, read on …

To follow up on my previous post updating the tale of Negro Leagues pitcher Alexander Albritton, who was beaten to death at a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia in 1940, something I wrote about in these previous blog posts here and here, and in this article on philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper’s Web site. (Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall, though.)

This second installment gets back to basics a bit, shall we say, and away from depressing ghost stories by looking at Albritton’s actual baseball career and his performance on the field before he left the game.

Albritton was born in February of either 1894, 1896 or 1897 (depending on the source), making him in his early- to mid-20s in the first coverage of his playing career that I found.

That would be in May 1918, when Albritton took the mound for the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City against the 349th field artillery team from nearby Camp Dix. The Giants nipped the Army team, 6-5, and Alexander whiffed four and walked six. At the time, the Bacharachs were a top-flight independent team based in Atlantic City, N.J.

But by August of that season, Albritton had skipped to the Black Sox of Camden, N.J., for whom he hurled a two-hit gem over a team from Chester, Pa., in a 7-2 victory. The Camden Courier-Post stated that the Chesters “were simply baffled at the bat by pitcher Albritton,” who produced some “clever twirling.”

However, a couple months later, Albritton was suiting up for another independent, largely barnstorming aggregation, the Pennsylvania Giants, who voyaged to Reading, Pa., where they played a local club, the Kaufmann Professionals, a team representing a furniture store, in a pair of games. Both contests actually went into extra innings, with the teams splitting them.

(The Pennsylvania Giants seem to be completely distinct from the earlier, juggernaut Philadelphia Giants, an independent professional team that was loaded with Hall of Famers and should-be HOFers.)

For the 1920 season, Albritton caught on with a team called the Pittsburgh Stars – likely the Pittsburgh Colored Stars of Buffalo, N.Y. – who were led by the great, ageless Grant Johnson, a turn-of-the-century star infielder who by then was pushing 50 (and who needs to be inducted in Cooperstown, like, yesterday). Albritton also apparently played left field for the Stars, but by the end of the season, Albritton was back with the Pennsylvania Giants, where he also suited up at first base on occasion.

It looks like Alexander started the ’21 campaign signed to the Buffalo club again, but he was lured away to the national capitol by the Washington Braves, who, according to contemporaneous reports, played in something called the Colored Professional Baseball League. I’ve never heard of a league in the 1920s with that precise name, and I doubt the media meant the first Negro National League, then in its second season.

Anyway, with the Braves, Albritton showed the talent that secured him a place in professional Black baseball. In late April, he hurled a three-hit, nine-strikeout, shutout gem to beat a team called the Brooklyn Slides, 4-0; a few weeks later, the Braves’ shoddy fielding let down Albritton, who held the Buffalo Stars (his previous team) to four hits in Washington’s 2-1 loss.

Fortune soon turned in Albritton’s favor. On May 18, 1921, he engaged in a pitchers’ duel with Hilldale’s Phil Cockrell before faltering in the later innings and suffering a 7-2 loss to the Darbyites.

At the time, the Philadelphia-based, then-independent Hilldale Club was one of the best teams in the country, and they apparently liked what they saw in Alexander Albritton, because 10 days after his hard-fought loss to the Darbys, he was on the mound, albeit for less than an inning, for Hilldale in its 10-9 triumph over the Norfolk Giants.

Two days after that, Albritton earned the starting nod on the hill for Hilldale in the front end of a doubleheader against Norfolk; Albritton claimed a 7-4 victory, which the Darbyites followed up with an 11-4 win in the second game.

He seems to have stayed with the Hilldales throughout the rest of the 1921 season, putting forth performances plagued by inconsistency. At times, he showed flashes of brilliance at times, such as his “airtight pitching” in a 2-0 blanking of a company team in Philly, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

But at other times, his pitching was certainly less-than-stellar, like when he got drubbed by a team called the Fleisher Yarners in Bristol, Pa. The Lancaster News-Journal summed it up nicely: “The ‘Yarners’ took a liking to Albritton’s offerings and knocked him out of the box in the first.” (Fleisher scored five times in the opening frame.)

In 1922, Albritton jumped to the Baltimore Black Sox, but I could only find one game in which he played – a late-August encounter with a local team, Public Service, in Camden, N.J., in which Albritton hurled a complete-game, seven-hit victory over the “Postscripts,” according to the Camden Courier-Post.

I could find no more mention of Albritton in the press until the following March, when the Courier Post reported that he had signed again with the Camden Black Sox. The newspaper asserted that Alexander would be the ace of the pitching staff.

However, the next time Albritton pops up is in May 1923, when he’s pitching for the Washington Potomacs, an independent team led by none other than future National Baseball Hall of Famer Ben Taylor.

With the Potomacs, Albritton pitched to a 4-4, darkness-ended tie with the Richmond Giants on May 18. Then, during a series of games with the great Harrisburg Giants, who at the time were also an independent club, one that included legendary outfielders and should-be Hall of Famers Rap Dixon and Fats Jenkins. (One year later, when the Giants entered the new Eastern Colored League, Dixon and Jenkins were joined in the outer garden by Oscar Charleston, many folks’ – yours truly included – choice for baseball GOAT of any era, league or color. That trio also ranks among the great outfields of all time – the greatest, according to some.)

One of the Washington-Harrisburg clashes came on Independence Day in D.C., with a doubleheader. Albritton pitched the first contest and got tagged with the 5-2 loss.

For the next five weeks or so – into late August – the Potomacs seemed to have played largely teams far from major-league level, such as company squads and town/city clubs. And in general, Alexander gave a good account of himself. Against a Philadelphia department store team on July 21, Albritton “was in wonderful form and did not yield a hit until … the seventh,” stated the Philadelphia Inquirer of his 3-0 victory; in Mount Holly, N.J., against a town team, Albritton “tightened up in the pinches” in posting another 3-0 W, according to the Pittsburgh Courier.

The Seamheads database paints a bit of a different picture, however. The Web site has the Potomacs going 14-20, with Albritton posting a record of 0-4, with a staggering 8.61 ERA, only five strikeouts and a horrendous WHIP of 1.783.

(If media reports are to be believed, though, the situation got a little better later on in the season, with the Aug. 25 Norfolk Journal and Guide, in describing the “rejuvenated” Potomacs, called Albritton “one of the leading pitchers in the East.” The Washington Evening-Star, one day later, asserted that “the local club has one of the best pitching corps in the colored league.”)

But Albritton then seemingly jumped back to the Baltimore Black Sox, because on Sept. 9 he came on in relief in the ninth to clinch the 12-8 triumph over the New York Lincoln Giants in the Big Apple. That Lincoln Giants club was absolutely loaded, with pitcher-manager and eventual Hall of Famer Cyclone Joe Williams (who got tagged with the loss in that 12-8 game), plus three guys who should be in the Hall in Oliver Marcell, George Scales and Spot Poles. (It also had star pitchers Bill Holland, Sam Streeter and Dave Brown.)

The 1924 baseball campaign seems to have started with a bit of equivocation for Alexander Albritton. Multiple media reports in April ’24 stated or hinted that he was uncertain with whom he’d sign – possibly with the Philadelphia Giants, possibly re-signing with the Potomacs, maybe with the Newark American Giants.

Pittsburgh Courier columnist Rollo Wilson, for example, wrote in early April that “Albritton … is undecided where he will twirl this summer. He is considering an offer to go up into New York state, he says.” But then, less than a week later, a newswire service reported that Albritton had committed to pitch for the Newark American Giants “but as yet has not sent in his signed contract.”

He landed with none of those. Instead, in 1924 Albritton initially suited up for the Brooklyn Cuban Giants, apparently a new, independent team that was distinct from the Brooklyn Royal Giants of the ECL. He pitched for them in a 2-0, 14-inning win over the Charleston Giants, as well as a 19-6 triumph over the Wilmington Professionals. Both games took place in May.

(Interestingly, on May 24, 1924, the Philadelphia Tribune asserted that Albritton “is the pitching ace of the Giants” and called him a “spit ball artist.” I’d never seen him reported as a spitball pitcher before I found the Philly Tribune article in question.)

However, he once again jumped ship and apparently left the Brooklyn club for a team called the Pittsburgh Giants; on June 22, he pitched for his new team in their 11-1 drubbing at the hands of the General Tire company team in Akron, Ohio. 

And a month later, Albritton was back with the Washington Potomacs, who were again piloted by Ben Taylor. There was a key difference in the setting, though – in 1924, the Potomacs were no longer an independent team, but instead members of Ed Bolden’s Eastern Colored League, one of the seven Negro Leagues now officially recognized as major leagues. That would seemingly make Alexander Albritton an actual major league baseball player. But we shall see.

And a month later, Albritton was back with the Washington Potomacs, who were again piloted by Ben Taylor. There was a key difference in the setting, though – in 1924, the Potomacs were no longer an independent team, but instead members of Ed Bolden’s Eastern Colored League, one of the seven Negro Leagues now officially recognized as major leagues. That would seemingly make Alexander Albritton an actual major league baseball player. But we shall see.

In practical terms, Albritton was back in action under a skipper he knew and hopefully was used to. The Courier’s Wilson wrote on July 19, quizzically, that Taylor plucked the battery of Albritton and catcher Willie Creek from the Homestead Grays, who at that point had yet to become the major-league powerhouse they were in the 1930s and ’40s. In 1924, the Grays were still growing and gestating toward their golden era. However, I’ve found no proof, i.e. game coverage or printed game box scores, of Albritton actually suiting up for Homestead. Anyhoo, Albritton appears to have finished the 1924 campaign with the Potomacs.

For the following season, 1925, Albritton reportedly began the season with the Potomacs. In early February, Rollo Wilson penned that in ’24, “Albritton proved one of the steadiest men of the [pitching] staff.”

Returning Washington manager Taylor, in an article in the Baltimore Afro-American attributed to himself, acknowledged that the Potomacs had been a mediocre venture on the diamond during the previous two seasons and would need significant adjustiments and additions for the ’25 season to be any better than the club’s previous couple summers. Taylor noted that he first inked Albritton to the Potomacs in 1923 and that the Philly lad would be back in 1925.

The ’25 season, though, didn’t work out as planned for the Washington Potomacs – by June, they’d abandoned the nation’s capital and moved to Wilmington, Del. But Albritton, along with the rest of the Potomacs, soldiered on, and on June 8 he earned a 7-6 victory over the Mahanoy City (Pa.) Blue Birds, despite inconsistency on the mound.

“‘Twas a game of good baseball, bad baseball, good pitching, bad pitching, and much heavy hitting …,” reported the Mahanoy City Record American.

“Neither Albritton nor (Blue Birds pitcher) Knetzer looked any too steady out on the hill,” the newspaper added, “each allowing five passes in addition to the heavy and sincere clubbing. Both were in to stay the limit, however, and both worked hard.”

Actually, Albritton was the article’s lead, starting with the first paragraph. Unfortunately, the report was dotted with some verbiage that is now woefully outdated and offensive. (That’s in addition to the bizarre word salad and questionable grammar.) Stated the initial paragraph:

“Alexander Albritton, looking like a coal yard at midnight in Pittsburgh, brought his rag time [sic] band of Wilmington Potomacs to the West End Park yesterday and pitched his dusky brethren to a 7-6 victory [over] the Mahanoy City Blue Birds in a battle featured by extra basehits [sic]. Alexander the Great emerged victorious over the Flock but not until a torrid session that lasted two hours and fifteen minutes and ended with the winning run on second base had been laid before the fans.”

(I’ll note here that in the June 13, 1925, edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, Rollo Wilson asserted that Taylor had actually signed Albritton to the Potomacs in the current year from the Philadelphia Giants.)

The rest of the 1925 campaign proceeded with further inconsistency from Albritton. On June 21, he pitched well in the Potomacs’ 9-3 triumph over a town team in West Lebanon, Pa., but five days later, he looked dreadful against a team in Hazelton, Pa., getting shelled for eight runs in seven innings of work in which he didn’t notch a single strikeout.

As the 1925 season wore on, there was more bad news for the Potomacs – they were forced to drop out of the ECL and revert to a barnstorming, independent team. (Wilson described the newly rebranded club thusly: “Several league discards are on a co-plan team which is laying around the Somnolent City as the Wilmington Potomacs. Larry Somer … has charge of the outfit and is getting them good booking.”) Albritton stuck with the rebranded franchise, however, with continued mixed, often mediocre, results.

But Albritton still couldn’t sit still, and in September 1925, he took the mound for a traveling “all star” team under the managerial eye of grizzled veteran catcher Chappie Johnson, who was approaching the half-century mark age-wise. On Sept. 20, he hurled the the first game of a four-game series between Chappie’s All Stars and a barnstorming team in Binghamton, N.Y., and came away with a complete-game, 7-1 win in which Alexander scattered eight hits.

That’s the last mention on Albritton I could dig up until a few in spring 1927, which places him on another all-star aggregation or sorts, this one led by future Baseball Hall of Famer Louis Santop and apparently based in the small town of Ambler, Pa. Santop called the club the Bronchos, and, per his usual, Albritton was decent but nothing spectacular; in a doubleheader against the spring-training, Ben Taylor-piloted Baltimore Black Sox, Alex picked up the win after going seven innings in long relief against the strong-swatting Baltimore bunch. The Asbury Park, N.J., Press newspaper reported that “as a whole [Albritton] turned in a very credible performance.”

In 1928 Albritton reportedly returned to Santop’s crew, but I couldn’t find evidence of Albritton pitching in a game with the aggregation that year.

And that, as far as I could find, was that for Alexander Albritton’s career on the diamond. Looking back, one question we can maybe ask when summing up Alexander Albritton’s career on the diamond is somewhat basic: How good was he? And, more specifically, was he of major-league caliber?

We can probably trust the venerable writer/researcher James A. Riley, author of the landmark “The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues,” who included a brief entry on Albritton:

“During a five-year span in the early ’20s, he pitched with five different eastern teams, but despite being a hard worker and always ready to pitch, never really made it big. … He was a fair pitcher and could beat the white semipro teams but was not effective against the [B]lack major-league teams.”

From what I could glean, Riley’s assessment is pretty spot on and sums up Albritton’s on-field career perfectly, and that sentiment was generally echoed by Ben Taylor himself, who wrote in his aforementioned, first-person article in the Afro-American in early 1925:

“He is a fair pitcher, but is too light for the big leagues. However, he can beat most any white club and will earn his salary pitching against the semi-pros. He is a hard worker and is always ready to work.” (This might actually be from where Riley got his assessment of Albritton.)

Therein lies a second question we could pose about Albritton – did he ever actually achieve “major league” status?

From what I can tell, and from the record that I found, Albritton did play for a team that is now considered a major league team in the eyes of modern Major League Baseball – for the Washington Potomacs of the Eastern Colored League in 1924. By my tally, every other edition of a given team for which Albritton played was either an independent, barnstorming and/or sub-top level.

However, we should possibly go a bit further to sharpen up the focus even more by making sure that, during that tenure with the major-league Potomacs, did Albritton ever actually pitch against another team that was similarly of major-league level? Or did he personally only ever pitch against lesser opponents in games scheduled between official ECL contests?

The verdict: Albritton never took the mound pitching for an MLB-level team against an MLB-level team.

The verdict: Albritton never took the mound pitching for an MLB-level team against an MLB-level team.

So, he was briefly a member of a team that is now considered major league, but he never pitched in any official fully major-league games.

Thus, the answer to the question of whether Alexander Albritton was a major league player is, as is quite often the case in the Negro Leagues, it’s complicated.

It also must be pointed out that I might have missed a game or two in my research, and that someone might, down the road, uncover proof of Albritton’s fully and unquestionably major-league status.

Update/Edit: Like I noted up top, I’ve learned a great deal more about Albritton’s life on the diamond, such as box scores and game covers, that detail many additional games in which he played over his career. The bottom significance of that is that we can definitively say that Alex Albritton, was, under newly modernized MLB standards, an officially major league baseball player.

Specifically, I now know that Albritton did pitch or otherwise play in several games in which his team was of major-league level, and so was the opponent. The records of these additional major-league games came courtesy of my friend and peer Kevin Deon Johnson, whose own database included these “new” games. Many thanks to Kevin for the input and research.

As stated at the beginning of this post, I plan on doing a separate, more thoroughly post fleshing out Albritton’s career, but for now, I’ll explain how I missed these additional games when I was doing my own research on Albritton.

Basically, I searched the newspaper databases to which I have access for the keywords “Albritton,” “Allbritton” and “Albritten.” The game articles and box scores Kevin possessed featured Alexander listed under an array of other spellings and names — “Britton,” “Britt,” “Al Britton” or some other abbreviation.

I subsequently did my own additional research using those new keywords, and I uncovered a slew of other games in which Albritton participated, many of them against semipro or company clubs.

So keep an eye out for my next post about Albritton’s baseball career. Now, back to this original post …

A final query we could ponder regarding Albritton’s time in baseball is whether he might have shown any flashes or hints of symptoms of the illnesses that would land him in a psychiatric hospital in just over a decade.

Alas, that’s a question that might have no discernable answer, at least at this moment. The coverage of him in his athletic pursuits mentioned no signs of psychological instability or distress that I could find. Moreover, we don’t immediately have access to any relatives, descendants or friends for any testimony, whether spoken or written, as to his health.

In general, though, many people afflicted by mental illness start showing severe, debilitating symptoms in the late teens or early 20s. Depending on the year of his birth, Albritton was in his early- to mid-20s years old at the time of the first game coverage of him, and late-20s-to-early 30s at the time of his last mentioned performance. Why did his career end? Was it his health? Was it by choice? Or was it because, well, he just wasn’t that great a player?

I’ll hopefully be able to more fully dive more deeply into his afflictions, hospitalization and death. But for now, we close the curtain on Albritton’s career pursuing the national pastime.

Editor’s note: This is the third and final installment of a series about the 1947 New Orleans Creoles. The previous parts are here and here.

I’ll launch this concluding chapter by concluding the story of the official 1947 Negro Southern League season. Like many a season in Black baseball, the ’47 NSL campaign was one filled with uncertainty, irregularity and seat-of-one’s-pants planning.

Schedules were always adjustable, including official league contests, and at the mercy of financial realities, travel complications and other variables that were always shifting throughout the season.

So by what was declared the end of the regular season, it was unclear about what to do in determining a league champion. From what I can glean, everyone involved agreed that the powerhouse Asheville Blues had won the first-half championship, but there was less consensus about who won the second half.

At one glance it appeared the Blues had nabbed the second-half flag as well, which would have automatically made them league champs. However, the New Orleans media announced, somewhat unilaterally, that the Creoles had won the second half, thereby setting up a playoff between Asheville and New Orleans.

For whatever reason, all agreed just to hold a best-of-five championship series between the Blues and the Creoles, which began Sept. 12 in New Orleans.

“HEAR YE! HEAR YE! COME ONE, COME ALL,” wrote The Louisiana Weekly’s ace scribe, Jim Hall, in the paper’s Sept. 6 issue.

“Haven’t you heard the latest news? There is going to be a town meeting at the Pelican Stadium,” Hall added.

He continued later in his article: “Now, that you have the news, the old town-crier will stop singing the blues. But I must make this last call. Hear Ye! Hear Ye! COME ONE! COME ALL!”

The teams split the opening two games, both held at Pelican Stadium, then the New Orleans guys took game three, 4-1, at Baton Rouge.

However, the Blues rebounded with a 10-5 win at Shreveport to even the series at two games each, and they clinched the series and the NSL championship with a dominant 16-4 triumph in game five in Beaumont, Texas.

Thus ended the 1947 Negro Southern League season, with the New Orleans Creoles as runners up. The Creoles tied a bow on a relatively successful debut campaign by beating the visiting Indianapolis Clowns, 11-8, in an exhibition at Pelican Stadium on Oct. 2. Page somehow got Negro Leagues big-timer Chet Brewer (Cleveland Buckeyes) in pitch in the game against the Clowns, with Baton Rouge native Pepper Bassett, aka the Rocking Chair Catcher, backstopping.

William Plott, in his comprehensive book history of the Negro Southern League, described the life in the NSL for teams like the Creoles. In particular, he explained what the league meant for players.

“The Negro Southern League gave a home to professional baseball in Southern cities that could not field teams at the Negro National League level,” Plott wrote. “… In those cities were players whose renown would hardly leave their expanded neighborhoods. Thousands of them played the game in even greater obscurity than did their counterparts in the ‘major league’ Negro National League and later Negro American League. The Negro Southern League was minor league baseball … That means that the number of players who went on to become major leaguers … was relatively small.”

Plott added that the achievements, both routine and extraordinary, of the NSL’s players were quite often obscured, clouded, forgotten or ignored, the result of spotty media coverage, poor record keeping – Plott noted that “[n]o official statistics were ever issued by the league” – and irregular scheduling. 

It was in this stark reality that the following three 1947 New Orleans Creoles toiled with a universal zeal for the national pastime.

Wenceslao Gonzales O’Reilly – In April 1947, Creoles owner Allen Page turned to a close friend to boost the Big Easy team’s roster, a move that brought five ringers from the storied Cuban Professional League. The personnel coup was arranged by Alex Pompez, the owner of the New York Cubans of the Negro National League and one of Page’s dearest friends. (Pompez was eventually ushered into Cooperstown in 2006.)

Among that group of five hired guns was pitcher Wenceslao Gonzales, a fresh-faced native of Quivican, Cuba, who was five months away from his 22nd birthday when he arrived in New Orleans.

Gonzales’ primary “claim to fame” was a single Major League Baseball appearance, with the Washington Senators on April 13, 1955, eight years after becoming one of the staff aces for the modest New Orleans Creoles.

Here’s how the Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen newspaper described Gonzales in June 1953, while he was playing minor-league ball with Cuidad Juarez (located in the Chihuahua state of Mexico) in the Arizona-Texas League:

“By stretching the imagination a trifle, we find that Wenceslao Gonzalez [sic] of Juarez … is a left-handed version of the famous Satchel Paige,” wrote the Citizen’s Ray McNally.

“Like Paige,” McNally added, “Gonzalez [sic] is “a pitcher with oodles of stuff, a variety of deliveries, [and] a sensational mound record. He’s a fellow whose age offers an interesting point of speculation and a guy who has plenty of color.”

The Citizen further analyzed Gonzales’ strengths as a pitcher, asserting that the Cuban southpaw “appears to have a rubber arm – one of those valuable pieces of a pitcher’s armor that seems to get better with age.”

But back in 1947, when he signed on with the New Orleans Creoles, he was barely in his 20s and fresh from a tour of duty in the Cuban Navy during World War II, ready to start his professional career. He’d spent eight years in amateur beisbol in Cuba, including an early stint on the Cuban national team in 1939 at the age of 14, when the club won the Amateur World Series, the country’s and the national team’s first international championship.

With the Creoles in 1947, Gonzales was generally viewed as the team’s pitching ace, something Pittsburgh Courier correspondent/columnist Lucius Jones asserted in a May 1947 column; Jones noted that Gonzales’ recent Creoles debut was a two-hit gem against the Memphis Red Sox. 

Another article in the May 24 issue expounded on that notion: “Gonzales came to the states [sic] with high praise and in his only out[ing] he displayed a coolness and polish of a veteran and a rare assortment of every pitch in the book. He is destined to reach the highest rung in baseball.”
In its June 8, 1947, edition, the Chattanooga Daily Times asserted that “[t]he Creole pitching staff is built around” Gonzales, who “is the strike-out wizard of the Creoles and is leading the league in that department.”

Wenceslao Gonzales retired from professional baseball at the age of 43 and passed away a dozen years later at the age of 55 in Cuidad del Carmen in Mexico.

Oliver “Butsy” Andry – Oliver Andry was born on Oct. 3, 1919, in New Orleans; his parents were Willie Andry, a laborer for a steamship company, and Consuelo Andry, nee Jackson. When Oliver was a youth, the family lived on St. Anthony Street; later on, the Andrys moved to Annette Street in the same neighborhood.

Oliver was the third of (by my count) a dozen children and grew up in the historic Claiborne Avenue neighborhood, which, before it was chopped in half by the construction of I-10, was one of the liveliest, most tradition-rich Black sections of New Orleans.

By the time Oliver was in his early 20s, he was playing centerfield for the Dr. Nut Tigers, a New Orleans semipro team sponsored by the World Bottling Corp., a local company that produced Dr. Nut soda. In July 1941, Andry racked up two doubles and a homer in a Tigers game against a team from Houma. By trade he worked as a plasterer in building construction for Louis Miramon, a property developer from Slidell, La.
But in May ’42, Andry enlisted in the Army as a private and served his country for three-plus years in World War II. After being discharged in October 1945, Oliver – nicknamed “Butsy” – continued a career in semi-pro baseball that included a stint with Allen Page’s New Orleans Creoles.

He returned to the diamond in 1946, once again playing for the Dr. Nut Tigers.

Andry was a potent little sparkplug on the field. At just 5-foot-1 and a mere 125 pounds, Butsy flitted around the outfielder catching fly balls, but at the plate he boasted a surprising amount of power and prowess.

When he climbed aboard to New Orleans Creoles’ train, by mid-season 1947, Andry had turned into a fan- and media-favorite standout, both at home and on the road. In late May of that year, the Macon (Ga.) News stated that “[a]nother star with the Creoles who are expected to take a bright spot will be Oliver Andrews [sic], amazing outfielder”; a Louisiana Weekly cover of a doubleheader bringing the Atlanta Black Crackers to the Big Easy reported that “center fielder Oliver Andry performed miracle catches in the field and continually brought the crowd to its feet.”

Later in the season, the Atlanta Daily World, in its preview of a Creoles-Black Crax series, dubbed Andry “the dapper youngster who made several spectacular catches in centerfield.” In June, Andry hit a three-run, inside-the-park homer in the second inning in the Creoles’ 14-3 cakewalk over a composite local all-star team in an exhibition clash, prompting the Delaware County Daily Times of Chester, Pa., to write that Andry was “the best flyhawk in the state, is hitting well over .300, and is a speed merchant on the bases.”

Andry continued with the Creoles the following season, and his local renown continued to grow, with some media reports referring to him as unusually little – in August 1948, as the Creoles were prepping for a game against the barnstorming Cincinnati Crescents in Selma, Ala., the Selma Times-Journal stressed Andry’s tiny stature in a preview article, referring to him as “Oliver Andry, New Orleans boy, sensational midget leftfielder.

“When fans see Andry they will see a real Creole boy making some sensational catches in the left field garden. He is the fastest man on the team.”

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any mention of Oliver in The Weekly over the next two seasons (1949 and ’50), so I stopped looking at that point.

As Oliver approached middle age, he attended Beecher Congregational Church in New Orleans, serving as a deacon, and by the 1950s, multiple generations of pretty much the entire Andry family lived on Pauger Street, still in the historic Claiborne Avenue district.

But later in life, Oliver Andry and his wife, Mildred (nee Sayas) Andry, whom he married in 1959, moved to Slidell, maybe 35 miles away from New Orleans on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain. 

Andry also took part in the Old Timers’ Baseball Club, a local organization of dozens of former Negro League and Black baseball players and managers; he sometimes played in the club’s annual all-star reunion game.

Butsy Andry died on Aug. 31, 2004, roughly a month before his 85th birthday, and was buried in Resthaven Memorial Park in the New Orleans East part of the city. 

Lucille Herbert – “Miss Lucille Hebert [sic], former softball and [field] hockey star in California and one of the best feminine athletes in these parts, will be a regular figure in the frist[sic] base coaching box for the New Orleans ‘Creoles’ of the Negro Southern League this year. This wil make her probably the first woman in colored baseball history to be so intimately connected with the ‘playing’ end of a professional diamond aggregation.”

That’s how The Louisiana Weekly announced that Lucille Herbert, a New Orleans native and recent graduate of the University of California-Los Angeles, had been hired by Allen Page to blaze a trail in New Orleans baseball history.

While Page and the Creoles are well known as the folks who in 1949 famously hired the legendary Toni Stone, one of Negro League baseball’s earliest and most popular female trailblazers, 

But Page plucked other women to join the Creoles’ roster and join his team, including Fabiola Wilson and Gloria Dymond. But Lucille Herbert (married name Lucille Bland) was the first, in 1947. 

For her excellent book, “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone,” Martha Ackmann interviewed Lucille Bland, who told the author that Page ran an ad in The Louisiana Weekly for a woman to join the Creoles. The team owner thought having a female presence on the club might pique potential fans’ curiosities and entice them to games.

“He thought that would be the come-on,” Ackmann quotes Bland as saying. 

As it turned out, Page ended up not having to look very far for a woman prospect – Bland was already working as a cashier at the Page Hotel.

“Lucille Bland loved sports, played basketball and baseball at Dillard [University, an HBCU in New Orleans], and read everything she could about her hero, Babe Didrikson Zaharias,” Ackmann wrote.

While Page insisted that Bland (at that time Herbert) stay attractive and “stylish” on the field, she knew how to entertain a crowd, and as a result she wasn’t afraid to “get right in an umpire’s face and let him have it,” Bland said.

She noted that at first the other players weren’t thrilled with her presence – “they resented it immensely” at first – but once she proved to them that she was a baseball junkie who knew the game front to back, they became more comfortable with her around and accepted her suggestions. “I was a sister to them,” Bland told Ackmann.

The first mention of Herbert I found in the media outside of New Orleans in 1947 came in mid-May, when the Morning World newspaper of Monroe, La., mentioned her in a preview article about the Creoles’ upcoming game against the Cinderella Sports of Monroe.

“A feature of the Creole outfit is its woman coach, Lucille Hebert [sic], who will operate from the first base coaching box when her team is at the bat,” stated the World.

The national press apparently caught wind of Lucille’s presence with the Creoles in mid- to late-July, when several papers from outside Louisiana, as well as multiple national Black wire services, reported on her position with the New Orleans club.

An Associated Negro Press dispatch from July 21 noted that “[n]ovelty has been added to baseball by the New Orleans Creoles, members of the Negro Southern League, in Miss Lucille Herbert, and attractive 24-year-old graduate of UCLA who travels with the club and acts as coach.”

It added that “[h]er hobby is sports and she played softball, basketball and a number of other sports. …

“[S]he hopes to land a post in a city playground or recreation center, but, until then, watch her on the first base line with the Creoles.”

The Los Angeles Tribune, another Black paper, published a sports brief about Herbert, noting that she was a student at local schools, Los Angeles City College and UCLA, and graduated in physical education from the latter institution. Being a coach, the paper stated, gave Herbert “one of the most unique jobs held by a woman.” The publication added that Lucille “plays baseball herself.”

Unfortunately, many of the media references to Herbert included commentary about her looks and attractiveness, including a column by my journalistic hero, the Baltimore Afro-American’s Sam Lacy.

“Southern League teams are whistling at the first base coach of the New Orleans Creoles,” Lacy wrote in the Afro’s July 26 issue. “He’s a she, 24-year-old Lucille Herbert, beauteous UCLA graduate.”

A short essay about Lucille can be found on the Web site for the Center for Negro League Baseball Research. The essay states that Bland “was an outstanding all-around athlete” who was selected by Page “as a third base coach/traveling secretary/player because of her athletic ability, her bubbly personality and her administrative skills.”

The CNLBR piece adds:

“As the Creoles’ third base coach Lucille was said to have put on quite a show when New Orleans was up to bat. Her confrontations with the umpires were said to have been quite a spectacle. Lucille’s fiery demonstrations always kept the fans entertained. She was very popular with the players, fans and media. A picture of Lucille in her Creoles’ uniform was even featured on the cover of the [team’s] program in 1947.”

The short article underscores that she was a well known figure in the New Orleans community by showing pictures of her in her Creoles uniform mentoring kids during a baseball camp at Pelican Stadium in June 1947.

After her tenure with the Creoles, Lucille stayed active in the local community; she attended Dillard, where she starred in basketball, and she later helped perform fundraising for the school. She also participated in a voting registration drive, sponsored by the Pontchartrain Park Homes Improvement Association in 1961, during the Civil Rights Movement.

Lucille achieved one of her goals when she earned a position as a recreation supervisor with the New Orleans Recreation Department in 1952. As part of the job, she coached the girls basketball team at the Rosenwald Recreation Center, for example. Unfortunately, though, she was dismissed from the job in 1957 for specious reasons put forth by the NORD supervisor, who was the son of the department’s executive assistant director.

Later on, Bland headed back to California, where she earned a master’s degree from Pepperdine University and spent her career in the education field. However, she maintained a home in New Orleans.

Before I complete the tale of the 1947 New Orleans Creoles (first two installments here and here), there’s a few other cool things I want to get to, including today’s post.

For this piece, I’m going to jump way back to something I discussed and wrote about in fall 2014 – that’s right, more than a decade ago. Here’s my article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and this and this are the blog posts I wrote.

At that time, I somehow learned about (I can’t recall how, exactly) Alexander Albritton, a pitcher whose career in the upper echelons of Black baseball was mainly during the 1920s. I wouldn’t necessarily call his career brief, but it was generally unremarkable. He seems to have been a decent flinger of the horsehide, but he was far from a Hall of Famer. He could have brilliant outings, but he got just easily got shelled.

But his quality as a pitcher doesn’t really figure into the main thrust of his story.

What Albritton is most remembered for – the thing that makes his life truly remarkable – is his tragic death at the age of 45.

That death came in February 1940 while he was a patient at Philadelphia State Hospital, a notoriously decrepit, filthy and horrific public psychiatric facility commonly known as Byberry Hospital.

Albritton died at the hands of Frank Weinand, an orderly at the hospital who beat poor Alexander to death, allegedly to subdue Albritton during a psychological breakdown.

In addition to Byberry’s troubled, corrupt existence during its time – it finally closed in 1990 after numerous investigations into the deplorable conditions and questionable methods of its staff – several questions and mysteries remained, such as where exactly he was buried (I was unable to confirm his final resting place back in 2014).

But the biggest blank space in Albritton’s saga was what precisely caused his death. News reports at the time weren’t able to offer any clarity, mainly because on Albritton’s death certificate, the lines for the principal cause of death just stated “inquest pending.”

So it was apparently unknown, or at least unverified, exactly what Weinand did in his physical altercation with Alexander that killed the latter on Feb. 3, 1942. 

Since I wrote the article on Albritton for the Philadelphia Inquirerer and the corresponding posts I penned on the sad incident, I hadn’t really revisted the Alexander Albritton tale for many years.

But a couple weeks ago, something made me circle back to the tragedy just to see if anything new had developed or emerged since 2014. I’m not sure what prompted me to check it out; it just kind of struck me one day. I had a feeling.

Turns out it was a good thing, too, because I did indeed find something new.

Namely, a second death certificate! One that included the actual results of the inquest/autopsy of Albritton’s body!

When I did take a return dive into the story a couple weeks ago, I hopped on Ancestry and did a search or two on Albritton’s life, including looking up the death certificate for the heck of it.

At first, what I found was the same document I came across in 2014 – with the same old “inquest pending” rubber stamp on it.

Curious as to whether there might be any addendums or anything attached to the primary certificate page, I clicked to see the next page of records that had been uploaded to Ancestry. 

Lo and behold, there was now a second death certificate following the original, and it was one that had filled in the lines for the exact cause of death.

I don’t know precisely why I hadn’t uncovered the follow-up certificate 11 years ago, i.e. whether I was sloppy or careless in my reporting or if the additional document had been filed and uploaded since 2014.

Regardless of how it happened, it happened, and now, with a decade of additional lessons learned about journalistic investigation and historical research, I’d found something big.

So what caused Alexander Albritton’s death? States the newfound document: “Injuries to chest in altercation at above hosp. [sic] on 2/1/40 at hands of Frank Weinand while subduing the decd [deceased][,] a patient at above hosp. [sic].”

The ruling of the coroner, Charles H. Hersch: “Homicide.”

Murder was the case, indeed.

Now, as reported by the contemporaneous media of the time, Weinand was charged with murder on Feb. 5, 1940, but eventually he was largely cleared of wrongdoing by the investigation into Albritton’s death; the post-incident probe determined that Weinand had acted in self-defense when Albritton allegedly attacked the orderly with a broomstick. (The charges appear to have been downgraded at some point to manslaughter.)

However, even with the completed autopsy results, the second death certificate leaves a lot of curiosities and questions about what all happened. There’s also a lot of details about the case that, whether due to unavailability of information or lack of time on my part, I wasn’t able to fully explore and write about over a decade ago.

First, there’s other differences between the two death certificates. The most noticeable is that the spaces for background information about Albritton, or any deceased person – sex, race, relatives, spouses, addresses, birthday and place, etc. – are filled out on the initial document but left largely blank in the second one, probably because it would have been roughly the same information.

Another key difference between the two versions is the listed date of death; on the first one, it’s stated as Feb. 3, 1940, but on the ensuing one, it’s Feb. 1, 1940.

The variation can most likely be attributed to the gradual discovery and revelation of the complete and accurate account of what had taken place between Albritton and Weinand. In the particular case of date of death, it eventually came out that Albritton’s body – indeed, the fact that he was dead – wasn’t discovered for a couple days by hospital staff.

What seems to have happened is that Albritton’s body was likely found on Feb. 3, at which time staff and investigators probably just assumed that he had died that same day, but subsequent multiple investigations by the State Police, the Philly police and others found that the altercation between Albritton and Weinand actually occurred two days earlier.

It then took staff, doctors and others to not even realize for two days that Albritton was dead and hadn’t been treated at all for the injuries – which included, it seems, four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and constusions to the torso and arms – sustained by the altercation. It would seem that whatever Weinand did to Alexander, it was severe, even with the former’s exoneration.

Another aberration between the two death certificates is the date they were filled. The first one indicates that it was logged on Feb. 6, 1940, but, curiously, there is no filing date on the updated document version, only that Hersch had “attended the deceased” on Feb. 13. 

Yet another discrepancy is Hersch’s signatures – they look substantially different. 

Moreover is the uncertainty about where Albritton’s body ended up. The initial death certificate states that the dispensation of the body took place on Feb. 9, 1940, at Eden Memorial Park cemetery of Collingdale, Pa. However, back in 2014 I called Eden to confirm, and the staff there said they had no such record of Albritton. (I also called three other possible cemeteries, none of which had any record of him, either.) Then, in the second edition of the death certificate, all of that information is left blank.

The details of the fatal incident are intriguing, and hopefully I’ll be able to talk about those at some point. I also hope to follow up on where Alexander was buried, as well as examine his family background.

But next up will eventually be a look at Alexander’s career on the diamond.

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a three-part series on the New Orleans Creoles. The first installment is here.

We’ve covered the Creoles’ barnstorming, charity and other non-league contests. Now, we have to look at the team’s actual Negro Southern League games and the Creoles’ performance in the circuit.

But just like most years and most leagues in Black baseball, the NSL’s in-circuit season was irregular, unpredictable and nigh near willy nilly.

By the time the dust cleared and the 1947 Negro Southern League season wrapped up, there was, not completely unexpectedly, a lack of clarity as to who’d won the darn thing. 

Thanks to the same challenges that plagued Black baseball and their leagues, teams and players for decades and at all levels of the game – erratic news coverage, incomplete or altered game schedules, small crowds, team-jumping players – the conclusion to the 1947 Negro Southern League campaign is a little cloudy, to say the least.

And the Creoles had for themselves a front seat on the roller coaster ride.

The Crescent City team opened its league schedule on May 11, with a doubleheader at Little Rock, where they split with the Memphis Blues, a club that existed for a single year in 1947 and played in the NSL for that season.

(As was usually the case in the Negro Leagues, NSL teams often played at neutral sites as a way to maximize revenue by bringing the gameday experience to different places, including those that currently didn’t have a team in the loop.)

After two more divided road series – a doubleheader against the Atlanta Black Crackers that the foes split, and a 2-2, four-game set with the Raleigh Tigers at different venues in North Carolina – the Creoles arrived in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in the first week of June to face the Asheville Blues, the defending NSL champs.

Unfortunately, the Blues flexed those superpower muscles and swept the four-game set, and it didn’t get much better after that – a four-game series at Chattanooga against the Choo-Choos ended with the home team taking the set, three games to one.

Then came an example of a frequent practice that made the Negro Leagues wholly unique in professional baseball at the time – an extended, paired road trip, in which two teams accompanied each other on a jaunt to different locales, often across multiple states, as a traveling attraction, a road show of shorts.

In this case, the Creoles traveled with the Black Crackers, beginning with a doubleheader in Atlanta on June 15; the clubs ended up splitting that twin bill, then headed west.

Where, finally, at long last, the Creoles came home.

The Big Easy boys had their league home opener on June 17 at Pelican Stadium against Atlanta, and The Louisiana Weekly of June 14 stated that the event would hold tremendous significance for local baseball fans.

“Two long months of endurance and waiting by New Orleans fans will end on Tuesday night when the Creoles clash with the strong Atlanta Black Crackers at Pelican Stadium,” the paper said. “This will mark the first time a stable, chartered league [in recent years] has had a representative from New Orleans.

“Twice on occasions in the past,” the article added, “New Orleans has had entrants in semi-organized circuits. … In days past it was such names and officials as Moss, Geddes and [Fred] Caufield [actually spelled Caulfield] that vanguard the movement to establish New Orleans as a baseball city.

“Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Allen Page will trot out one of the greatest young teams ever assembled and certainly one of the best that ever wore a New Orleans uniform.”

Thanks to, ahem, cracker jack pitching, the Creoles won both contests, held on consecutive nights. In the Tuesday game, the Creoles’ Cuban ace, Wenceslao Gonzales, hurled a four-hit, 1-0 shutout, and Billy Horne scored the lone marker on a Cracker fielding error in the sixth inning. An estimated 5,100 folks showed up to see the game.

The following night, New Orleans pitcher Wild Bill Chapman allowed six hits and only a lone tally in the first inning, followed by airtight, shutout ball the rest of the way in a 6-1 triumph. With the win, the Creoles (by my calculation) moved ahead of Atlanta and into sole possession of third place in the NSL, behind first-place Asheville and second-place Jacksonville.

The two clubs then embarked on their pair journey through the South and headed north and west to Shreveport, where the Creoles nipped the Crackers, 8-7, in a contest played on the home diamond of the white Shreveport Sports of the Texas League.

New Orleans then swept a doubleheader over the Black Crax in Houston and followed up by edging out the Atlanta aggregation, 3-2, in 11 innings at the American Legion ball field in Longview, Texas, on June 24.

Beginning in late July, the Creoles faced a grueling slate of league games that at some point paired them against (in order) Nashville, Chattanooga, Asheville, Raleigh, Jacksonville and Nashville again. The regular-season league schedule didn’t conclude until the last week of August.

And during those roughly six weeks, the Creoles enjoyed only eight home dates at Pelican Stadium in New Orleans. The rest of the time, the Big Easy lads were scheduled for contests at Longview, Texas; Alexandria, La.; Baton Rouge, La.; back to Longview; El Dorado, Ark.; again to Longview; another one in Longview after a quick trip home; El Dorado; Houma, La.; Shreveport, La.; back to Houma; to Nashville, Tenn.; and to Dayton, Ohio.

A couple notes on that schedule:

• Only three of all those games were played at the home field of the Creoles’ given league opponent. That would be the ones for the last series, at the famed Sulphur Dell in Nashville against the Nashville Cubs. 
• Those contests at Nashville were billed in advertising in The Tennessean newspaper as “official championship playoff games,” but I’m not sure why. It could have been a series to determine the winner of the NSL second-half pennant and the right to play the first-half winner and defending champion Asheville. (More on that in the third and final installment of this blog series.)
• While numerous games being played at neutral sites certainly isn’t surprising in the slightest for the Negro Leagues, I don’t know why these particular locales were chosen. However, since Shreveport is in northwest Louisiana, Longview is in northeast Texas, and El Dorado is in southwest Texas, all three of those places are relatively close to each other, which might have facilitated traveling between them. As to why Dayton was selected, your guess is as good as mine.
• Houma is only about 60 miles and an hour’s drive to the southwest from New Orleans. The medium-sized town was at that time home to the Houma Indians, a team in the low-level, professional circuit Evangeline League, which, despite its rookie-level status, was an extremely colorful, beloved, scandal-plagued league contained entirely in the southern half of Louisiana.
• Remember that this is a Black team traveling through the South at a time when segregration was still in full effect, which often meant rickety vehicles, sketchy hotels and meals grabbed on the fly wherever they could. It was a trying existence for the team, players and management. 

As a way of concluding this installment, we’ll take a look at the off-field measures of success for a baseball team – gate receipts, attendance and public support? Did the Creoles draw good crowds, or did the local community not give the type of attention to the club that the Creoles for which the Creoles were hoping?

Basically, it was solid, but it certainly could have been better, something on which The Louisiana Weekly then-sports editor Jim Hall emphatically expounded in his regular column from July 26, 1947.

Coming shortly after the Creoles drew just 2,300 spectators to a doubleheader at Pelican Stadium against Chattanooga, Hall’s piece lamented the languid state of Black baseball in the Crescent City and the African-American citizenry’s apathy toward the situation.

We have one team (Creoles) that can play their games in Pelican Stadium and we don’t fully support it. Fans, colored baseball needs you and ‘Brother’ it needs you very badly.

Jim Hall, Louisiana Weekly columnist

“Judging from last Sunday’s twin bill affair at the Pelican Stadium,” Hall penned, perhaps, lots of the baseball fans or followers don’t know about the New Orleans Creoles … For years, local fans have been shouting the question, when are we going to have a home team, a team which will represent our city in one of the organized leagues in our country? …

“Now that the out-of-town teams games have been cut down and one of the baseball magnets [Page], who by the way, is a colored citizen, has invested nearly $10,000.00 in a baseball team called the New Orleans Creoles, which is a member of the Negro Southern League, the attendance is still fading. …

“At the present time,” Hall added, “there is [sic] some twenty baseball teams in New Orleans without a place to play their games, these teams must stay on the road and play their games. We have one team (Creoles) that can play their games in Pelican Stadium and we don’t fully support it. Fans, colored baseball needs you and ‘Brother’ it needs you very badly.

“In New Orleans, there is little incentive for colored players to give their best to baseball when the home town [sic] fans will not come out and see the team in action. Whether the [white] New Orleans Pelicans win or lose, the crowd is always giving full support. Why can’t the colored fans support a team of their own?”

That, unfortunately, is a common theme running through just about the entirety of African-American baseball history in New Orleans. In 1947 specifically, those citizens who declined to support their own Negro League team missed one helluva conclusion to the season. That, plus a focus on three of the 1947 Creoles themselves, will be in our next, final installment of this series.