Within two weeks a major change affecting both teams transpired.
George Bluebird pitched and manager Frank Whitfield caught for the Pipestone team. The season started with a game between Pipestone (League of Nations) and the Sioux Falls Black Sox, the latter an all-black team. The last game of the 1925 season was played on September 18 when the Independents hosted, and lost to, the Sioux Falls Canaries.īy the 1926 season the Pipestone Independents had become the “Original” Philadelphia League of Nations. Shortly two other Ghosts joined the Independents. The Sioux City team, named the Ghosts, was an all-black team two days after their engagement Scotty Henderson, a black pitcher for the Ghosts, joined the Independents.
The Independents played teams from Flandreau and Sioux Falls in South Dakota, Sioux City, Iowa, and Minneota and Tracy in Minnesota among numerous others in the tri-state region. No untoward race incidents occurred in either 1925 or 1926, or at least no reported ones. Whitfield, variously described as a porter, barber, and owner of a shoe shine parlor, likely acquired status and respect in Pipestone. The catcher and manager of the Independents was Frank Whitfield, an African American resident of Pipestone. Two local newspapers, the Pipestone Leader and the Pipestone County Star, carried reports of the games. At least four black ballplayers joined up with white ballplayers, and on a few occasions with a Native American pitcher, George BlueBird the Independents ended a fairly respectable season with a record of 14 wins, 11 losses, and 2 ties. During the 1925 baseball season, an integrated team, the Pipestone Independents, emerged. Often that necessitated hiring black ballplayers to come to Pipestone (this situation lasted into the 1950s, when the current author watched black players such as “Thumper” Jackson make Pipestone baseball of championship caliber). As did many other small towns in the upper Midwest, it had an ardent craving for baseball, and especially for winning baseball. Pipestone, an historic community located in southwestern Minnesota, normally had few black residents. The Pipestone Black Sox, an all black baseball team, played its first game on May 16, 1926. One such small town all-black team established itself in Pipestone, Minnesota in 1926. Sometimes, an essentially all-white team would have one or two (or even four or five) black ball players, who were frequently paid in semi-professional baseball, and sometimes all-black teams were located in small towns as well as large cities. For both small and large towns in the Midwest, this segregation made for interesting combinations. In baseball, for example, despite no southern teams in major league baseball, black players were excluded so that African Americans, led by Texan Rube Foster, established their own Negro Leagues.
Nonetheless the team competed with other white, all-black, and racially integrated teams as far away as South Dakota and Iowa.ĭuring the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of Jim Crow society, one of the remarkable victories of racist white supremacy emerged in the segregation of athletics on the national, state, and local levels. Glasrud follows the exploits of an all black baseball team in the southwestern Minnesota town of Pipestone in the 1920s which at the time had virtually no black residents. In the following article historian Bruce A.
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