Negro Leagues conference honors heroes of baseball history
21st June 2022 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
As the son of the most important figure in New Orleans Negro Leagues history, Rodney Page knows Black baseball.
He also knows what is needed to preserve its history and legacy, and at the recent Society for American Baseball Research’s Jerry Malloy Negro Leagues Conference in Birmingham, Ala., he summed up perfectly the task ahead for all Negro Leagues fans, historians and scholars.
“All of us are here out of a sense of justice,” Rodney Page, the son of legendary New Orleans team owner and sports promoter Allen Page, told attendees at the conference-closing banquet and awards ceremony.
“It’s so important that the truth of history be spoken,” said Page, who now lives in Austin, Texas. “There is a truth and history that has to be cherished and preserved and passed on. Each of us has a calling, a calling that has to do with justice and truth.”
Page was one of dozens of people to attend the Jerry Malloy Conference that ran from June 2-4 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Birmingham. The gathering marked the first such SABR-sponsored Negro Leagues conference in five years following delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first after a series of landmark developments that have pushed the Negro Leagues and their greatness into the public consciousness.
In December 2020, following years of painstaking research by historians and persistent, fervent lobbying by the Negro Leagues community, Major League Baseball at last bestowed major league status upon the top-level Black leagues that ran from 1920-48.
With the attainment of such overdue and well deserved status, the statistics of hundreds of Negro Leagues players and managers – including Hall of Fame legends like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Buck Leonard and Cool Papa Bell – are finally being integrated into the major-league record books.
Then, in 2021, the National Baseball Hall of Fame elected its first pre-integration African-American members since 2006 in a vote that was both encouraging and controversial for those who continue to fight for the respect Negro Leaguers have deserved but been deprived of for decades.
Such developments buoyed the spirits of those in attendance at the recent conference, but they also continued to fuel the passion of Negro Leagues supporters as they keep up the fight for justice, fairness and respect for the players, managers and executives who toiled and excelled in the shadows of segregation.
Larry Lester, founder and chairman of SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee, summed up the tight-knit but welcoming group.
“We are a family,” he said.
Those words were too similar to the ones spoken a century ago by Hall of Famer Rube Foster, founder of the first Negro National League and the widely renowned “Father of Negro Baseball.”
“We are the ship. All else the sea,” Foster said.
Foster’s legacy, and by extension the legacy of the Negro Leagues, was embodied by the attendance at the conference of Doug Foster, great nephew of Rube and grandson of Hall of Fame pitcher Bill Foster (who was also Rube’s half-brother). Doug Foster said the Malloy Conference was an incredible experience for him.
“I’ve always felt like Rube Foster is someone who’s known in baseball circles, but beyond that not too many people know about him,” Doug said. “[The conference] is just a credit to his legend and how important he was to American history.”
In addition to Doug Foster and Rodney Page, another scion of a Negro Leagues great who attended the conference was Dr. Harriett Hamilton, the daughter of Henry Kimbro, who enjoyed a lengthy career as a player from the late 1930s into the ’50s. Kimbro also managed the Birmingham Black Barons from 1952-53.
Hamilton, a professor at Tennessee State University and former college basketball coach, said she was heavily influenced and inspired by her father’s work ethic and devotion to his family. As a result, she works to preserve her dad’s legacy and help burnish the stellar reputation of the Negro Leagues.
Hamilton said her taciturn father grew up “cruelly poor, and the fact that he could never play in the Majors because of segregation “tore him to pieces.” She said that despite his own lack of education, “he was one of the smartest men I ever knew” and sent all his children to college by operating two businesses and working seven days a week.
“He taught [his kids] that whatever you do, give it everything you have to the last drop,” she said. “He taught that if you do something, do it well or don’t do it at all.”
Hamilton said Kimbro represented the strength, determination and valor of the Negro Leagues and helped pave the way for those who came later. “I’m proud that my daddy held down the fort until Jackie Robinson and all of them came along,” she said.
Hamilton started attending Negro Leagues events because she was working on books about her father and wanted to learn more about her dad and Black baseball.
“I came to get more information and to see and hear and connect with people who had the same goals,” she said. “I got transformed. I loved it. I saw another world and saw people who had the same intention I had – to tell the story [of the Negro Leagues], because the stories are important to tell.”
In addition to several family members and descendants of Negro Leagues, three former players from Black baseball came to the conference and were recognized and honored. They included Clinton “Tiny” Forge, a catcher for the Detroit Stars; Birmingham Black Barons pitcher Tony Lloyd; and 97-year-old Bill Greason, an active minister in the Birmingham area who pitched for the Black Barons and briefly made it to “The Show” as a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals.
The selection of Birmingham as the site of the conference continues the recognition of the exalted place the city holds in Negro Leagues history. As the home of the great Black Barons, Birmingham served as the epicenter of Black baseball in the South.
The city’s segregated industrial baseball leagues, as well as professional teams that preceded the Black Barons added to Birmingham’s great Black ball legacy.
To that end, on the afternoon of June 3, the conference attendees took a bus tour of three sites of great importance to Birmingham, its history and its legacy as a locus for many civil rights landmarks.
The group first stopped at the National Civil Rights Institute, where they saw displays of artifacts from the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, including the jail cell from which Dr. Martin Luther King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963.
The NCRI sits across from the park where in 1963 protesters were assaulted with fire hoses and attack dogs, as well as the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were killed by a KKK bombing in 1963.
The conference-goers also visited the Negro Southern League Museum, which opened a few years ago and features a dazzling, comprehensive collection of everything from bats, balls and mitts to stadium bleachers and promotional posters for games.
The museum was the creation of Dr. Layton Revel, the founder of the Center for Negro League Baseball Research who donated his personal collection of memorabilia for the effort. Despite recently undergoing major heart surgery, Revel attended the Malloy conference, where he expressed modest pride for the NLSM and Negro Leagues Research in general.
“We’re proud of it,” Revel told The Louisiana Weekly. “It’s nice to see your life’s work come to life,”
At the closing banquet, SABR CEO Scott Bush stressed the importance of the work done by Negro Leagues researchers and supporters and underscored the work left to be done.
“Since [its founding],” Bush said, “the committee has been a leader in everything it does, not just within SABR but across the baseball world.”
This article originally published in the June 20, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
