New Book Explains the ‘Genocide’ of Black Baseball

Reginald R. Howard's book, "Baseball's Silent Genocide," expresses
his beliefs on why and how Black youth were kept from playing
the "Great American Game" called baseball.

MEMPHIS, TN – Before the wanning of Negro League Baseball, Black players with amazing athleticism excelled on the diamond with “speed, strength, quickness, and agility.” 

“[So] why is 75 percent of Blacks playing basketball, 65 percent-plus Blacks playing football, and only 8 percent of Blacks playing baseball?” Reginald R. Howard, an infielder for the Indianapolis Clowns in the 1950s, asked.

The league folded at the end of 1950. Howard calls this period and after “Baseball’s Silent Genocide,” the title of his new book, which GrantHouse Publishers in Memphis released in June.

The book’s subtitle – “How They Cut Black Youth Out of Baseball” – would be enough for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to ban the book, according to Oscar-winning actor Lou Gossett Jr., who penned one of the book’s two prefaces.

Howard said it took more than 50 years for the book to become a reality. He began compiling information after a frank discussion with his father about the vicissitudes of Black baseball.

“He stopped me and said, ‘Look, they did their part on the field. You didn’t have the skill level to do it on the field. So why don’t you write about it.’ I said, ‘Nobody wants to hear what I got to say.’”

Howard, in fact, has so much to say about the subject. At one point he was on the verge of giving up. After chatting with his father, he felt compelled to write. 

“I got to get this thing done now before I die,” the 88-year-old said.

He needed to tell the story and proceeded with determination – with editorial assistance from Ilunga Adell, a television and film producer, screenwriter, and actor. 

“The stuff that I’ve been telling you about is not something that I’ve read, but something that I’ve experienced,” said Howard during an interview. “A lot of Black people [players] have just about died out.”

There aren’t many left, he added. 

Howard was born in South Bend, IN. He moved to Memphis in 1979. “I don’t want to die with this stuff in my head,” he wrote. “It would be a serious dereliction on my part if I did.”

What was in Howard’s head is now in print. It is a recollection of his experiences on and off the diamond, his relationship with players – the celebrated and the unsung – and what he believes led to the genocide of Black baseball.

The premise of the book is that the “majority” systemically kept baseball out of the hands of Black youth, fearing they would eventually dominate the game as Black athletes had done in basketball and football. 

“The first thing they did was to stop sponsoring baseball in the inner city.” Howard contends this was a “sophisticated and clandestine design to reduce the number of Blacks playing baseball.”

And then too, the equipment was expensive for the inner city’s poor Black kids, he said, and that coaches often steered them to other sports as his coach in South Bend had tried to do when he was in school.

“…all the Black students would be steered toward track and field because they didn’t want you playing baseball.”

Howard calls such practices little “nuances” which, he maintains, led to the withering of Black baseball.

The book is interspersed with the photos of Black players whose names are legendary and etched in the annals of history. The midsection is replete with a cache of individual photos, team shots, contracts, even a 1946 score card.

Perhaps the much-heralded Black baseball player ever was Jackie Robinson. He broke baseball’s color line in 1947 when he played Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

“They talk about Jackie Robinson like he was playing by himself,” Howard said. He wasn’t being resentful or begrudging but added: “There were 200-something players playing too.”

Many of those players are referenced in Howard’s book: “Baseball’s Silent Genocide.”

And many of them, he pointed out, were gifted with “speed, strength, quickness, and agility,” the four “attributes” for excellence.

For more information, or copies of the book, contact Reginald R. Howard at 901-487-5949. 

Fulton’s Artwork Highlights the Blues and Egyptian Culture

 

Artwork by Jerome Fulton, such as “Feeling His Music,” is on 
exhibit for six months at the Blues Hall of Fame Museum in
Downtown Memphis. (Photo by Wiley Henry) 

MEMPHIS, TN – When Kimberly Horton met Jerome Fulton at the 2022 King Biscuit Festival in Helena, Ark., in October, she was bowled over by the depth and intensity of his artwork. 

She had to tell Andrew Ross, director of the Blues Hall of Fame Museum in Downtown Memphis, which “exposes, educates, and entertains visitors with all that is blues culture.”

“I got the two of them together so he could curate an exhibit at our museum,” said Horton, president/CEO of The Blues Foundation, which has operated the museum since it opened in 2015.

“When she came back, she said, ‘We got our artist,’” Ross said.

Horton was swept away by one of Fulton’s pieces at the festival. “I talked about that piece,” she said.

Ross went on to curate an exhibit for Fulton entitled “Crossroads 2 Memphis.” It is a multi-media compilation of deep Southern culture and blues music, including ancient Egyptian and Nubian cultures.

Family, friends, art enthusiasts, and the curious strolled into the museum on opening night, June 30. They took note of the “blues” in two- and three-dimensional forms while bluesman Mick Kolassa sang and played guitar.

The music complemented Fulton’s artwork and provided some respite from the sweltering heat. “Crossroads 2 Memphis” will hang for six months and closes the end of December.

“I want to show a level of creativity that is different from a Southern perspective,” Fulton said. He has traveled the country and the world exhibiting his artwork at festivals, markets, conventions, and at other venues. 

“Crossroads 2 Memphis” is Fulton’s first full-scale art exhibit. The months-long exhibit exposes him to art appreciators and blues lovers alike. 

“He’s also the first Memphian and the first African-American artist, I believe, who has been with us on site here,” Horton said. “Most of the art that we have here has a direct correlation with the blues.”

“We’ve had great art in the past,” Ross added. “But there is so much going on in the pieces. It’s tangible. It gets at that connection between Memphis and the Delta in powerful ways.”

Fulton describes his artwork as folklore. It’s a retelling of stories with historical significance. Like the syncopated rhythm of blues music, the artist is not pigeonholed to how he creates art. 

He’s comfortable with creating cotton fields, shacks, or any other subject matter in watercolors, acrylics, tinfoil, metal, aged wood, window frames, burlap, and more. He said much of his artwork is derived from found material.

One such piece is an antique rocking chair. It would be a simple rocker if Fulton hadn’t embellished it with images from Egyptian culture, such as obelisks and the Eye of Horus (The Third Eye).

He also adorned the rocker with shacks, cotton fields, and guitars, bringing it up to the age of modernity.

“I also used these things called the four entities, or the four seasons,” said Fulton, a 1976 graduate of the Memphis College of Art. “So, on each chair, I put nations of music, which is jazz, blues, country and gospel.” 

He titled the piece “The Cotton Rocker.” The concept came from the tomb of Ramesses III during his dynasty, he said. 

“There are names under the chair itself that date from 1885 to 1965,” said Fulton, adding, “I’m incorporating everything to tell the story.”

Other works on exhibit are just as intriguing, such as “Feeling His Music,” a multi-media piece painted on rusty corrugated tin of a bow-tied blues player strumming his guitar with another set of hands stroking a keyboard. 

“Crossroads 2 Memphis,” the exhibit’s namesake, utilizes a pleated wooden window with images of guitars, a cotton field, a pyramid, and The Third Eye. The image of a person is also fused into the background. 

“Every time I look at the pieces, I see something new,” Ross said.

For more information, contact The Blues Foundation at (901) 527-2583.

Campbell’s ‘Foot’ Man Character Honors ‘60s ‘Foot Soldiers’

 

Stanley Campbell Sr. as the Memphis 
“Foot” Man on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
in Selma, Ala. (Courtesy photo) 

MEMPHIS, TN – A small town in Mississippi felt eerie to Stanley Campbell Sr. in March when he was scouting for a spot to film a character that he’d created to pay tribute to the “foot soldiers” of the civil rights movement.

He described the area as wooded with trees hovering over him. He’d mistakenly turned down a beaten path and noticed that pieces of clothing were strewn where he’d ventured a quarter mile on foot.

“I’d turned down the wrong road,” Campbell said. He was looking for an ideal location to shoot video of himself as the Memphis “Foot” Man – but not down this eerie path into nothingness.

He was unaware that he’d veered not far from Philadelphia, Miss., where civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were murdered and buried in 1964.

He shuddered just thinking about their gruesome death and regretted that he’d gone off course. “I don’t want to do that again,” he admonished himself. “I didn’t know what I was thinking.” 

He’d begun imagining Black bodies swinging from taut tree limbs, the Klan, the worst. His nerves were frayed. Then Billy Holiday’s hauntingly graphic song, “Strange Fruit,” came to his mind.

She sang: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees…”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t see bodies hanging from trees,” said Campbell, adding, “I was in a time zone that went back to the 1960s.”

Then it dawned on him that the wooded area was conducive for a video shoot after all. 

“It was the best decision I’d made,” said Campbell, a visual artist, playwright, producer, activist, humanitarian, and owner of The House of Mtenzi, a museum that honors his late mother, Thelma Brownlee.

Campbell, the youngest of nine children, had been to the 58^th annual [Edmund Pettus] Bridge Crossing Jubilee in Selma, Ala., and wandered through the heart of Mississippi en route to Memphis.

“I was in the Deep Delta,” said Campbell, and transformed himself into the Memphis “Foot” Man, one who travels “one step at a time” to “remind, educate and rebuild,” his motto.

Since his character’s creation in March, Campbell’s Memphis “Foot” Man has traveled to once turbulent areas during the civil rights movement where gallant foot soldiers trod by day and night seeking justice and freedom.

He’s been to Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., where The Little Rock Nine in 1957 were confronted by an angry white mob and the Arkansas National Guard for trying to enter the school building.

He also traveled to Tulsa, Okla., where a white mob in 1921 rained down bombs on “Black Wall Street” in the Greenwood District and massacred scores of Black residents in this wealthy Black community.

At home, in Memphis, the “Foot” man called attention to Room 306 at the National Civil Rights Museum, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was staying on that fateful day in 1968 when it was The Lorraine Motel.

The Memphis “Foot” Man, Campbell explained, embodies “the image of all the civil rights fighters – the 1960s trench coat, the skinny necktie, the shades, the brim” – who fought valiantly to change the status quo.

“When I see the face, the image, of the Memphis ‘Foot’ Man, it gives me a visible illusion of the past, the present and the future,” said Drew McCraven III, CEO of Millennial Entertainment and a Campbell ally.

“The picture from Selma, Ala., that he took puts you in the mindset of what our ancestors had to go through in the process of their struggle when they marched across the bridge in Alabama, in Selma,” McCraven explained.

He continued: “When I look at the picture of him in the mask with the flag of the United States, it takes me through the struggle of where we are now and where we are going. That’s what he represents.”