The Life and Times of Sol White
— by Gary Ashwill
The following essay has been re-published from “Sol White’s Official Baseball Guide” with the express permission of Summer Game Books.
In the spring of 1907 a team called the Philadelphia Giants started selling a small paperbound book at their games. Its cover said it was the History of Colored Base Ball, by Sol White, captain of the Giants, the “World’s Colored Champions.” Inside, the title page called it Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, and added that it had been edited by H. Walter Schlichter (who also held the copyright). At 5 ¾ by 3 ½ inches, it could be described as a thick pamphlet or even a “brochure,” as White would later call it. The book’s 128 pages were packed with tiny print and photographs illustrating the exploits of professional African American ball clubs and their players going back a little more than 20 years. It also featured essays on “How to Pitch,” by Rube Foster, the best black pitcher in the country, and “The Art and Science of Hitting,” by Grant Johnson, the best black everyday player. Like a game program, it was sprinkled with advertisements, mostly for businesses related to the Philadelphia Giants or run by the owners of other black teams, as well as a few other Philadelphia-area concerns. And for good measure White and Schlichter reprinted “Casey at the Bat” and its sequel, “When Casey Slugged the Ball.”
Just four years earlier, W. E. B. DuBois had declared in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” It was certainly baseball’s problem. The tentative reconstruction era that baseball had undergone in the 1880s, when dozens of black players, and a few black teams, infiltrated the minor leagues and even (briefly) the majors, had shuddered to a halt in the 1890s. The last black player to appear in organized baseball was Bill Galloway, who played in five games for the Woodstock club of the Canadian League in 1899. By 1907 a “veil,” as DuBois would put it, had descended over the world of black baseball. Sol White’s little book was a guide to this world.
Even as the minor leagues were struggling with the idea of racially-integrated dressing rooms, all-black professional teams were forging ahead, finding opponents and venues, attracting crowds, making (at least some) money. Sol White identified the Cuban Giants, founded in 1885, as the first black professional club; in fact, they were “neither giants nor Cubans,” and may not have been the first professionals. But they did make by far the biggest splash on the sporting scene of any African American team to that point, getting dates with big league clubs within only a few weeks of their founding. They spawned imitators and competitors, and so many of them called themselves “Giants” that the name eventually became a code word or euphemism meaning “black baseball team.” By the time Sol White was leading the Philadelphia Giants, dozens of African American professional or semiprofessional clubs (most of them Giants of one sort or another) dotted the country.
But this was not yet the era of the Negro leagues. The teams were not organized, and did not actually spend most of their time playing each other. In 1903, for example, the Philadelphia Giants played 130 games, but only 7 of those were against other black professionals. The rest were against white teams — minor leaguers, college teams, semipros. It’s crucial to understand that the world Sol White describes in his Guide was a sports world very different from anything we’d recognize now. The minor leagues were free and existed for their own sake, to run their own pennant races, rather than just to develop players for the majors. And beyond the minor leagues were the independent professionals, or semipros. They represented small cities and towns that weren’t in leagues — but they also existed in big cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston. In those pre-television, pre-radio days there was a huge demand for live baseball, and even Philadelphia, with two major league teams, had room for a more local, and cheaper, brand of diamond entertainment.
A reporter, writing about Sol White in 1927, said that he had “given his life, unselfishly, to the game purely for the love of it…Some others went into the game to make money, and made it, but Sol takes greater pride in having watched the game develop to where it is today, although he has no money to show for it.” No doubt this is true; still, as this book shows, money was greatly important to White, both as a player and as a manager. He was, after all, trying to make a living, and later trying to keep money-making enterprises afloat. It’s worth reflecting that in 1907 slavery was still well within living memory, and that it was even more recent in the 1880s when White begins his story. Several of the original Cuban Giants — and most of Sol White’s immediate family — were born in slave states before the Civil War. Though their early histories are not known in detail, it seems virtually certain that some of them were born into slavery — or at the very least possessed intimate knowledge of the institution. Now they were attempting to make baseball their profession. And while this was a possible path for African American men around the turn of the century, it was not an easy one, and it did not typically produce a stable, steady career progression — as a look at Sol White’s own life and career shows.
Sol White the Ballplayer
Sol White’s family background is hazy, though there are a few things we do know. He was born (as he tells us) in Bellaire, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, on June 12, 1868. His parents and four older siblings were all born in Virginia; the circumstances of the family’s arrival in Ohio remain unknown. Within two years of his birth his father was dead and his mother, Judith White, a washer woman according to the 1870 census, was raising five children alone. As a boy Sol hung around a local team called the Globes. One day in 1883, playing against a Marietta, Ohio, team captained by Ban Johnson (who would go on to found the American League), a Globes player hurt his finger and had to come out of the game — so they drafted Sol to take his place.
He had heard stories of Bud Fowler, the black professional ballplayer. The Cuban Giants had been founded in 1885, and Frank Grant joined the Eastern League and then the International League in 1886. The idea of a career in baseball for a black man may not have seemed so far-fetched to Sol. When the National Colored League started up in 1887, he saw his chance, and earned a spot on the Pittburgh Keystones. Unfortunately the league didn’t live up to Sol’s ambitions. It crashed within a couple of weeks, leaving players stranded hundreds of miles from home with no money, and while the Keystones struggled through as an independent team, Sol went back home to sign with the Wheeling club of the Ohio State League.
It’s clear that had he been white, he would have been a huge major league prospect. As a 19-year-old third baseman with Wheeling in 1887, he batted .370 and slugged .502, with 20 extra base hits in 53 games. His teammate, the catcher/outfielder Jake Stenzel, hit .387 and slugged .474, with 8 extra base hits in 41 games. Stenzel would go on to play over 700 games as a major league outfielder, batting .338 with a 134 OPS+. Eventual Hall of Famer Ed Delahanty, the same age as White, hit .351 and slugged .475 as a second baseman for the Mansfield club in the same league — and wound up with a lifetime .346 average in the big leagues, and a 152 OPS+. While Delahanty and Stenzel were certainly outliers (there were other comparable hitters in that league who did not go on to great major league careers), the fact remains that White as a player was showing similar abilities at a similar age, and would certainly have gotten every chance to make a similar mark in the majors if it weren’t for the color line.
What happened next was Sol White’s first substantial experience with baseball Jim Crow. In the off-season the league (now renamed the Tri-State League) passed a rule barring all black players. The Wheeling Register noted that “[v]ery many of our citizens will regret this on account of Sol. White, as he was a favorite with the patrons of the game in this city, being not only one of Wheeling’s best players, but also a perfect gentleman in his actions.” Weldy Walker, the former major leaguer and catcher for the Ohio State League’s Akron team, wrote a fiery letter denouncing the action, which was published in The Sporting Life. Within a few weeks the ban was rescinded. The president of the Wheeling club, aware of White’s popularity, promptly signed him and sent him to meet the team at Lima, Ohio — but the new manager, Al Buckenberger (who would later manage the Pittsburgh Pirates), apparently did not want a black player on the team, and White was turned away.
With the exception of one interlude in 1895, White would spend the rest of his career on all-black teams, although a few of them would play in white leagues. For the rest of the 1888 season he re-signed with the Pittsburgh Keystones. In August he accompanied them to a four-team “Colored Championship” tournament put on by John M. Bright in New York. The Keystones finished second to Bright’s own Cuban Giants.
The next few years were a whirlwind of teams and leagues for White. Primarily an infielder, he played virtually every position. Like all the other best black players of this era, he was caught up in the battle between the Cuban Giants and their arch-rivals, the New York Gorhams, who competed both on the field and off, constantly raiding each other for players. White spent two different spells with the Gorhams, and all or part of five seasons with the Cuban Giants. He also played for the 1890 York Colored Monarchs, a white-owned club that signed up most of the 1889 Cuban Giants; a revived version of the Pittsburgh Keystones in 1892; the Boston Monarchs in 1893; the Hotel Champlain team in Bluff Point, New York, which was organized by the head waiter Frank P. Thompson, one of the men who had founded the Cuban Giants; the Fort Wayne, Indiana, club in the 1895 Western Interstate League (White’s last experience in a white minor league); and the Page Fence Giants of Adrian, Michigan, one of the great black teams of the nineteenth century. At various times his teams played in the Middle States League, the Eastern (and Western) Interstate League, the New York Semiprofessional League, and the Connecticut State League. During these years his wages advanced from the paltry $10 a week he earned as a catcher/infielder with the ’89 Gorhams to the $75 to $80 a week he got from the ’95 Page Fence Giants and Ft. Wayne teams.
Two key developments in White’s life took place after he spent the 1896 season with the Cuban Giants. First, he entered Wilberforce University as a preparatory student, and spent the next four years playing ball in the summer and studying in the winter. Second, he left the Cuban Giants for the Cuban X-Giants. The “X” signified “ex-Giants,” as the team had been founded when a group of Cuban Giants became fed up with John M. Bright’s sharp dealing and left. They engaged Edward B. Lamar to be their business manager, and played on the “cooperative plan,” “a system whereby all expenses were deducted from the gross receipts and the balance evenly distributed between the players.” White had stayed loyal to Bright for one season after the X-Giants revolution, but eventually decided to join. Put together, his entrance into college and his defection to the co-op team seems to reflect an interest in bettering his situation, achieving a measure of self-determination.
His next stop, after leaving school, was the Columbia Giants of Chicago. They were formed in 1899 when the Columbia Club, an organization of young black businessmen in Chicago, purchased the Page Fence Giants from the team’s white backers. After just one season in Chicago, White returned to the Cuban X-Giants for another year. Then in 1902 he teamed up with H. Walter Schlichter, sports editor of the Philadelphia Item (a white paper), and Harry Smith, baseball editor of the Philadelphia Tribune (a black paper), to found the Philadelphia Giants. For the first time Sol White would serve as captain and manager.
“The Strongest Organization of the Time”
Now he entered the years that he would later consider “the heyday of his glory,” the years when he made the Philadelphia Giants champions and wrote the book that might be his true legacy. The Philadelphia Giants kicked up a rivalry with White’s old team, the Cuban X-Giants, that echoed the Gorhams/Cuban Giants rivalry of the previous decade, especially in their propensity for stealing each other’s players. In 1903 the Cuban X-Giants, behind a young fireballer from Texas named Andrew Foster, defeated White’s Giants 5 games to 2 to claim the “colored base ball championship of the world.” So White and Schlichter signed Foster from the X-Giants, along with Charlie Grant and a young Pete Hill. When they met the X-Giants again for the black championship a year later, Foster set the tone by striking out 18 of his former teammates in the first game, and Philly took the series 2 games to 1.
In 1905 White brought in the X-Giants captain and manager, Grant Johnson (who had actually twice been White’s manager, with the Page Fence Giants and Columbia Giants), along with their lefthanded ace, Danny McClellan, and the coup was complete. Now he had what he called “the strongest organization of the time.” The Giants won 134 games, lost only 21, and tied 3, sweeping four games against the Newark International League team and winning 12 out of 13 games (with one tie) against the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the only major black team they faced that year.
They could not stay on top for long. The 1905 Philadelphia Giants, for all their impressive firepower, were a precarious financial balancing act; they were too dominant, and had trouble booking enough truly high-profile games against worthy opponents. E. B. Lamar of the X-Giants, having been robbed of nearly all his stars, refused to meet the Giants; so did the All-Cubans, the team of Cuban League stars run by Abel Linares. So in 1906, when those erstwhile punching bags the Royal Giants offered Grant Johnson a big salary to be their player-manager, White and Schlichter couldn’t stop him from leaving. Soon after, a new club called the Quaker Giants, run by the McMahon brothers from New York, signed away Bill Monroe and Chappie Johnson.
Despite these setbacks, the Giants won the 1906 championship of the local, racially-integrated International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs, as well as the informal colored championship. That same year Sol White wrote his Official Base Ball Guide, outlining the history that had led up to this point. Unfortunately, just as he had already lost Grant Johnson to the Royal Giants, he now lost Rube Foster (and a couple of other players) to the Leland Giants of Chicago. White compensated by bringing in a young second baseman named John Henry Lloyd from the Cuban X-Giants (which disbanded after 1906) and making him into a shortstop. The International League was replaced by the avowedly black National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs, organized by Schlichter and New York promoter Nat C. Strong. The Giants won their second straight pennant, which doubled as their fourth straight blackball championship.
Difficulties continued to beset the club in 1908, including more defections — Rube Foster signed away Pete Hill and Emmett Bowman (who was one of White’s particular favorites) — and the death of pitcher George Washington (“the Georgia Rabbit”), who suffered a heart attack in the team’s dressing room before a game he was scheduled to pitch in Winsted, Connecticut. White and the Giants persisted. They even ventured into the lion’s den in Chicago and managed to tie the Lelands, 3 games to 3. But in the end they lost the black championship of the National Association to Grant Johnson’s Royal Giants. More damagingly, the partnership at the heart of the team, between White and Schlichter, broke up. In later years White admitted to being “high strung” during this period, which may have contributed to their falling out. Whatever started the “misunderstanding,” it led to White leaving the team and joining the Quaker Giants for 1909 — whereupon Schlichter had White and his club, along with another black team, Pop Watkins’s Stars, “outlawed” by the National Association. Observers noted that this amounted to “the white managers of the colored clubs” keeping out the black managers.
“The Peer of All Managers”
In 1910 Sol White was hired to manage the Royal Giants, but only after Schlichter agreed to remove him from the National Association’s blacklist. According to the sportswriter Harry Daniels, two of the Royal Giants’ best players, outfielder/pitcher Charles Babcock Earle and shortstop Bill Monroe, ignored White and seemed to be the “real bosses themselves.” Daniels criticized John W. Connor, the Royal Giants’ owner, for hiring the “peer of all managers” and then not allowing him to do his job. One might wonder if White was losing his touch. If so, it didn’t stop the McMahon brothers from appointing him in 1911 to organize their new team, the Lincoln Giants, which was to play in Harlem’s Olympic Field. White signed John Henry Lloyd and outfielder Spottswood Poles. When in July he plucked the “crack battery” of youngsters Dick Redding and Louis Santop from the roster of the Philadelphia Giants, he sealed the fate of his old team — Schlichter disbanded the Giants within weeks. At the same time White had assembled the core of the next great African American baseball team, one that in 1913 would defeat Rube Foster’s American Giants for the “negro baseball championship of the United States.” Sol White would not be around to savor this victory, however. Before the Lincolns’ first season was even over, he had left the team for unspecified reasons, replaced as manager by Lloyd.
White made one last stab at success in fast company. For the first time he left the U.S. in pursuit of his baseball career, joining the Fe club in the Cuban League, and staffing it with black American players. It was a collaboration with his old ace pitcher, Rube Foster — both brought players from their respective 1911 teams, plus a few more from the St. Louis Giants and Leland’s Chicago Giants. Unfortunately, the cream of African American baseball at the time — Joe Williams, John Henry Lloyd, Pete Hill, and Grant Johnson — had all joined the Habana club. The Sol White-Rube Foster team-up got off to a slow start, and the Fe management was exceedingly impatient. They lost five of their first six games, culminating in a 13 to 2 humiliation by Habana on January 29, 1912. After this game seven of the American players plus White were let go.
That was pretty much the end of the primary phase of Sol White’s career at the top of the African American baseball world. In 1912 he was reported to be organizing a team owned by Ambrose Hussey, a well-known white promoter, to play at the Ridgewood Grounds in Brooklyn. Called the “Boston Giants,” even though it was organized in New York, the team made no stir whatsoever — there was virtually nothing about it in the press, and White (through Calvin) later admitted that “business was dull” that year. Despite rumors that White and Schlichter had gotten together again to revive the Philadelphia Giants, or that White would undertake to manage the Pittsburgh Giants, in fact he retired from the game. He went home to Bellaire, Ohio, for the first sustained period since he began playing ball in 1887.
Whatever he did in Bellaire during his retirement, around 1918 White began to get restless, evincing a renewed interest in baseball, and talking putting together a team in Columbus, Ohio. In 1919 he wrote a series of articles for the Cleveland Advocate on black baseball. Meanwhile his old ace pitcher, Rube Foster, founded the Negro National League (NNL) in 1920. After its first season, the Dayton Marcos franchise was moved to Columbus and renamed the Buckeyes, and White joined the organization as secretary. Lloyd was engaged as player-manager for the 1921 season, but despite his and White’s efforts, the team sank to sixth place and folded at the end of the season.
Sol White reemerged right away in 1922 as manager of a second-tier club in Cleveland, the Fears Giants, and followed this up by taking to the dugout as field manager of another NNL team, the Cleveland Browns, in 1924 (his first manager’s job at the highest level in a dozen years). White brought in his old third baseman from the Philadelphia Giants, the 45-year-old Bill Francis, and one of his outfielders was the 19-year-old Vic Harris, who would become a legendary manager for the Homestead Grays in the 1930s. But in the end the Browns were no better than the Buckeyes. Under White’s tutelage they went 11–20. He left in early July, replaced by the team’s catcher, Otto “Jaybird”Ray.
Shortly afterward White seems to have moved east. In December 1924 he disclosed a plan to W. Rollo Wilson of the Pittsburgh Courier to create a farm team for the Eastern Colored League (ECL) that would take players on loan from the various league clubs and “bring them up to major league ability.” While it’s unclear whether this plan ever saw fruition, in 1926 he became involved with a new ECL club, the Newark Stars. The “young and progressive manager,” Andy Harris, signed White as coach and advisor. Wilson commented that “in his day” White “was cock o’ the walk and the king-pin strategist of Negro baseball. Now he comes back to the game he knows and loves so well, and the week’s salute goes to him, the mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream (if Mons. V. Hugo will pardon me).” But all White’s experience and Harris’s youth and new ideas didn’t avail the Stars, who won only one of the eleven ECL games they managed to play before they folded up. This was the last big league team he was ever involved with.
“A Wealth of Information”
Sol White may have retired from baseball, but that didn’t mean he had lost interest in the sport. In 1927 a major article by Floyd J. Calvin about his life and career, evidently based on extensive conversations with White, appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier. White “has been close to the game since its beginnings in 1885,” Calvin wrote, “and he hardly talks about anything else.” He certainly wrote about it extensively. Back in 1908 a second printing of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide added 9 more pages of text entitled “History of Colored Base-Ball During 1907.” It’s possible that the original intention was to produce subsequent editions, updated annually with supplements to bring the story up to date. This wasn’t to be. But reportedly by 1927 White had a second volume already written, described by Calvin as “a kind of second edition to his old one, bringing the game from 1907 down to date, and if there is anybody anywhere in sports circles who thinks enough of what has gone before to help Sol print his record, he will be glad to hear from them.”
Over the next decade White produced a series of columns and stand-alone articles for eastern African American newspapers, mostly the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. It could be that some of these pieces were drawn from the manuscript mentioned by Calvin. In a 1936 letter, Schlichter suggested that White go “see the Editor of your colored paper and try to sell him a history of colored baseball which you could write either as a single article or as a series. Except for recent years you have all the data in the book and I would be glad to furnish the cuts and pictures. It looks to me to be worth trying.” He was evidently unaware that White had already been writing such articles for years. As late as 1940 White was still consulting Schlichter about “the feasibility of another brochure with a more elaborate discussion, or rather, comments about teams, managers and players, the ‘game’ and the pertinence of the business…”
Meanwhile the reputation of his little 1907 book grew, even as actual extant copies of it dwindled. By 1927, Calvin was writing that “Sol’s personal copy of his own book is the only one he knows about and it would be a historical tragedy if this should be lost.” In 1936 H. Walter Schlichter had two copies left. He agreed to send one to White, who had evidently requested it, but “[t]he other one I will not part with at any price.” In 1953 a collector of baseball guides placed an appeal in the Pittsburgh Courier, hoping that copies of White’s book “may be in the hands of your subscribers who are no longer interested in them.” The sportswriter Malcolm Poindexter, Jr., penned a column about White’s book in 1954. “Few copies are available today,” he wrote, “but in the text is a wealth of information about the beginning of professional baseball….What a pity such great heritage is lost in the pages of a few volumes.”
Despite its lack of availability (until recent decades) Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide has exerted a tremendous influence on our understanding of the early black game. Its value was already clear when it was first published. Promotional copy that ran in both the Indianapolis Freeman and the Baltimore Afro-American was pretty accurate:
“Sol White’s ‘History of Colored Base Ball’ is just off the press. It is unique, in that no history of the popular pastime, as played by colored men, has ever before been written. No one knows more of the progress of the game better than he, and he writes most entertainingly. In addition to the full tale of the progress of the game there are nearly a hundred half-tone pictures of old-time and present-time colored players, including all of the present-day celebrities, and a number of groups of the prominent teams of this and past years.”
The ad copy rightly concentrated on the book’s visual legacy, which is enormous (if overstated; the book actually contained 54 images rather than “nearly a hundred”). While some of the photographs here circulated independently of White’s book, most of them are known only from these pages. The formal studio photographs of the Cuban Giants players in suits and ties are particularly valuable, historically speaking; for many of them, these are the only known images other than an appearance or two in team photos.
The book carried a significance beyond the photographs, of course. It has helped shape our perceptions of early black baseball, especially in its focus on the Cuban Giants as the first African American professional team. While it’s hard to establish particulars in all cases, professionalism of one sort or another certainly antedated the Cubans. Philadelphia, for example, was said in 1882 to possess a “nine of colored professionals,” most likely the Orions, one of the Cuban Giants’ predecessors. The 1883 St. Louis Black Stockings were called “colored professionals,” as were the 1884 Gordon Club of Chicago and the (black) 1884 Metropolitan Base Ball Club of New York. As was the case with white baseball, it seems probable that professionalism grew in stages, and that there was no hard, clear line dividing the amateur from the professional era. In general, Sol White exhibited a (pardonable) bias toward events in the northeast, with a few nods to Chicago. There’s no mention of the 1886 Southern League of Colored Base Ballists, which preceded the National Colored League by one year as the first Negro league.
Another notable characteristic of White’s Guide is its complete lack of statistics. It’s without a doubt the most striking difference between this Official Base Ball Guide and the Reach and Spalding guides, which were mainly statistical compendia. The vast majority of Giants games were not league games, of course, although even the International League of 1906 and the National Association of 1907–1909, with very limited schedules of championship games, never published any individual playing statistics. One guesses that, as captain, manager, and sometime player, White simply didn’t have time to compile statistical summaries from score sheets, and didn’t have the money to hire someone to do it for him. The best he could do was to reprint box scores that were more or less identical to the box scores that appeared in the Philadelphia Item and other daily papers. Due to lack of resources and (to some extent) lack of interest on the part of team owners, problems with statistics would afflict African American baseball as long as the color line held, eliciting many complaints from fans, journalists, and players themselves.
It might be an exaggeration to claim that before Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide, there was no such thing as black sportswriting — but it would not be too much of one. Even in the black press, published material about African American baseball teams and players was largely confined to box scores, game accounts, and brief items. After White published his book, everything began to change. Black baseball journalism became an identifiable genre. The Indianapolis Freeman led the way, opening its pages to the likes of Dave Wyatt, Cary B. Lewis, James H. Smith, and Harry Daniels, who wrote analyses and prognostications, picked all-star teams, and argued with each other. The New York Age, Chicago Defender, and Indianapolis Ledger followed suit, pointing toward the golden age of black sportswriting in the 1920s, when nationally-distributed papers like the Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier devoted two or three whole pages to sports each week.
If Sol White’s book was unique in its day, it remained unique for decades afterwards. There were a few pamphlets published about black baseball, along with programs, some short-lived magazines, and yearbooks, and of course there was the voluminous newspaper coverage over the years. But there were no books solely devoted to the Negro leagues and African American diamond exploits — nothing with the scope and ambition of White’s history, nothing that brought all the threads together and gave them shape and meaning the way he did. There were experts and scribes (Dave Wyatt, W. Rollo Wilson, Frank Young, Halley Harding, and many more) who could have produced a whole library of books, on baseball and other sports, if they’d been given the chance. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Sol White’s magnum opus would at last find companions to sit beside it on the bookshelf of black baseball history.
Sol White would live to see Jackie Robinson finally break the color line in 1947. He would live to see Larry Doby and Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe follow Robinson. He would live to see the arrival of Minnie Miñoso and Willie Mays, before he finally passed away in 1955. While we have no record of his thoughts about these momentous events, we should count ourselves fortunate that history did preserve his detailed accounts of baseball behind the color line from a half-century before.