Wednesday, June 22, 1927: New York City

Sol White. (“Every Day” — Part-2)

Myles Thomas

Published in

The Diary of Myles Thomas

10 min readNov 8, 2016

“Myles Thomas, I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine. Sol White.”

An old Negro is sitting at a small table that has been placed outside in the concrete courtyard behind the tenement building. While everyone around him is dancing, he is listening intently to the music. He looks close to 60. He is unusually thin. His hair is slightly outgrown, unevenly so, with tufts of white flecks like tiny cotton balls.

The table he is sitting at is part of the collection of furniture that was emptied out from the apartment above, where the rent party is being held, to make room for the band and dancing, and so that as many paying guests as possible can squeeze into the rent party. Such are the vagaries and economics of Negro life in Harlem. The way the dining room table and its chairs, the living room sofa, a large sitting chair, and three beds are arranged in the courtyard makes it looks like a theater set for one of Stanwyck’s plays.

“So, you’re a Yankee,” says Sol White, after Eyre introduces me. “It must feel good to be a Yankee this year.”

“It certainly has its moments,” I reply with a smile.

White doesn’t smile back. I had assumed when he said, “must feel good” that he was making a genial understatement, but apparently he meant it literally, as a straightforward declarative statement.

As I was about to discover, unlike other Negroes I have met, Sol White doesn’t use humor as a source of sustenance. In fact, he doesn’t use humor at all. He is as serious and as sober a man as I have ever met, one whose opinion of the world has been hardened every day, for almost 60 years.

“King” Solomon White, courtesy *Ars Longa Art Cards*

“Sol was also a ballplayer, Myles,” Eyre says as we sit down at the outdoor dining table, “and not just just your run-of-the-mill ballplayer, either. Sol was one of the great ones.” White doesn’t smile at this compliment. He simply nods his head in agreement.

“Sol just retired last year after 45 years in the game — and he played on some of the greatest teams ever assembled.”

“That’s right,” says White, punctuating Eyre’s storytelling.

“And not only did he play on great teams, he also put one together, the mighty Philadelphia Giants with Grant ‘Home Run’ Johnson and Rube Foster.”

“Yes, I did,” says White, almost to himself.

I consider telling Eyre and White about my visit to see Foster in the Kankakee asylum with Benny Morton and Jimmy Yancey last month, but then think better of it. (Perhaps Benny Morton told Eyre about our trip? Perhaps that’s why Eyre brought me to meet Sol? Either way, I decide to let it be — I’m not the person to give Sol White a report on his old teammate’s descent into madness.)

**1904 Philadelphia Giants (Sol White third row, center)**

Eyre tells me stories about White and his contemporaries, a river of names: Ball, Grant, Foster, Fowler, Fleetwood, Monroe, Stovey, Taylor, Walker.

“Have you heard of any of those fine sportsmen?” asks White.

“I’ve heard of Mr. Foster,” I reply.

“Did you ever see him play?”

“Unfortunately, no sir. I never saw him play. But being a pitcher, I wish I had.”

“Rube Foster stood bestride the mound like a Colossus,” White says. “As good as any man who ever took the hill. As good as Mathewson or Johnson or Young or Ruth, back when Ruth pitched. And those other names you’ve never heard — Home Run Johnson and Frank Grant and Moses Fleetwood Walker — they were all fine men and great ballplayers, as good as any of the players of their time” — he looks me in the eye — “or since. Black or white.”

He nods his head up and down in support of his own point. “Black or white,” he repeats.

I look around and see no trace of Hoyt and Stanwyck. I imagine they’ve long ago gone, back through the kitchen window and are either dancing or drinking or simply gone. But I stay in the tenement courtyard for the next hour, as Sol White and Eyre Saitch, who looks after White, talk about Sol White’s life and times in baseball.

Once upon a time they tell me, in the 1880s, there were dozens of Negroes in the minors and even the majors — and also a few black teams in the minors — but slowly the color-line was drawn, and they were all pushed out.

“I was 19 years old when I was playing in Wheeling, West Virginia, back in 1887. That was the year that Cap Anson finally got the National League to lay down the color-line, after four years of tryin’. I wasn’t in the big leagues, but the directors of my league, the Tri-State, voted to keep out colored players, too — even though a couple of us were already there.

“I was one of the best and most popular players on the team — the Wheeling paper wrote about me. Then Moses Fleetwood Walker’s brother, Weldy, who like his brother was a college man from Oberlin as well as a ballplayer, wrote a letter that was published in The Sporting Life protesting the color-line.

“After all the protestations the league said we could play again. Once I heard that I traveled all the way to Lima, Ohio, from Wheeling to meet the team. But when I got there the new manager informed me he didn’t care if I was allowed to play, he didn’t want a colored man on his team — though he said it more crudely than that.”

“Of course, it was always rough before then — in order to play second base, Bud Fowler had to make shin guards, like catchers wear today, only his were made from wood because most of the white players would spike him anytime there was play around the bag.”

I jump in. “That’s how Ty Cobb slides.”

Sol White corrects me. “Ty Cobb hates everybody. The players I’m talking about hated Negroes.”

Eyre says to me, “Imagine a world where everyone who’s not your color is Ty Cobb.”

I can’t.

But I’m starting to.

Eyre and White tell me about how White played on all-Negro teams that were allowed in some white leagues because their race games were big draws.

White says that at first he, Fowler, Walker and the other Negroes thought the color-line might not hold. But over time it only got stricter and more solid, till he and the other players were locked out of all of the existing organized baseball leagues.

At the end of the century White moved to Philadelphia to help found one of the the best Negro teams of its time, the Philadelphia Giants. Over the next few years he brought Foster onto the team, and then Johnson. “As good as Foster was on the mound, that’s how good Johnson was at the plate.”

It’s after two, and Eyre suggests that Sol White head home to sleep.

“Isn’t it a little loud in there?” I ask Eyre, pointing up to the kitchen window from which we descended over an hour ago and the apartment where the party is still going full blast.

“Oh, that’s not Sol’s apartment,” he chuckles. “A neighbor just lent it to us for the party. That should give you a sense of how much everyone on this block loves Sol.”

“That’s right,” says White, without a trace of a smile.

We leave the courtyard and walk into the basement of the tenement and then down a hallway. Sol White opens up his subterranean apartment door.

Inside there’s just one window, up high, only inches below his ceiling. The light from the outside street lamp bounces off the glass, which is too caked with grime for it to shine through.

White flicks on the light switch. His apartment is just one room, perhaps 10 feet by 15, with a kitchenette and bathroom. As for furniture, on one side there is a bed with a steamer trunk at its foot, on the other side a dresser and a desk with a typewriter. There’s paper in the typewriter that’s stopped mid-sentence, and what looks like a manuscript of some sort alongside it. All around the floor are stacks of newspapers.

“I want to show you something,” White says. He opens up one of the desk drawers and takes out a small, thin, 6” by 4” red paperback book bound with stitching. He holds it out to show me the cover.

“History of Colored Base Ball.”

“By Sol White.”

“Captain of the Philadelphia Giants.”

“World’s Colored Champions.”

“It’s the last one I have left,” he says. “I had about a dozen of them, but they were lost a few years ago. Otherwise I would give you one.”

The last one. The cover of the book is torn.

“May I look at it?” I ask him, gently. I hear my own voice and it sounds as if I’m talking about holding a sleeping child.

White nods his head.

The book is only a bit over 100 pages, almost a third of them filled with photographs of Negro ballplayers, pictures of young men in the prime of their life — young men who must have truly loved the game to have stuck with it given the conditions under which they were forced to toil, after having been thrown out and had the doors locked behind them.

It is written in a straightforward style, exactly what I would expect having spent this time with White. There’s nothing purple about its prose, nor does there appear to be any bitterness on its pages.

I’m struck by how full of hope some of its passages are.

There are grounds for hoping that some day the color bar will drop and some good man will be chosen from out of the colored profession that will be a credit to all, and pave the way for others to follow.

I ask him if he still believes that.

“I do,” he tells me. “I wrote that 20 years ago, and I have believed it every day since then.”

Then Sol White closes his eyes and begins to recite his own words.

“Baseball is immune from attacks from all critics. From a scientific standpoint it outclasses all other American games. It should be taken seriously by the colored player, as honest efforts with his great ability will open an avenue in the near future wherein he may walk hand-in-hand with the opposite race in the greatest of all American games — base ball.”

Sol White opens his eyes.

And finally smiles.