cc >> Florencia Mallon: Well,
I think we'll get started. Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Florencia Mallon, chair of the History Department.
I wanted to welcome you to the first Selig
Distinguished Lecture in the History of Sport and Society.
I'd also like to point out that we'd like you to join us
for the reception immediately following in the Alumni Lounge.
As you will see in the brochure accompanying the lecture, this
is part of a broader initiative being carried out by the History
Department, with the generous support of the Commissioner of
Baseball, Bud Selig, who is here with us today, in the front row.
It's great to see you, Commissioner.
Thanks so much for coming. ( applause )
The commissioner's generous support is going to help us to
develop the emerging and very exciting scholarly field of the
history of sport in the United States.
In addition to establishing the Allan H. Selig chair in the
History Department here at UW, which we're looking forward to
filling soon, Commissioner Selig has generously offered to fund
these Distinguished Lectures, to help us educate ourselves
about this important and emerging field.
So thank you so much Commissioner, for your ongoing
generosity to the UW, and especially to the History
Department. Thank you so much.
( applause )
I would also like to thank our co-sponsoring departments
on the UW campus: Afro-American Studies,
Chican@ and Latin@ Studies, and Latin American, Caribbean
and Iberian Studies, all of which have helped us with
publicity and with organizing the events.
So thank you so much to all our colleagues.
Finally, I would like to call up to the podium, my colleague
in the History Department, Professor William Jones,
specialist in the 20th century history of the United States,
who will introduce our speaker, Professor Adrian Burgos, Jr.
( applause ) >> William Jones: Thanks,
it's great to see a big crowd. Thanks for coming out today.
I can't imagine a better person to be giving this lecture, this
inaugural lecture than Adrian Burgos.
He's an associate professor of history, African-American
studies, Latin-American and Caribbean studies and Latina and
Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Burgos is the author and editor of three books, including
Playing America's Game, Baseball, Latinos and the Color
Line, Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story
of African American Baseball, and Beyond el Barrio:
The Politics of Everyday Life in Latino/Latina America.
Playing America's Game was based on his dissertation
at the University of Michigan, and was awarded a number of
prestigious awards, including the Latina/Latino Book Award
from the Latin-American Studies Association, and Honorable
Mention for the best baseball book of 2007, and a Featured
Book on C-SPAN2, an award that most of us will have no chance
of ever getting. He's received prestigious
research awards from the Ford Foundation, the
National Baseball Hall of Fame, and a number of other places.
Adrian has also published widely in scholarly and popular press,
including the Journal of American Ethnic History,
Social Text, CounterPunch, and many others.
It's an impressive list that goes on for several pages.
He was the consultant and talking head on several films
on the history of baseball, and seems to be a regular feature
on radio, often sports radio, but also more general radio.
Today's talk is based on Adrian's next book,
which is due out in May. The book is entitled,
Cuban Star: How One Negro League Owner Transformed
Modern Baseball. Adrian, thank you for coming.
( applause )
Adrian Burgos: Thank you all for coming in the midst of
weather that's only baseball-- Well, a time of year it's only
baseball season in Florida and Arizona, perhaps.
Again, it's good to see some familiar faces, once again.
It's good to see a number of friends, and make new ones
while I'm here. I'd like to thank the History
Department for the invitation to share my work.
Commissioner Selig, for your generosity in creating this
lecture series which represents an important advance in the
critical study of sport and society within the academy.
My aim here today is to illustrate the powerful
resonance that the history of sport and society has in our
contemporary society, as well as how a historical understanding
of race relations, immigration, and ideas about American culture
are influenced by narratives that are woven from what takes
place on and about the playing field.
For me, the study of sport is always framed by critical
examination of the intersection of sport and society.
The matter sport at times is more than a reflection of
society, I see it often as a social laboratory for our
society. This is what the best of those
who write sports histories do. Here I must acknowledge the
invaluable work that the now departed Jules Tygiel did
in his book, Baseball's Great Experiment,
which set a standard for studying baseball to understand
race relations and the story of integration.
There are many others, Steven Reese, Amy Bass, Susan Cahn, who
are not merely interested in the performance on the terrain of
play, but in the social forces institutions and human actors
that shape the performance and its meaning for us as a society.
So what I want to do today is take you through a story.
One which is of Alex Pompez, but I'm going to teach it basically
in reverse chronological order. I'm going to bring the familiar
of today and then move backward through time to reveal his
story. To do that, I want to capture an
incident that occurred last year, a minor controversy, but
one that has powerful meaning for many of us who follow the
game. In 2010, a controversy emerged
over the comments of Torii Hunter, outfielder with the
Anaheim Angels. Part of a roundtable organized
by USA Today to discuss the current state and the future of
baseball, his comments sought to shed light on declining
participation of US-born blacks in baseball, and particularly
since its zenith in the 1970s. The comments you see there
angered some within the Latino community.
And it's noteworthy that now foreign-born Latinos represent
over 25% of all Major Leaguers. When you add those Latinos to
US-born Latinos, such as Alex Rodriguez, Eric Chavez, and
others, the number nears one-third of all Major League
players. Hunter's quote was, "People see
dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're
African-American. They're not us.
They're impostors. Even people I know
come up and say, 'Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero?
Is he a black player?'" And Hunter's response,
"Come on, he's Dominican. He's not black."
The story of what Hunter was trying to illuminate is indeed
about race, identity. But the way I see it, fails to
capture a longer history of America's game.
One that was about the participation, not just within
the United States, but across the Americas.
I want to share with you a timeline about the breaking of
the color line in baseball, and the place of Latinos within that
story.
So, 1947, April 15, to be exact, is an important moment in the
history of the game. It's when Jackie Robinson broke
the color line, the first African American to play in the
Major Leagues since the 1880s. Robinson did important work as
the initial integration pioneer. Over the next couple of decades,
the participation of blacks in baseball increased.
You see the zenith occurred in 1975, where according
to Richard Lapchick's center, approximately 28% of the players
in Major League baseball were black.
Note I said "black," not African American.
Because here is one of those big moments in the history of
the game, September 1, 1971. It's the Pittsburgh Pirates
when they fielded an all-black lineup.
But if you note, half the players in the starting lineup
of the Pittsburgh Pirates were Latin American and/or Latino:
Rennie Stennett from Panama, Roberto Clemente
from Puerto Rico, Manny Sanguillen from Panama,
Jackie Hernandez from Cuba. Those gentleman were included in
that 28% that was cited in 1975. So one of the things that has
occurred in how we as a society look at race is that there's a
bit of a disaggregation between how we count Afro-Latinos and
how we count African Americans. So where Torii Hunter was
seeking to shed light about race and place, he perhaps obscured a
couple of things that I think the story of Alex Pompez
highlights.
The story and the history of race in America's game has been
an ongoing one, in terms of capturing its essence, capturing
its importance. An individual that should
receive great credit for illuminating, casting light onto
the shadows is Ted Williams. He took the moment of his
induction speech in 1966-- And having interviewed some of
the journalists who were there that day, they still speak
with amazement on how he stunned them.
Among the words that Williams shared on the day of his
greatest glory in baseball was, "I hope some day Satchel Paige
and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame
as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here
only because they weren't given the chance."
So Williams took his grand moment to shed light on the
story of the Negro Leagues. His efforts began the first wave
of research into the story of black baseball.
Efforts to acknowledge organized baseball's Jim Crow past and its
history of segregation was launched through one effort
by the Hall of Fame, a blue ribbon panel, which
examined who within the Negro Leagues merited inclusion
in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Additionally, the recovery of
the story of the Negro Leagues was sped up tremendously due to
the work of Robert Peterson and his invaluable book,
Only the Ball Was White. In addition to that, the
formation of American baseball's researchers Negro League
committee did invaluable work, as the work of Jim Riley,
John Holloway, and John Coates, illuminated the stories of black
baseball. But there was another story
within that that had not yet been fully captured.
It's the story of Latinos and the color line.
Oftentimes in these stories that captured the history of the
Negro Leagues, Latinos were presented, at minimum,
not directly affected by the color line.
In my research for Playing America's Game, I found that
that was very much not the case. Approximately 240 Latinos
performed in the US black baseball circuit between
1890 and 1946. Meanwhile, during the same
period, 54 Latinos appeared in the Major Leagues.
During that span of time, by a ratio of over 4:1, Latinos were
playing in the Negro Leagues, versus playing in the major
leagues. One of the key figures in
bringing those Latinos into the Negro Leagues, and eventually
into the Major Leagues, was Alex-- Alejandro Pompez.
And mind you, this photograph here below is of the press
conference where the hall of fame, along with Commissioner
Bowie Kuhn, who's center seated, were announcing the formation
of the blue ribbon panel. To Bowie Kuhn's right is the
person who I affectionately refer to sometimes as the
Forrest Gump of baseball history, because he kept popping
up everywhere. The life story of Alejandro
Pompez embodied both the dreams deferred and the promise of
America's game with a twist. Someone who was an Afro-Cuban
American, who rose to reign as Harlem's numbers king, and then
remade himself strictly as a baseball entrepreneur and talent
evaluator or the highest order. I first became acutely aware of
Pompez's contribution to baseball history while
researching my first book on how Latinos were affected by
baseball's color line. Interestingly, his contributions
have been typically described as part of two distinct chapters,
as if his story didn't bridge the era of Jim Crow segregation
and the onset of baseball integration.
In fact, his name kept popping up in three distinct historical
literatures, what we like to call historiographies.
The historiography of the Negro Leagues, the historiography of
Latinos in baseball, and the historiography of Harlem and its
renaissance. My forthcoming book, Cuban Star,
is my effort to weave those disparate historical threads
together by taking an inside look at the sporting world,
and communities within which Alejandro Pompez operated to
eliminate the forces and actors who shaped who he was,
and how he became baseball's numbers king.
His story not only complicates how most scholars have written
about race in America and the working of color line--
what African American intellectual W.E.B. du Bois
astutely predicted would be the problem of the 20th century,
but also what we think we know about the dismantling
of baseball's color line. Simply put, many did not know
quite what to do with the fact that Pompez was a black Latino,
a "mulatto," who was also bilingual.
Attempts to place his story within traditional notions of
race and identity led to a conundrum.
Was it a story of a Cuban, a black man, an American,
or some combination therein?
Before you, you see some of the faces of players that Alejandro
Pompez either signed or influenced their career as they
entered into professional baseball in the United States.
Among them, Martin Diego, Orestes "Minnie" Minosa,
Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, among others as well.
Historians have not fully explored the people, events, and
circumstances that shaped Pompez as a man.
So I endeavored to unravel some of that mystery today,
surrounding his time in Harlem's numbers racket, his work as a
sports entrepreneur, and involvement in the desegregation
of organized baseball. His story is of an individual
who lived in between what others viewed, and sometimes sought to
maintain, as well-defined spaces.
Black and white, legal, illegal, good, criminal, citizen,
foreigner-- He was all of these,
often at the same time.
Pompez bridges baseball's two most important eras, I argue.
The era of the color line, and the era in which the color line
was dismantled. And Negro League owner, briefly
a Negro League president, and a Major League scout who became
the first Latino director of international scouting for any
Major League organization. Pompez's story encapsulates the
arc of race, opportunity, and America's game.
As someone who was black and Latino, he encountered race in
nearly all of its complexities when it came to baseball in the
Americas. That racial belief followed
wherever he traveled and persisted, regardless of his
station in life is captured in former Cuban baseball team
owner, Emilio de Armas's description of Pompez to
journalist Bob Heuer. This is what de Armas responded
when Bob Heuer asked, "Well, do you have any reflections
on Alex Pompez?" I'll read it in Spanish,
then I'll translate. ( speaking Spanish )
"He was a mulatto, he was black, but he was still
a good person." Such comments were often
standard fare, not extraordinary expressions of racial animus or
hatred. The words remind us that leaving
the United States for the Spanish-speaking Caribbean did
not mean Pompez entered into a race-free zone, lands were all
color blind, and everybody was race-neutral.
That place did not exist then, nor does it now.
This reality did not sour Pompez.
Most who knew him-- and here I refer to mostly the
ball players who I interviewed-- recall his warm smile,
endearing personality, and determination,
qualities that convinced most prospects, and especially their
parents, to place their trust in him when he was scouting them.
The story of Alex Pompez illustrates how the story of
Jim Crow and baseball integration are incomplete
without a discussion of Latin America and of Latinos'
long participation in U.S. professional baseball.
Part of the argument I advance here is that a transnational
framing of baseball history illuminates the broader terrain
of struggle against Jim Crow. And through that, we can gain a
better understanding of the participation and contribution
of Latinos, and particularly of Afro-Latinos.
Understanding the actors who created and participated in the
transnational circuit, outside of organized baseball during the
Jim Crow era, engages the connections between the English
and Spanish-speaking baseball worlds.
In so doing, we can trace the movement of talent, baseball
players, capital, the money to pay them, the money that fans
spend, and the information, newspapers, a vital source, that
unveiled a whole set of collaborators, and reveals that
the fight against segregation in U.S. professional baseball was
more than just a national story. It affected opportunities
for talented players in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican
Republic, Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America.
Alex Pompez's career in professional baseball spanned
seven decades, from his early Negro League days in the 1910s
through his Major League scouting up to 1972 for the
Giants organization. His Cuban Stars were the first
Negro League team to tour Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic,
which he did in 1960. He was also the first in either
the Negro Leagues or the majors to diversify his team roster
by dipping into Panama in 1921, the Dominican Republic, in 1926,
and Puerto Rico, in 1928. Such diversity was also
characteristic of his numbers operation.
So now I'm going to take you back through time, starting in
the more contemporary moment, or a more contemporary moment,
back to his beginnings. Integration was an uncharted
realm of experience for most within organized baseball.
As it unfolded in minor league towns and on Major League teams
across the United States, talented African American and
Latino players learned that lifelong lesson.
More than talent was required for them to secure a genuine
chance at a lasting professional career.
They had to persevere, despite the cultural adjustments
involved in pioneering integration.
That was regardless of whether they were a foreign-born Latino
or a U.S.-born black prospect. Importantly, the San Francisco--
well, at this point, they were the New York Giants--
placed Alex Pompez in charge of their organization's Latino
talent. And this was in 1955.
So each spring training, the team would gather in Melbourne,
Florida, and Alex Pompez was the one who was to assign their
rooms, to determine where they would be, and teach them lessons
about life in the U.S. south. What Pompez understood, and
Carl Hubbell Jack Schwartz, and Horace Stoneham came to
understand, that when it came to Latino players, and when it came
to many African American players, the cultural adjustment
from segregation into integration, from a
Spanish-speaking society into an English-speaking society, was
sometimes just as important to their ultimate success as a
player as learning how to hit a curve ball, or learning how to
move your pitches at just the right speed, at just the right
point. The former Negro League team
owner served as a cultural translator for many of the U.S.
Latino players. After all, he himself was U.S.
Latino, born in Key West, raised in Tampa, Florida, and who came
to Harlem in 1910 as a 20-year-old.
He could interpret social norms in the U.S. for them,
and translate them, so that they could have a better
understanding of the field beyond the playing field that
they had to traverse. So Pompez introduced the young
prospects to the rules of social and racial engagement.
Knowledge of such rules was immediately pertinent.
This was the first time, when they went to spring training
camp in Florida, for most of the Latinos to be exposed
to Jim Crow segregation. So his goal was to alleviate the
culture shock that these players inevitably experienced.
So as I mentioned, he supervised their living quarters, he made
roommate assignments, and he imparted, as Felipe Alou
remembered, almost every night, after practice were done, these
cultural lessons. And after several years, these
practices became institutionalized.
After the Giants moved their spring training for the minor
league camp from Florida to Surprise, Arizona, the new
complex that the Giants had came with a classroom where
Pompez and his scout, Horacio Martinez, would often
lecture to the young ball players after practice
about how to speak English, how to engage with the press,
and how to behave in public. The Giants made accommodations
on every hand. Some of the accommodations broke
stride with discriminatory practices, while others,
at times, seemed to conform to the rules and dictates of
segregation. In Melbourne, Florida, the
dormitory that housed the prospects featured a very
interesting form of integrated accommodations.
Players slept in the same dormitory building, but there
are no mixed race room assignments.
White prospects enjoyed the rooms on the first floor, as
Julio Novastro, Orlando Cepeda, Felipe Alou reminded me
as I interviewed them. The black and Latino recruits
were assigned a cluster of rooms on the second floor.
But what was interesting about this, and what had gone against
the dictates of Jim Crow, is that they were all in the same
building. In times past-- and this is what
Roberto Clemente and many other players encountered,
particularly the black American players--
they would have to reside in the black community, and not with
their fellow ball players. So what the Giants were doing
was truly breaking stride with what was dictated by many of the
rules. The Giants were able to do that
because they had bought out, just like the Dodgers did, a
former military base, and as private property, they could
have integrated facilities in the segregated south.
If it had been public land, things would have been quite
different.
So initially, Pompez used to do these roommates assignments, and
he would house the Dominicans with Dominicans, Cubans with
Cubans, and Puerto Ricans would follow Puerto Ricans until they
became a bit more comfortable with one another, and then they
started to mix it up. The Giants were the most active
team in the era of integration in Latin America due to the work
of Alex Pompez. In 1957, the Giants had
34 Latino and Latin American players in their farm system and
at spring training. This number included
Panamanian Vibert Clarke, Virgin Islander Valmy Thomas,
African American Willie McCovey, Leon Wagner,
and Bahamian Andre Rogers. That gives you an indication of
the terrain that Alex Pompez scouted for the Giants
organization. Signed in November 1955,
Dominican Felipe Alou counted himself among those who
benefited from Pompez's spring training rap sessions at the
minor league camp. A nightly ritual emerged where a
group of Latinos would load up at the Pompez Packard, and he
would drive them to a local ice cream parlor, and then he
would drive them back once they finished.
And I asked Alou, you know, why was this?
And he said, racism was very strong at that time in
Melbourne, and he wouldn't let us walk.
Basically, the only way he would let them leave the spring
training facility is by shepherding them there.
Part of that was because an incident occurred at the 1956
spring training camp where one of the players--
and again, I spoke with this with Julio Navarro--
a friend of mine who had done, actually I misspoke
before, a friend of mine had done the Felipe Alou interview.
And in both instances, in these interviews, they both remembered
this particular incident where a player whistled at a group of
high school girls who were walking in front of the spring
training facility. And if you recall, 1956 is a
year after Emmett Till. And Pompez and the other
administrators, the scouts and personnel, were enraged that
this had occurred. And so Pompez gathered up all
the Latino players and took them to a room, and basically scolded
them. And he was like, I don't want to
know who did it. I don't want to even know if one
of you did it. But from here on out, none of
you are even going to look at these young girls.
This is the south. You need to understand what are
the rules that are at play here. And Julio Navarro followed that
up in the interview I did with him, and he said, you know, in
reflecting back on it, Pompez-- he doesn't know how he slept
that night. Because you know with so many
players, or young prospects-- these guys were teenagers,
17, 18, 19 years old. Their first time in the States.
Hormones raging. And he had to look out for what
they were doing, and to be ready, at the ring of the phone,
to go get one of the players, to make sure they stayed out of
trouble. So Alou said, he used to explain
it as the rules of the game, and also the rules for blacks.
It was very important to have a male like him who knew the
society so well, to explain to us, the limitations we had.
You know, to protect us from falling into a problem of some
sort. Those are Felipe Alou's words.
A sense of obligation motivated Pompez to share the lessons that
he himself had come to learn and accept of working within the
system, of understanding the ways that race mattered, and of
having to make the adjustment in order to first survive, and then
succeed. Since his Negro League days, he
had witnessed many talented Latino players who did not make
it in professional baseball due to their inability to handle the
cultural adjustment. Of the Giants Latino prospects,
Pompez told journalist Robert Boyle in 1965, "When they first
come here, they don't like it. Some boys cry, and they want to
go home. But after they stay and make the
big money, they accept things as they are.
My main thing is to help them. They can't change the law."
Which is an interesting dynamic for Pompez to say, as I'll get
to in a few slides. He had his own confrontation
with the law, which he also really had to learn to--
you know. That he couldn't change the
laws, that he would have to change himself.
Evidence of the wily baseball man's successful work was all
around the big leagues by the early 1960s.
Cepeda, Marichal, Alou, McCovey, Pagan, among others, had all
come through the Giants minor league camp to become stars.
That success inspired Robert Boyle to examine the case of
Latin Negroes, as he called them, in the big leagues, in a
lengthy 1960s Sports Illustrated article.
Through this study, Boyle came to understand why Latinos such
as Felipe Alou would declare that Pompez was, "king to us."
Or similarly, what Manny Mota had to say, which was, "Alex was
like a father to all of us. He took us under his wing, he
prepared us in what to expect in a different country and a
different culture." San Francisco-based sportswriter
Bob Stevens concurred with the assessment that Pompez was more
than just a scout. According to Stevens, Pompez was
judge, advocate, and adviser to all Negroes and Latinos on the
Giants. Stevens added, "He helped with
contracts, told them about where to get haircuts, manicures,
neckties, and shoeshines. He instructed them in the use of
language in their place in baseball.
He explained to them wages and rights."
So Stevens, who observed the Giants throughout the '50s and
'60s, had an inside look at what was the work of Alex Pompez.
But the work that Pompez did for the New York San Francisco
Giants was not the first time he collaborated and helped others
work their way through, around the terrain of the color line.
Here's a picture from 1954. And there's two individuals who
are particularly noteworthy in this photograph, which are
Alex Pompez and Joe Cambria. Joe Cambria scouted for the
Washington Senators from 1934 through his death.
Which was, I believe, don't quote me, I think was 1965.
I don't know if you can fully see the screen there.
But you might notice where they're seated.
What the color of the faces all around them are.
They're at the front edge of what was, in Richmond, Virginia,
the, "colored section," at a game between the Syracuse Chiefs
and, I think it was, the Richmond Braves.
Pompez and Joe Cambria had forged a collaboration to work
around the color line in the 1930s, and they maintained that
association, yet even friendship, beyond the era of
baseball segregation. An article in August of 1932 in
the Washington Post illuminated a unique arrangement that Pompez
and Cambria had formed. The two agreed to allow
Ysmael "Mulo" Morales to continue playing with Pompez's
Cuban Stars for the 1932 season so that Morales could travel
around a bit, and pick up a little better English.
So this arrangement allowed for a different kind of seasoning
than most players get in the minor leagues.
It was so that Morales could get more cultural seasoning, and the
following year, sign with the Washington Senators.
So here's a case where you have a Cuban player who starts in the
Negro Leagues, and whose access would be brokered into organized
baseball. This was more than a one-time
transaction between Pompez and Cambria.
After 1934, Cuban Tommy de la Cruz, who had
pitched with Pompez's Cuban Stars team, was
transferred over to Joe Cambria's Albany
minor league team. And after many seasons in the
minor leagues, in 1942, Tommy de la Cruz would play
Major League baseball with the Cincinnati Reds.
So Pompez and Cambria learned about how to work around
baseball color lines in the pre-Robinson days.
The story that captures the complexity of that terrain, and
how to work around the color line, is captured in the story
of Carlos Blanco. Since its inception as the
Cuban Stars, Pompez's team had welcomed Latinos from the
lightest to the darkest in skin tone.
In fact, the Negro Leagues never discriminated amongst Latinos.
Any Latino could play in the Negro Leagues.
Occasionally, the Caribbean players that Pompez signed drew
interest from Major League organizations.
Team executives like Clark Griffith had a simple mantra to
defend the signing before fellow big league officials, the press,
and the public. And what Griffith and others
would emphasize is, he's not black.
He's Cuban. So they would play on national
identity as to mitigate what people actually saw before them.
So at various moments when what I label a racially ambiguous
Latino was presented to the public, Cambria and Griffith
would inform the press, No, no, no.
Roberto Estalella? He's not black.
He's Cuban. Or another player was
Puerto Rican, or Venezuelan. And that's how they were
shepherding these players. So this clearly played on racial
ambiguity, but it nonetheless provided the main means through
which Latin American players of different gradations of skin
color were ushered into organized baseball at a time
when all African Americans were excluded, and the majority of
Latinos who were deemed to have, too "Negroid an appearance,"
were likewise excluded. So towards the end of the 1942
season, the Washington Senators had begun to express interest in
an infielder on Pompez's team. His name was Carlos Blanco.
As the Senators and Pompez sought to negotiate the
transaction, Pompez pushing for more money, the Senators said,
well, you know, we have to look at him first.
They went to a game that was played in Connecticut
to scout out Blanco. And this is Fay Young wrote in
the Chicago Defender. "Pompez was more concerned in
getting Blanco into big time baseball than money, and he told
Griffith, he could have Blanco. However, the Washington Senators
interest in Blanco dissipated after the Senator scout observed
the Cubans' playing exhibition in Waterbury, Connecticut.
The issue that arose was not about his talent.
It was about how he looked. The Washington club's
representative was disappointed in two things about Blanco,"
Young noted. "One was his hair, which was not
the wavy Spanish type, but was more Negroid.
Second was that Blanco was too dark.
He had hoped to find Blanco of a decided Spanish type,"
close quote of Young. The Blanco episode reiterated
the fickle nature of racial perceptions.
Blanco continued with the Cubans in the Negro Leagues, while some
of his former teammates, would then move into minor league
baseball. And all this was taking place
before the era of the color line being dismantled.
So how did Alex Pompez get the money to operate his Negro
League baseball team? And what does that tell us about
the story of race and opportunity in baseball?
Well, Alex Pompez financed his black baseball operations from
1916 to 1937 in particular through monies he made through
the numbers racket. He was a numbers king.
And how the numbers operated were by individuals placing bets
on the number anywhere between three zeros or 999.
Bets ranged between a penny and five dollars.
Most numbers bankers would not take a $5 bet.
Most won't even take a dollar bet, because it paid off at a
rate of 600 to one. So even a nickel bet
would yield $30. A dollar bet would yield $600.
And this is in 1920s, 1930s money, so it's a lot more today.
Nevertheless, the numbers were lucrative.
In 1932, Pompez's bank grossed between $5 million
and $7 million. 1932 dollars.
Not today. 1932 dollars.
So the numbers were one of Harlem's leading industries.
Dutch Schultz found that out as well when the Volstead Act was
about to be repealed, prohibition was about to come to
an end. Schultz had to find somewhere
else to make his money. He set his sights on Harlem's
numbers. And Schultz began to muscle his
way into Harlem. He was successful in bringing
many of the lower level numbers bankers into his fold, creating
his syndicate. But Pompez and a few others,
particularly Madame St. Clair, were able to withhold the
entreaties of Dutch Schultz. That all ended on Black
Wednesday, November 21 through 23, 1931.
That was when the lucky number 5-2-7 hit.
I was explaining earlier today. 5-2-7, one of the stories I
encountered in doing some of the oral interviews, and also in the
literature, was lucky because five letters, the name of Jesus,
after the second day he arose, which equaled seven, 5-2-7.
And so Thanksgiving being a moment in which we would be
thankful, many people placed their bets on 5-2-7.
And it hit. Pompez lost--
well, he had a shortage. He couldn't cover $68,000.
Again, 1931 money. Which means that at least
$115 had been bet on the number 5-2-7 among the people
who bet at his bank. Which also, the catastrophe of
Black Wednesday, being Wednesday before Thanksgiving,
all the banks are closed on Thursday, if they open on
Friday, they open briefly, they were closed on Saturday.
Where are you going to get the liquid cash, the capital,
to pay back the $68,000? And all these people are waiting
for you. If the average better had waged
$0.25, you have over 500 people who are waiting for their
winnings. And it was a moment like this
which separated the trustworthy numbers kings from the
untrustworthy. And so Pompez set it to mind
that he was going to pay his people back.
He been involved in the numbers since 1910.
He had worked all the way up to being a numbers king.
He did not want to lose his reputation.
But it was moments such as these that Dutch Schultz craved.
Schultz went all around Harlem to the numbers kings, offering
to partner up. Pompez kept telling him,
I'm coming, but not doing so. So he was brought to multiple
sit downs with Schultz's men. And finally, in 1932, shortly
after New Year's, he had a sit down with Schultz himself.
And here is when Schultz famously places, well, pulls his
weapon from his belt, places it on the table between, and using
a series of expletives says, I hate a blank liar.
You are going to be the first n-word I make an example of in
all of Harlem. Pompez joined shortly
thereafter. The agreement to partner up was
that Pompez would be put on a $250 salary, which he ended up
being paid really about $75 a week, and that Pompez would
receive 40% of the bank's profits.
Somehow the accountant for the bank never showed a profit once
Schultz's accountant took the books.
Where did the money go? Well, what Thomas Dewey heard,
and others eventually learned, was the money was being directed
to Democratic clubs operated by Tammany Hall political fixer
Jimmy Hines. And what Hines did, was to
arrange to have legal cases against those in Schultz's
syndicate dismissed in exchange for the regular contribution to
the Democratic party campaigns. In particular, in 1933, when
there was a district attorney race, what eventually came out
in testimony was, Schultz's men drew $10,000 from the bank
reserves to direct that toward a campaign of a Democratic
candidate for mayor, and another Democratic candidate for
district attorney. The bank reserves, where monies
are always kept, you know, behind for those cases where
there was a big hit that the bank could cover, Pompez also
later learned that over the-- he was supposed to have
$120,000 in reserves. All that money had been used by
Schultz in his case when he was fighting tax evasion charges.
So Pompez worked for Schultz between 1932 through 1934, when
he's able to get himself out of the syndicate.
Part of the way that Pompez was able to do this was by basically
asking for his money back. And Schultz was more concerned
with Thomas Dewey, who actually was not yet the DA, but had been
recently appointed special prosecutor.
He was more concerned about being thrown in prison than he
was about Pompez. And he informs a number of his
underlings, just let Pompez go. We'll get him back later.
Well, later never arrived for Schultz, as was murdered in
October 1935.
1935 was a very interesting year for Pompez, because two major
figures who had so shaped the world of black baseball and the
world of Harlem would be no longer with us.
Shortly after New Year's, Nat Strong, who had been the biggest
booking agent in all of black baseball on the eastern
corridor, particularly in New York City, but also
affecting bookings in New Jersey and Connecticut,
died of a heart attack. And then that October, Dutch
Schultz would also be dead. So Pompez actually enjoys a
revival. In 1935 and '36, his numbers
bank flourished once again. His New York Cubans were back on
the field, enjoying greater success than his Cuban Stars
had ever enjoyed. And all this money, this
revival, caught the attention of Tom Dewey.
And so Dewey was able to get a couple of indictments against
Pompez, and in January 1937, raids Pompez's 409 Edgecombe
apartment, which was right atop Sugar Hill, and Pompez flees to
Mexico. Pompez is ultimately arrested in
March, and he's able to fight extradition for six months.
He had a very crafty set of lawyers, who understood how the
Mexican federal court system worked at that time, and
basically, they kept staying the execution for 72 hours by going
to each state court. So as soon as one stated denied
a stay of the extradition into a permanent injunction, he already
had a lawyer in the next state to file, and so was able to keep
out of the clutches of Dewey and his men for six months.
Ultimately, he agreed to testify as state's evidence in the trial
of Jimmy Hines.
Pompez pleads down to a misdemeanor, a policy violation.
He's given probation and a suspended sentence.
Questioned by the press after testifying at the 1938 Hines
trials, Pompez declared to reporters, "I'm through with
the numbers rackets for good." He said he would dedicate his
energy to baseball, understanding that, "The money
may not be as fast, but it's much less troublesome
in the end." Indeed, although the black
baseball business did come with its own set of managerial
challenges, none of his fellow owners ever threatened to bump
him off for failure to comply with their demands or for
enjoying too much success with his team.
So where did Pompez get this love of baseball?
Where does his interest in the numbers come from?
Well that baseball, the numbers, and cigars would largely impact
the life of Alex Pompez is little surprise, considering the
Cuban emigre communities of Key West and Tampa in which
he grew up. In these communities, Cubans
forged a culture that was an amalgam created through economic
exchange and the flow of workers and entrepreneurs who adopted
practices from different locations throughout and within
the Americas. The result was a culture they
claimed that was distinct from that of their island's colonial
ruler, Spain. A young Alex Pompez witnessed
the migrations of Cubans between Cuba in Florida, driven by
mobilizations around nationalist insurgency, the rise and fall of
sugar work at factories, and the emergence of baseball as Cuba's
own national game, which was played on the sand lots in their
colonias and beyond. These events shaped the
world view of him and others, as did the possibilities for
individual and collective remaking, of participating in
the making of something new, of becoming a Cuban, and
fighting for one's own nation, wherever one resided.
Those were lessons that would be part of the inheritance from his
father, and those of his father's generation.
And here's a photograph of the founders of the Partido
Revolucionario Cubano, the Cuban Revolutionary Party,
in 1892. The second chapter of this party
was formed in Key West. Seated center is Jose Marti.
Directly behind Marti, standing tall, of course, most of them
are mustachioed men, is Jose Gonzales Pompez,
father of Alex Pompez. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen
in September of 1879, Jose Gonzales Pompez had arrived
in Philadelphia shortly following Cuba's Ten Years War.
A lawyer by training, he owned a cigar factory, and would settle
in Key West, Florida. A founding member of the
Key West chapter of the Cuban Revolutionary Party that was
formed on January 3, 1892, Jose Gonzales Pompez was one of
the key individuals on the committee that organized the
very first visit of Jose Marti to Key West.
Key West was a very important place.
In fact, more important than New York City among Cubans
at this moment. Because Key West was where the
money was at. It was where the cigar factories
were. And so Marti understood, to get
the funds to get his movement liquid, he had to go to
Key West, and he had to rally their support.
Key West was also where many of the leaders of the Ten Years
War, and who had participated in la guerra chiquita, resided,
outside of the surveillance of the Spanish colonial rulers
who were still in Cuba. Jose Gonzales Pompez was
a mover and a shaker himself. In November of 1892, he was
elected to the Florida State Assembly.
So he served in the Florida State Assembly, he actually
introduced one of the first pieces of legislation against
child labor, ensuring that you had to be older than 14
to work in Florida. It passed.
And he moved his family to West Tampa in April of 1894.
He would die in November of 1895 after being the first city clerk
for the city of West Tampa. I hold the documents in the
special collections in Tampa, Florida, where you can see the
founding papers for West Tampa, and has Jose Gonzales Pompez's
signature.
This is Ruth Seldon. She would be the love
of Alex Pompez's life. Married on July 8, 1934,
she was 34, he was 44. This was the second marriage for
Alex Pompez. Ruth Seldon was the blood aunt
of Edward Brook, who was the first African American elected
to the U.S. Senate since reconstruction, in 1966.
Seldon's family was well aware of Pompez's involvement in
Harlem's numbers. This Senator Brook attested to
in his 2007 memoir, Bridging the Divide.
And one of the things that Brook mentions in the book,
his memoir, "Everyone liked Uncle Alex.
He was a funny, good-natured, kind man who controlled the
numbers racket in Harlem. My father liked him, despite his
occupation." He also remembered spending
summers with Aunt Ruth and Uncle Alex.
And one of the his memories is, "Sometimes I watched in
fascination as Uncle Alex and Aunt Ruth counted thousands of
dollars in small bills on their dining room table.
If I ran an errand for my uncle, he would sometimes reward me
with a $20 bill, a fortune in those days."
So here we have this very interesting dynamic, where we
had Ruth Seldon, who was from a northern Virginia family
who also operated within D.C. circles.
A very respectable black family. Who understood what Alex Pompez
was doing, his role as a Harlem numbers king, and still allowed
for him to become part of that family.
The story of Alex Pompez allows for us to witness the broader
terrain of struggle against racial segregation in baseball.
And if the manner, Latinos were also active participants within
that long struggle. His story challenges us to see
baseball integration not as a moment, but as a process,
initiated by Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut with the Brooklyn
Dodgers. Indeed, when we see integration
as a process, we acknowledge a set of pioneering actors
involved, and the series of localized struggles that took
place, that transformed the culture of segregation within
baseball. Black players who followed
Jackie Robinson's stead still had to persevere to ensure
integration was not just a successful experiment in a few
locations. The hostility or benign neglect
that Larry Doby, Orestes Minnie Minoso, Monty Irving, Orlando
Cepeda, Felipe Alou, and Elijah Pumpsie Green, among others,
confronted as part of that generation of pioneering
players, was no less real because they came after
Robinson. The beanballs kept coming.
The epithets kept flying. Threatening letters were still
mailed, and team management sometimes still found reasons to
defer the big league dreams of black players.
Yet integration was also about what went on to beyond the
playing field. And it's here where Alex Pompez
operated, and I would say, the New York Giants created their
own unique space. What the New York Giants, later
San Francisco Giants, did was to internationalize the impact of
Jackie Robinson's success. They moved beyond the United
States and into the Americas. And they did this by hiring
a U.S. Latino in Alex Pompez. The once-excluded Negro League
executive made the smoothest transitions of all the Negro
League owners to baseball's integrated era.
As discussed here today, he was more than a talent evaluator who
scouted Latin America and the black baseball circuit for the
Giants. A witness to the rise and fall
of the Negro Leagues, the hardening of racial fault lines
in the American South, the limitations of colorblindness
among Cubans in their own nation-building project, and the
harsh realities above northern and southern forms of
segregation, Pompez drew on his vast experience to counsel
African American and Latino prospects about the social rules
of engagement. This represents an under-studied
part of baseball's integration story.
The unique expertise honed through involvement in the Negro
Leagues and Caribbean baseball brought to bear on the entry and
development of black and Latino players in organized baseball.
Indeed, over his 25 years for the Giants, his scouting and
recommendations would spur that organization to acquire Negro
League stars Monty Irving, Willie Mays, while personally
participating in the signing of Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda,
Juan Marichal, among others. Pompez may not have invented
what we can label a Latino approach, but he perfected it
within the baseball world, where it placed him
at a distinct advantage. Largely shaped by his experience
of growing up in the U.S. south within an exiled community,
he envisioned the Americas as a broad, interconnected
cultural terrain, where others had seen hard and
fast lines of separation. Thus, he went beyond strict
allegiance to his Cuban nationality to reach out to
others from throughout the Americas, as he used his
multicultural background and his bilingual skills to acquire
talent throughout the English and Spanish-speaking Americas.
He was not a foreigner in a strange land.
He was native to the United States, familiar with its
ever-evolving set of rules when it came to race and place.
This, I can attest, was the key to his longevity in professional
baseball, and why he was able to successfully reinvent himself
several times, to have multiple rises and falls, and ultimately,
redemption. Thank you for your attention.
(applause)