The Kings of 18th and Vine

During major league baseball's shameful segregationist era, African-Americans who enjoyed the game could go to white major league games, where they often had to sit in remote sections of the ballpark and root for the white players. Or they could attend Negro Leagues ballgames and sit where they wanted -- often in the exact same parks that would force them into the bleachers when white teams played -- and watch their own heroes on the diamond.

The Kansas City Monarchs were one of the most successful of these teams, establishing themselves with a reputation for quality play and classy behavior that earned them notice on both sides of the color line. The Monarchs were also unique in that they were the only Negro League team to be owned by a white man, promoter J. L. Wilkinson. William Young's 2016 book, J. L. Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs: Trailblazers in Black Baseball, explores some of the history of Wilkinson and the team he managed for most of its existence.

Young traces as much of Wilkinson's history as is known, starting with his own time as a ballplayer and then the two traveling baseball teams he managed before founding the Monarchs. He shows how Wilkinson's history with them -- one an all-women's team and the other the multiracial "All-Nations" team -- showed him the path to financial viability for unaffiliated baseball teams lay along a route of barnstorming and a top-quality on-the-field product. The creation of a traveling lighting system allowed the Monarchs the chance to schedule extra games during one of their tours, adding them on after people were home from the work day.

He also puts the history of the Monarchs in the context of their two affiliations, the prewar Negro National League and the postwar Negro American League. Young traces the development and impact of the team from its beginning in 1920 through the heights of the postwar period, to Jackie Robinson's breaking of the baseball color barrier and the decline of the Negro Leagues when segregation ended. Wilkinson understood branding before it was a term, and the Monarchs' brand was the best-dressed, classiest and most gentlemanly-acting team you would find. The owner was frequently known to front the cost of a suit for a new player, very often the first one he had owned, upon signing him.

Young is a professor emeritus in religious studies at Westminster College in Fulton, MO, so he knows well how to research and how to demonstrate his source material. Perhaps because a book on a baseball owner and team is not his usual fare, he sometimes sounds a little chatty, and he only hints at some of the differences between the cultures of African-Americans who came of age during segregation and those from more integrated societies, whether through location or time of birth. But he presents a great amount of material in a very readable platform and doesn't mince words about the financial shenanigans white team owners conducted as they took the best talent from Negro Leagues teams and offered little, if any, payment in return. His book is a good addition to the shelf of any history-minded baseball fan.

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The Monarchs formed a large part of the culture of Kansas City, MO, especially its jazz and blues district centered on Vine Street, either at 18th where the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is today or at the legendary 12th Street intersection, now the site of a park. White baseball offered the Kansas City Blues, an American Association minor-league team, but black baseball offered the cream of the crop of its division of the sport and drew well among white fans. Famous jazz musicians and other African-American athletes such as boxing champion Joe Louis made the area their preferred stops when visiting the region, adding to the big-league feel of the team and its culture.

This history gets a good outline in Janet Bruce's 1985 work The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball. Bruce shows, as Young will show later, how the team gained much of its reputation (and income) through traveling games played against local semipro teams throughout the southern and midwestern United States, and even into Mexico. Team members' sophisticated dress, high-class attitude and quality of play brought an aura of "big city" baseball to towns which otherwise could only read about the big leagues or see some clips in newsreel footage.

Bruce also, like many historians writing about Negro Leagues baseball, shows how many different partcipants and fans of the teams had differing goals: Owners wanted to make money, players wanted to be paid to play a sport they enjoyed and were good at, fans wanted to see men who looked like them on the field. But many African-American civic leaders and newspaper writers saw the leagues as institutions which were designed to play themselves out of existence -- to prove that black athletes could play baseball at the elite level and that white fans would pay money to see them do it. They would by quality of play and support prove the owners' fear of negative consequences at the box office unfounded and show that black players were excluded solely because of bigotry.

Bruce traces this arc and shows how the Dodgers' signing of Jackie Robinson, plus the widespread broadcasts of major league baseball on first radio and then television, brought about the end of Negro Leagues baseball as a natural result. She's also clear that major league team owners, by refusing to regard the Negro Leagues as organized baseball, could justify acquiring its stars for minimum compensation. Instead of partnering with the Negro Leagues, major league owners simply drained them until they were vacant shells, in much the same way that school integration would erase and close so many African-American schools in order to integrate majority white schools.

Monarchs is in many ways remarkable by offering one of the earliest modern tellings of this story. Bruce wrote in 1985, nine years before Ken Burns' Baseball documentary would put the history of the Negro Leagues in front of the nation at a much higher profile than ever before, and in her "Acknowledgments" section she highlights how scattered were the sources she had to search for her work. Much of the interview and archive material she gathered for Monarchs forms the research material available at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, founded five years after her book was published.

One quibble with the book is the two-column page layout which makes it a little tougher to read than the usual one-column format. It could have been a quirk of a mid-80's university press trying something new or trying to save money, and in any event doesn't reduce the important of Bruce's book for fans of baseball, American cultural history and of race relations during the 20th century.