Toni’s Creoles batting average hovered around .265.68 With her playing time limited to a few innings a game and little attention from her manager, Toni had to rely on her own natural talent, observation, and advice from teammates to improve her game. Sometimes late at night when she sat around with other players “lallygagging and playing cards,” she’d ask the men to help her dissect the game. “I had some buddies who would tell me things,” she said.69 Many players, like Toni, were eager for instruction, but few received coaching. Mahlon Duckett, who played for the Negro League’s Philadelphia Stars, said there were simply no coaches on black teams. One man ran the squad, he said—the manager. “We had no one to teach us,” he said.70 The Creole–Black Barons game in New Orleans was not a showcase for either Mays or Toni Stone. The Black Barons won 4–0 in a pitchers’ duel.71 After another road trip for Toni through the Dakotas and western Canada, the 1949 season came to an end with the Creoles finishing in first place.72 The Greenville (Mississippi) Democrat-Times reported that Toni finished the season with a .326 average and played in seventy-eight games.73
Toni returned to Oakland at the end of the season. She picked up day work where she could—cleaning, carpentry, odd jobs. She was never interested in more permanent work. She’d rather stop into barbershops and ask owners if they needed help cleaning windows or sorting stock. She also sought work driving trucks or other people’s cars. “Need help dumping your truck?” Toni would offer. “Want your car driven down the coast?” Dressed as she was in men’s clothes, Toni made some people apprehensive, but her friendliness and open manner usually eased their suspicion. Toni was especially comfortable working with older people, older men in particular.74 During the off-season, Toni earned enough money to maintain her independence and self-respect. Lessons in self-reliance taught by Boykin and Willa Stone were well learned. “Learn to do hair or sweep a floor,” her parents preached. “You always need something to sustain you.”75 During the off-season, Toni wasn’t looking for a long-term job as much as steady cash to pay basic expenses. The winter, after all, was merely a yawn between the postseason and spring training. By the following April, Toni was eager for another year with the Creoles, and she began playing pickup baseball games in Golden Gate Park. In New Orleans, sportswriter Jim Hall announced that Toni would be joining the team soon, noting that she had “received a leave of absence from a west coast college where she is a PE major.”*
A month later, in Saint Paul, Boykin Stone picked up the Chicago Defender and was astonished to find his daughter’s photograph and a three-column headline stretched across page eighteen: “New Orleans’ Lady Second Sacker Is Sensation of Southern League.” Boykin and Willa were surprised that Toni Stone, the family’s “special child,” had received national recognition. Toni had started the 1950 baseball season well, and the press, if not scouts and club managers, was beginning to take note. The article described Toni’s unprecedented rise in baseball and declared that she was “now displaying her greatest power with the Creoles.” She was batting nearly .300, flawlessly fielded hardhitting grounders and line drives, and displayed “a technique on second that rivals many of the males” on double plays. The article also reported that Toni had played last year in the postseason against the Jackie Robinson All-Stars in New Orleans before seventeen thousand fans. Described as a “shapely lass,” Toni told reporters that she was “too busy right now for much romancing.” Apparently Toni had mastered the curveball—in handling pitchers and an inquisitive press. She even managed to keep the fib going about her age. The Defender unknowingly perpetuated the myth that Toni was born in 1931, not 1921. Readers thought she was eighteen years old, the same age as Willie Mays. Perhaps only Toni’s family and a few close readers of the Defender caught an inconsistency in the newspaper’s text. How could a young woman purportedly born in 1931 have attended Gabby Street’s baseball school in 1934?76
Toni was guarded about her age for a reason. Younger players were the ones making moves. Since the previous year when the Creoles met the Black Barons, Willie Mays had pumped up his batting average to .353 and signed with the New York Giants. A nineteen-year-old, Ernie Banks, who had barnstormed with the semi-pro Amarillo Colts during summers in high school had been signed by the Kansas City Monarchs. Even some black players who had made it to the big leagues regretted that their break came too late, when their skills were beginning to wane. Monte Irvin admitted he was not “half the ball-player” he’d been ten years earlier when he played for the Negro League’s Newark Eagles. “I’m not bragging about what I was or trying to knock myself down about what I am now,” he explained. “But between the time I was 19 and 23, I could hit a ball farther and run faster and throw harder and had better reflexes.” In his thirties, Irvin regretted that the major leagues had passed him by when he was a younger man. “How I wish I could have had my chance in the majors at 23!” he said.77 Pushing thirty herself, Toni knew she had a limited amount of time for advancing in baseball, but she also believed there were more opportunities now than there had been when segregation had a full grip on the sport.
Toni found herself at a crossroads about her future. During a series in Memphis that spring, she took stock of her options and herself. She had been playing baseball for over a decade: local teams, American Legion, barnstorming, and now semi-pro ball. Where could she go from here? The call from the Pacific Coast League that she hoped would come never materialized. No woman would ever break the gender barrier in the PCL, as Toni had hoped. She could, of course, stay with the Creoles and barnstorm in the postseason. She could quit baseball, as so many players already had, and look for permanent work in New Orleans or back in the Bay Area. She could return to Saint Paul and join her brother in her parents’ barber and beauty shop business. Or she could redouble her efforts and aim—like Willie Mays—for the major leagues. It didn’t daunt her that she was a twenty-nine-year-old black woman masquerading as a teenager trying to make it in America’s most sacred sport. “I figured that then was the time for me to make the grade as the first woman player,” she said.78 Years later, when she looked back at that moment in Memphis, she realized it was a turning point in her life. It was there that she vowed to go as far as she could in professional baseball.
Toni’s Memphis decision sparked personal results. By midseason, she had raised her batting average to nearly .300.79 Injuries, including a bruised left arm from being hit by a pitch, kept her out of several games on a Midwestern tour. On another jump—she couldn’t remember where—an injury sent her to a local charity hospital, the Sisters of the Poor. But after a quick “patch up,” she “rode back to the ballpark on a policeman’s horse,” Toni said.80 It was not surprising that her grit and determination impressed sportswriters.81 One night in Iowa was particularly memorable. Creole third baseman Ralph “Big Cat” Johnson grabbed a hot line drive and fired it to Toni for the start of a double play. The lights on the field were dim, and gloves were not made well back then, Johnson said. So when Toni caught the ball, it tore through her glove and knocked her out cold. Toni lay on the ground unconscious as players yelled for water. “They poured water on that girl,” Johnson said, and “she jumped up,” yelling, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” No one had seen anything like it.82 Women, especially, found her play inspiring. In Mississippi, a 102-year-old woman attending her first baseball game asked to shake Toni’s hand and announced she was “pleased to see a woman playing.”83 The two women kept in touch, Toni said.84 In Council Bluffs, Iowa, a former women’s softball player emboldened by Toni’s play approached the local men’s team’s manager and won a tryout.85 For Toni, however, no attention meant more to her than the fan who sought her out during a July game in Iowa. Joe Louis, who recently had cancelled an exhibition boxing match in Georgia when local authorities refused to let blacks sit in ringside seats, was in the area participating in a golf tournament. After Toni led off the game with a single, Louis strolled over to the Creoles dugout to congratulate her.
Meeting Joe Louis may have made i
t seem to Toni that the vow she made in Memphis—as improbable as it was—was within reach. Just like the outstretched hand of her hero, a man she called “the champion of champions,” Toni’s dream felt within her grasp. Becoming the first woman to play professional baseball surely was a preposterous thought. Improbable. Naive. Some would say foolish. But Toni found it impossible to conform to someone else’s notion of who she should be. “My mother had a dreamer in the bunch and that was me,” she said.86 Every night she pictured herself playing professional ball. “I imagined myself on the way to something real big with a big payoff.”87 As enormous as the odds against her were, Toni knew no other choice would be right. Nothing else felt authentic. “I had to play,” she said simply.88 “I wanted to find the heart of the game.”89
*The Negro Southern League, not to be confused with the Negro League, began in 1920 and reached its peak in 1932. By the late 1940s, when Toni Stone played against the Creoles, the Negro Southern League was less organized and generally considered a level below such Negro League teams as the Kansas City Monarchs. Negro Southern League teams expanded their season by playing other black teams such as the barnstorming San Francisco Sea Lions and occasionally Negro League squads including the Monarchs and the Indianapolis Clowns.
*Dr. Daddy O was Vernon Winslow, a music reporter for the Louisiana Weekly.
*Sam Lacy (1903–2003) began his career selling peanuts in the Jim Crow section of Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. He was one of the most outspoken critics of segregation in baseball. After writing for the Chicago Defender, he later exclusively covered Jackie Robinson for three years for the Baltimore Afro-American. He was elected to the baseball writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame in 1998. Dick Young (1918–1987) was a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. Known for his abrasive prose style, Young was a president of the Baseball Writers of America and was elected in 1978 to the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He also was an early advocate of women sportswriters.
*Fields pitched for the Homestead Grays in the Negro League during the 1949 Colored World Series held at Pelican Stadium. The Grays won the series 4–1 against the Birmingham Black Barons.
†The Black Pelicans were part of a long history of African American teams in New Orleans that went back to the 1860s with the Aetnas, the Fischers, the Dumonts, the Unions, and the Pinchbacks, named for the first nonwhite Louisiana governor. The Black Pelicans played in the early 1900s and claimed with pride that they were “the first professional lineup to be mowed down” by Satchel Paige. “‘We’re gonna beat ya this time, Herman,’” the manager of the Chattanooga Black Lookouts said to Herman Roth, who managed and caught for the Black Pelicans in 1926. “‘See that l-o-n-g boy out there?’ said the Chat manager pointing to a string bean pitcher loosening up.” Roth remembered that “Baby-faced Satch” beat the New Orleans team 1–0. By the end of the year, Paige jumped to the Black Pels. New Orleans also had the Caulfield Ads and the Crescent Stars in the Negro Southern League in the 1920s, the Zulus, who played in the 1930s, and a host of local teams such as Dr. Nut’s Algier Tigers in the 1940s. Later, in the 1950s, New Orleans inherited the Eagles, who moved to Houston when Effa Manley shut down the Newark-based team (Old Timers Baseball Club Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA).
*Bill White hit .298 for the Danville Giants and went on to play thirteen seasons for the New York and San Francisco Giants, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Philadelphia Phillies. White served as president of the National League from 1989 to 1994, the first African American to do so.
*In 1954, Howe listed the Kansas City Monarchs in last place for both halves of the season—a record Baird disputed. Baird emphasized that poor record keeping could have disastrous results for a team if fans perceived the team as a losing enterprise and not worth supporting.
*Other accounts of Toni’s life state that she also played with the New Orleans Black Pelicans, a fact I have been unable to confirm.
*The Atlanta Crackers were known as the Yankees of the minors. An independent team, the Crackers played in the Class AA Southern Association. From 1950 to 1958 they were affiliated with the Boston and then Milwaukee Braves organization. The Atlanta Black Crackers were an independent team in the Negro Southern League. The ABCs folded in 1952.
†After Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball, he was followed in July 1947 by center fielder Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians, catcher Roy Campanella of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948, and pitcher Don Newcombe of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1949.
*Edward Honeycutt was jailed on a rape charge after he was found walking alone on a road outside town. Deputies alleged that after making a lumber delivery in town, Honeycutt got drunk and raped a white housewife. Honeycutt reported that deputies beat a false confession out of him. Later, three white kidnappers scaled the courthouse, dropped through a roof, grabbed Honeycutt, and drove out to the Atchafalaya River where they tossed coins to see who would lynch him. Honeycutt broke away and jumped into the river as bullets shot over his head. The next morning, a fisherman found him on the opposite side of the river, hiding in a tree. An all-white jury found Honeycutt guilty and sentenced him to death. The NAACP stepped in and the case went to appeal. Even though some of Honeycutt’s defense team expressed doubts about his innocence, his lawyers argued that the case was also about a black citizen’s right to a fair trial. African American jurors were rare in Louisiana, and so were lawyers defending blacks. Fearful that defense attorneys would be assaulted as they drove to the courthouse, a group of blacks appealed to Governor Earl Long to provide protection. State troopers stood at every intersection for sixty miles between Baton Rouge and the courthouse in Opelousas where African Americans crammed the gallery and the courthouse lawn. When the defense objected to one potential juror described as “one of the best niggers in Opelousas,” the judge overruled. “I don’t think it is meant to be derogatory in any way,” he said. “On the contrary, he was referring to the laudable characteristics of the person.” Honeycutt lost his appeal, and on June 8, 1951, he died in the electric chair. Advocates of fair trials for African Americans said that legal lynching were as deadly as literal ones (Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972, 124–129).
*The Louisiana Weekly (April 3, 1949) reported that Roy C. Brooks Sr. was killed by Gretna policeman Alvin Bladsacker. Dr. Oakley Johnson of Dillard spoke about white control of government.
*Journalist A. S. “Doc” Young believed criticism of Louis Armstrong was shortsighted. In a 1971 oral history, Young said, “It’s easy to be pointed [to] as an Uncle Tom. It was Louie Armstrong, as little as anybody knows, who was responsible for President Eisenhower sending the troops to Little Rock [in 1957–1958 to protect black students at Central High School]. A lot of young black people didn’t know…. Just because he had that white handkerchief and was smiling all the time didn’t mean he was an Uncle Tom. He refused to play New Orleans as long as he couldn’t play for an integrated audience…. They didn’t appreciate him because they didn’t take the time to find out” (Jim Reisler, Black Writers/Black Baseball: An Anthology of Articles from Black Sportswriters Who Covered the Negro Leagues, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007, 177).
*When the Clowns joined the Negro League in 1943, they split their home games between Cincinnati and Indianapolis. In 1946, they became known solely as the Indianapolis Clowns.
*Teams in the 1949 Negro Southern League were the Atlanta Brown Crackers, the Chattanooga Choo Choos, the Delta Giants, the Gadesen Tigers, the Memphis Red Caps, the New Orleans Creoles, and the Owensboro Dodgers. Managers for the New Orleans Creoles included A. Hill (1948), formerly with the Negro League’s Newark Eagles, Wesley Barrows, who took over in August 1949, and Felton Snow, of the Negro League’s Cleveland Buckeyes, who began managing the Creoles in May 1950.
*Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor (1897–1973) later became police commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, and came to national attentio
n when he used fire hoses and attack dogs against civil rights protestors.
*In a 1993 interview with Kyle McNary, Stone said she completed study for her high school GED while living in California after World War II. The Minneapolis–Saint Paul Twin City Leader on July 19, 1941, reported that Toni was attending West Virginia State University. Officials at the University have no record of Stone’s attendance, although the institution was known for its outstanding athletic program and several young people from Toni’s Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul were enrolled at West Virginia State. I have been unable to confirm or deny that Stone attended any California college.
On Deck
Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League Page 12
