Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League

by Martha Ackmann

  *Statistics released by the Baltimore Afro-American for July 11, 1953, also included the following information for Neil, Banks, and Stone. Neil achieved his average based on playing in twenty-six games with ninety-three at bats. Banks appeared in twenty-one games and had seventy-three at bats. Stone appeared in twenty-five games with thirty-six at bats. See also Marilyn Cohen, No Girls in the Clubhouse: The Exclusion of Women from Baseball. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009, 85.

  Keep on at It

  Looks like what drives me crazy

  Don’t have no effect on you—

  But I’m gonna keep on at it

  Till it drives you crazy, too.

  —LANGSTON HUGHES1

  Charlie Rudd was covered in broken glass, but he was alive. Big Red, too heavily damaged to move, sat wounded and gasping on the bridge. The drivers of the tractor-trailer and the laundry truck opened their doors and edged out to inspect the crumpled piles of metal that their vehicles had become. No one was seriously injured—thankfully—not even Milk Can, who, like Charlie, was cut and bleeding. As soon as they could get to a phone, Bunny Downs and Buster Haywood started making calls. Bunny reported the accident to Syd Pollock, who made quick arrangements for a charter bus to pick up his battered team and take them to Kansas City. Buster called the Monarchs office and tried to have the next day’s doubleheader dropped, rescheduled, or at least reduced to one game, but wasn’t successful. A doubleheader meant double gate receipts, and neither team could afford to cancel. The next day the Clowns limped onto the field, rarely got a runner on base, and dropped both games. Like most of her teammates, Toni played only one game, too sore to make it through two. She sat out the first game, went 0 for 2 in the second, got irritated when the Clowns shortstop yelled her off an easy popup, and then dropped the ball, allowing Ernie Banks to take first base.

  It was a long afternoon. The Clowns looked “not up to their best in body or mind,” one sportswriter observed in generous understatement. With bruises, jangled nerves, and more than three months on the road still to go, Toni must have felt that the jubilant Opening Day had been a dream. Only a fraction of the fans who had overflowed Blues Stadium for that matchup at the beginning of the season now returned for the doubleheader.2 Gone was the euphoria. Ahead was the grind. August, September, October, and November would reveal much about both the league’s future and Toni’s determination. There would be good news and bad.

  The good news came from Sam Lacy and the Pittsburgh Courier. Before the Clowns’ wreck, Lacy had taken in the team’s games in Washington, D.C., against the Birmingham Black Barons. His sports column appeared a week later and focused on his impressions of Toni Stone. Lacy admitted he had felt skeptical about a woman playing professional baseball. He even confessed that he attempted to trick her into believing he was only interested in “an informal chat.” In fact he was sizing her up, evaluating her femininity, her sexuality, and her grit. He even grabbed the glove out of her hand to determine if it had extra padding. By his own admission, Lacy had a “reputation for kicking the props from under the building,” and he expected to find that Toni’s foundation was flawed. What he discovered, however, surprised the jaded reporter and upended the assumptions he and other sportswriters had about Toni Stone. “She’s no dummy,” Lacy declared. He found her wise to Syd Pollock’s hyperbolic prose and wise to his own attempt to entrap her. Lacy was astonished to discover that Toni was married. She “measure[s] up as a gal in every respect,” he said and wrongly cited “Al Berger” as her husband. During warm-up practice, Toni could feel Lacy’s eyes on her: he was trying to catch her flinchingwhen teammates threw hard at her. Toni’s strength surprised Lacy—the way she took intentional hard throws, heightened press and player scrutiny, and quietly went about her work on the diamond. He respected her resolve. “What you’re doing is something no other woman has ever done before you and fearfully few are likely to do after you,” he wrote. To this “hardboiled newspaperman,” Lacy confessed, Toni Stone was no gimmick.3

  Then bad news came from Chicago. Comiskey Park had been home to the Negro Leagues’ fabled East-West All-Star game for over two decades. All the greats had played at Comiskey: Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard. During the peak years of the leagues, the ballpark stands were filled with smartly dressed couples, some of whom had traveled on trains especially chartered for the game. Toni was slated to play for the East team, representing the Clowns. Russ Cowans of the Chicago Defender predicted that, with all the players hoping to get into the game, Toni would play an inning or more “based on her magnetic drawing power … particularly [for] those gals who remain in the grandstand.”4 But when the teams were announced, Toni didn’t make the cut. Players were chosen for the game based on ballots fans sent in, and apparently Toni did not receive enough votes. The game on Sunday, August 16 also was a disappointment. The East, managed by the Clowns’ Buster Haywood, lost the game 5–1. And even with scouts from at least sixteen major league clubs in the stands, the reports on some of the standouts were not good. The word on Ernie Banks was “good field, no hit.” Even the Monarchs’ traveling secretary, a bird dog for the Yankees, did not recommend him for a move to the majors. But the biggest disappointment was the crowd itself. It was the smallest East-West attendance in almost ten years. Some observers wondered if the location of the game was a problem—that Chicago fans were no longer interested in the game. Others thought two all-star contests should be held: one in Chicago and another in Kansas City. A few critics argued that the game itself had become passé, damaged by unprofessional management, poor promotion, inadequate press, and the lack of an official scorer. “The ruse of race pride is no longer valid for its success,” opponents argued. Even league president Dr. J. B. Martin admitted there were problems, citing that liquor bottles were found in the stands and fans hurled rowdy jeers at league umpires. Frustrated and seemingly out of ideas for improvement, Dr. Martin invited fans to write him directly with advice.5

  The disappointment of the East-West game prompted another round of debate about the future of the Negro League. The results were surprising. As dismal as the turnout had been at Comiskey Park, many observers remained optimistic that the league could survive as a feeder system to the majors. Moreover, Toni Stone’s continued magnetism brought new fans to the game who might be converted to the league. Some credited Stone with carrying the Negro League on her back in 1953 and giving other players a shot at the majors. Without her, they argued, the league would have folded, and young stars like Banks would never have been considered by scouts. Players and owners owed Toni Stone a lot, Cal Jacox of Norfolk’s Journal and Guide wrote. She was the Negro League’s “badly needed shot in the arm” and proved that black baseball “is too valuable an asset … to be allowed to wither on the vine.”6 Syd Pollock needed no convincing that signing Toni had been the right move for the Clowns, whether Buster Haywood liked it or not. Pollock’s 1953 team set attendance records among all other Negro League teams; while the crowds were not the same as they had been in the flush of May and June, Syd had hopes that gambling on a woman at second base would continue to pay off. Pollock started making plans for the postseason, including the possibility of games with Jackie Robinson’s integrated All-Star team. Toni Stone and Jackie would make a perfect marquis matchup, he thought, especially if Toni were healthy. Just to be assured there would be a woman on the team, Syd pulled out his “girl players” folder again and read through letters of inquiry to determine if any other female player measured up. He might need a backup.

  Toni had already seen a couple women come and go on the Clowns. “Ole Syd … had a gang of [women] standing up, trying them out,” she said. “He was hoping he’d get one.”7 But no woman stayed for longer than a few games. Perhaps the league was too competitive, or the women soon realized that they had not been educated to understand the game’s fundamentals the way that the men had. Always a student of the game since the days she read baseball books in Saint Paul’s libraries, Toni earned the pra
ise of reporters who noted her “fine baseball mind” and awareness of what she didn’t know.8 Once when Ernie Banks was running toward second base with Toni covering the bag, Banks aimed his sliding foot at the ball and kicked it out of Toni’s hand as she tried to apply the tag. “That was something I should have learned in high school,” she said. “I learned something from it and told [Banks] it wouldn’t happen again.”9

  Occasionally, when Pollock scheduled the Clowns in a city where another team was playing nearby, Toni asked if she could take in a few innings so that she could study the game. Bunny “would let me go for a half hour or so,” she said, and the other Clowns would wait for her on the bus.10 Nobody else wanted the extra study. Toni believed women who dreamed of playing professional ball had to be skilled and smart to overcome detractors—like Buster Haywood—who thought they had no right to play. Over the months that Toni played with the Clowns, a chasm began to develop between Buster and Bunny Downs. “Buster wouldn’t want Lena Horne if Lena Horne could play second like [Ray] Neil, hit like Josh [Gibson], run like [Speed] Merchant, talk like J. B. Martin and dance like Bojangles,” Bunny said.11 Buster’s aversion to women in baseball was so intense, Toni knew she needed more than skill to succeed. To earn the respect of men like Haywood, women had to “put their heart and soul in it,” she said. They had to want it and work twice as hard as any man to get it. Pollock’s son, Alan, who occasionally traveled on the bus when the team was up North, caught a glimpse of Toni’s determination in an unlikely moment. Late at night when the bus stopped for a bathroom break, the men lined up beside the road to relieve themselves. Alan watched as Toni walked into the woods alone and disappeared into the darkness. It had to be lonely, he thought, for a woman to travel night and day on a bus with nearly two dozen men.12 Some of her teammates, the ones who did not begrudge or belittle her ambition, could not understand how she kept at it. “Nothing comes easy,” Toni would say.13

  Toni had to persevere through additional challenges, trials she shared with her teammates. On a daily basis, every member of the Indianapolis Clowns confronted humiliations as blacks living in Jim Crow America. Nowhere were those struggles more pointed than in restaurants and hotels down South. The Jim Crow stories were legion: service refused, contaminated food, smashed plates and cups. But the Clowns met discrimination with resolve and creativity. In places where the team knew white hotels would refuse them, Syd made arrangements in advance from the home office. But sometimes rooms were not available or schedules changed at the last moment, and Bunny would have to consult his book of addresses of black establishments. When the Clowns ran out of suggestions from their usual sources, Chauff could always pull out The Negro Motorist Green Book—a publication nearly every black family used when traveling in the segregated South. The Green Book was the work of New York City travel agent Victor Green, who in 1936 began a listing of hotels, taverns, service stations, barbershops, and night clubs that would serve black clientele. “Carry Your Green Book With You. You May Need It,” the cover read.

  When the Clowns traveled below the Mason-Dixon line, they knew not to expect service in white restaurants, but sometimes those establishments were the only places serving food. One player would have to knock at the back door of a restaurant and ask if it sold food to blacks. “Shoot!” Toni said. “You’d have somebody go to the old back … windows and the old sandwiches were cold.”14 When white comedian Ed Hamman joined King Tut and Spec Bebop as part of the team’s entertainment midway through the season, his wife often accompanied him. The couple drove along the same route as the Clowns bus. Joyce Hamman would offer to buy food at white diners and bring it to the team’s locker room before a game so the Clowns wouldn’t have to play hungry. Sometimes, however, she was thwarted by restaurant owners who suspected what she was doing. “Ain’t gone to be no integration by proxy” was an all-too-familiar refrain.15 Along the Mason-Dixon line, restaurants would serve black clientele but in a decidedly hostile atmosphere. The Clowns had their own policy when it came to bigoted “partway” table service in border towns. They knew waiters and waitresses would not overtly refuse them but would ignore the team, so they devised the “three strikes and you’re out” rule. After waiting for five minutes or more for service, players would flag down a waiter. “In a minute,” the waiter would say: strike one. More time would pass and another attempt would be made to get some attention. “Be right there,” was the reply: strike two. After more time passed with more neglect from the waitstaff, one final attempt would be made. “Coming, coming,” a waiter would respond: strike three. That’s when the Clowns would gather up the silverware, pocket the utensils, and walk out the door. Later, when the team reached their favorite black hotel in Indianapolis, they would present the owner with gifts of Jim Crow table service.16

  Felix “Chin” Evans, a Clowns pitcher, became famous for his response to the smashed dishes that so deeply disturbed young Henry Aaron when the team tried to eat in Washington, D.C. Chin had heard the sound of crashing plates so often in one D.C. restaurant that he came prepared on a later visit. When he purposefully walked toward the restaurant for lunch, a teammate grabbed Chin and tried to steer him in another direction. Chin went in anyway, alone. Just as everyone suspected, an infuriated host threw a menu at him and stomped off, muttering about the “nigger ball club” whose bus was parked outside. Chin ordered, ate, and shooed the waiter away when it came time to clear the dishes. He didn’t want the server to appear “like a servant haulin’ off a colored man’s trash,” he said. The bill for Chin’s meal came to under one dollar, but he handed the bigoted host a twenty-dollar bill. “Pretty big tip for a nigger clown,” the host replied. It wasn’t a tip, Chin explained. It was a “waste riddance fee.” That’s when he reached into his pocket and brought out a hammer. Chin pulled the tablecloth up over the dishes, swung the hammer, and smashed every plate, cup, and saucer. “Just throw the nigger dishes out in the nigger tablecloth and keep the change,” he said and walked out.17

  The treatment the Clowns received at Jim Crow restaurants infuriated them, but the team’s experience with hotels was often miserable and occasionally terrifying. Tired and dirty from being on the road, Toni and her teammates would dream of a clean bed. It was the little things that she missed, Toni said, like being able to wash out her underwear. “You could kinda feel a little like home” when that amenity was available, she said.18 When black hotels were not available, the team stayed in boarding houses, rooming establishments, or private homes. Teams had to find these accommodations before local curfews for blacks went into effect. One player remembered playing one town in Mississippi where the local police announced the game would have to be over by 10:00 P.M.; black men were not allowed on the streets after that hour. The team played fast, got back on the bus, and returned to Memphis in sweaty uniforms and without any dinner. They simply couldn’t risk stopping anywhere for food.19 And Ed and Joyce Hamman later received bomb threats at their own home because Ed was involved with a black team.20

  While threats against blacks occurred less frequently than they once had, ball clubs like the Clowns and the Monarchs were always vigilant travelers. They never became complacent or beguiled into a false sense that they were safe. On the Monarchs bus, team manager Buck O’Neil made a ritual of offering advice and warnings based on recent news reports whenever the team pulled into a new town. Like the Clowns’ King Tut, Buck had seen nearly every stretch of road, and he knew from experience which businesses would welcome black men. He realized he had young charges under his supervision, some of whom came from the North and might be naive or uninformed about the reach of Jim Crow. When the Monarchs arrived in one Kansas town, Buck got up to offer his usual speech. But this one was more serious than usual. He told his ballplayers that there had been a recent lynching. Buck told his team, “Just get dressed, go to the park, and play.” Ernie Banks found it odd that the white fans who cheered for him from the stands could threaten him on the street. Then there was that most ridiculous of charges:
“reckless eyeballing.”21 The mere phrase “reckless eyeballing” was laughable, he thought, but he also knew that a white woman could report any black man—even have him thrown in jail—if he looked at her a second too long. “Those were dangerous times,” Toni later said.22

  For Toni, finding comfortable and safe accommodations was the most difficult challenge of life on the road. Sometimes rooming houses would offer her—but not the men—a place to stay. “I told [the proprietors] ‘thank you very much’ and got back on that old bus and went to sleep,” she said. Toni believed refusing a room under those conditions was an important show of respect toward her teammates. “They’re my brothers,” she said. “And we stick together.”23 Asking Toni where she slept was a favorite question of reporters. Everyone was curious about her sleeping arrangements and whether her teammates took advantage of her sexually. Toni had a practiced, if not always truthful, response. “I found that this wasn’t any headache,” she said. “At first, the fellows made passes at me, but my situation in traveling around the country with a busload of guys isn’t any different from that of the girl singers who travel with jazz bands. Once you let the guys know that there isn’t going to be any monkey business, they soon give you their respect.”24 Of course Toni did not mention that showing there would be no “monkey business” sometimes meant taking a baseball bat to the head of a teammate as she had on a bus ride years before. But Toni’s comparison of her life to that of jazz musicians was appropriate. They were both willing to accept rough accommodations, loneliness, and isolation for steady work doing what they loved. But there was one difference. People were used to female singers traveling with jazz bands: Billie Holiday, Alberta Hunter, Ella Fitzgerald. Few people, however, expected to find a woman on a men’s baseball team. If hotel proprietors in small towns had not read about Toni Stone in the Defender or in magazines, they made assumptions about why she traveled with the men.