Baltimore Black Sox: The Walkout That Built a Negro Leagues Team

Negro Leagues History

In 1912, a group of Black ballplayers in Baltimore made a choice that would shape the next two decades of baseball in their city. Their team, the Giants, had just been taken over by white owners. Rather than play for them, the players walked away. A year later, they were back on the field under a new name, the Black Sox, with a Black owner behind them.

What followed was a long tug-of-war over who would own, run, and profit from Black baseball in Baltimore. The story runs through a black businessman, a pair of white businessmen, a pitcher who became a dentist, a missing $385, and a laundry owner. By the end, the Black Sox name was back in Black hands.

Before the Black Sox: the Weldons and the Giants

The Black Sox grew out of the Weldons, a Baltimore club founded by Wallace Smith. Born enslaved, Smith went on to build a hotel and a string of businesses with his brother Thomas, and he put his weight behind civil rights causes in the city.

The Weldons were later renamed the Giants, and between 1905 and 1912 they earned a national reputation playing the best Black clubs in the country, with home games at Union League Park at McComas and Light Streets in South Baltimore. Success made the team valuable, and value made it a target. Historian Bernard McKenna, author of a full history of the Black Sox, describes what the Giants became:

Pawns in a racial battle for control of semi-pro baseball in the city.

Historian Bernard McKenna, on the Baltimore Giants

1912: The players walk away

In the semi-pro baseball of the early 1900s, whoever owned a club controlled its bookings, its ballpark, and its share of the gate. In 1912, white owners took control of the Giants. The players responded the only way that guaranteed they would answer to themselves: they left.

It was a remarkable decision in a city that was tightening the lines of segregation. Two years earlier, Baltimore had passed one of the first residential segregation ordinances in the United States. Walking away from a winning club meant giving up a known schedule, a known paycheck, and a known field, with no promise of anything better.

1913: A Black-owned ball club

The players did not stay gone for long. In 1913, they re-formed as the Black Sox, backed by a new owner, Howard Young. The team that had walked out of white ownership was now playing under Black ownership, and it kept winning. Between 1913 and 1922, the Black Sox were crowned Colored Champions of the South six times.

They also played white teams before crowds that included both Black and white fans. McKenna has found no record of racial violence at those games, despite the warnings of segregationists. In a city divided by law, the ballpark was one of the few places where Black and white Baltimoreans gathered in the same space.

Enter Rossiter and Spedden

Within a few years, control of the Black Sox changed hands again. By the late 1910s, the club was owned by two white businessmen, George Rossiter and Charles Spedden. Public records say little about exactly how the transfer happened, but the change in direction was clear. Home games moved to Westport Park in 1917, the team went 35-5 in 1918, and in 1919 it won the McCallister Trophy as the Colored Amateur Champions of the South.

A ballpark of their own, and who signed on

On July 24, 1920, the Black Sox filed for incorporation with $20,000 in capital stock at $100 per share. Among the names on the papers, besides Charles F. Spedden, was Dr. Frank J. Sykes.

Sykes was the team's own pitcher. A dentist by training, "Doc" Sykes pitched for the Black Sox from 1920 to 1924 and threw a no-hitter against the Bacharach Giants in 1922. His later life was just as bold. Practicing dentistry in his hometown of Decatur, Alabama, he testified in the Scottsboro Boys case, challenging the fairness of all-white juries. The backlash pushed him to Baltimore, where he practiced until his death in 1986 at age 94.

The new corporation built Maryland Baseball Park at Bush and Russell Streets in South Baltimore, and it opened on May 15, 1921 with a doubleheader before a big crowd. In February 1924, Spedden boasted that the Black Sox owned and operated a "$35,000 plant fully paid for." The land beneath it, though, belonged to the B&O Railroad, which leased it to the club for $2,400 a year.

Who should own Black baseball?

When the Eastern Colored League formed in December 1922, the Black Sox were one of its six charter members. Three of those six founding clubs had white owners: Nat Strong of the Brooklyn Royal Giants, James Keenan of the Lincoln Giants and George Rossiter of the Black Sox.

That did not sit well with Rube Foster, the founder of the Negro National League, who objected to white owners running a Black league. His sharpest criticism was aimed at Strong, who held a tight grip on ballparks around New York City and made Black clubs pay him a share of their gate receipts to play.

Rossiter, meanwhile, became a league insider. He served as treasurer of the Eastern Colored League in 1926 and, in 1929, as treasurer of the American Negro League under its president, Ed Bolden, the Black owner of the Hilldale club.

A missing $385

Spedden handled the money for the league's World Series. Four months after the 1926 series, it came out that he had failed to report $385 in receipts. Rossiter released him from his duties with the team, and from then on the Black Sox were Rossiter's club.

Under Rossiter, Baltimore reached its peak. In 1929, the Black Sox won about 70 percent of their games and the American Negro League championship behind the "Million Dollar Infield" of Jud Wilson, Frank Warfield, Dick Lundy and Oliver Marcell.

The Depression and the laundry owner

The Great Depression changed everything. In 1932, Joe Cambria, the owner of a Baltimore laundry called the Bugle Coat and Apron Company, became Rossiter's co-owner and the team's general manager. Cambria moved the Black Sox to his own ballpark, Bugle Field, and added lights for night games. Maryland Baseball Park was dismantled.

To keep the team afloat, Cambria stopped paying set salaries and paid players a percentage of the gate instead. The East-West League collapsed in the middle of the 1932 season, and the Black Sox moved to the Negro National League in 1933. In 1934, Cambria's application to keep the team in the league was rejected; several star players announced they were leaving, and he disbanded the club.

Full circle

The Black Sox name did not end with Cambria. In 1934, Jack Farrell, a Black sportsman from Chester, Pennsylvania, acquired the name for his Negro National League franchise. The club that began when Black players walked away from white ownership ended with its name in Black hands.

By the mid-1930s, the Black Sox were gone. Baltimore would not have another major Black club until the Elite Giants arrived in 1938. In 2007, the Baltimore Orioles wore Black Sox uniforms on the field to honor the franchise.

Why the ownership story matters

The question of who owned Black baseball ran through the entire Negro Leagues era. Black entrepreneurs like Rube Foster and Ed Bolden wanted Black teams run by Black owners. White businessmen often held the ballparks, the bookings, and the money. The players were caught in between.

Baltimore's version of that story began with a group of players who were willing to walk away from a winning team rather than play for owners they had not chosen. Everything the Black Sox became, from Colored Champions of the South to American Negro League champions, started with that decision.

Coming next: how Jud Wilson, Frank Warfield, Dick Lundy and Oliver Marcell became the Million Dollar Infield.