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On the court and the baseball diamond as well as in his Homestead community, Cumberland ‘Cum’ Posey had many sides, says JAMES E. OVERMYER
On the court and the baseball diamond as well as in his Homestead community, Cumberland ‘Cum’ Posey had many sides
Cumberland W. Posey Sr. and his wife, Anna, of Homestead, were among the leading members of Pittsburgh’s black community at the turn of the 20th century.
The senior Posey, usually referred to as “Captain” because he was a licensed riverboat engineer, also built 41 boats for the Ohio River cargo trade and was in the coal business, serving the area’s steel mills. Anna was a mainstay of Black social and educational life. Now, more than a hundred years later, the things they accomplished are all gone, save for the Aurora Reading Club, a Black women’s literature group Anna helped found that celebrated its 125th anniversary last year.
But their oldest son, Cumberland Jr., is today acclaimed in the world of sports. Posey is one of only two people in two American professional sports halls of fame. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006 and the The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.
His fame as a sports executive and as one of the best Black basketball stars on the East Coast in the 1920s was achieved here. His baseball Homestead Grays won nine consecutive pennants in the Negro National League in the 1930s and ’40s.
There was no Black basketball league, but sportswriters for the major Black weekly papers picked a consensus national champion each spring. Posey ran two of them, the Monticellos, the champions in 1911-12, and the Loendis, champions for four consecutive seasons beginning in 1919-20.
Posey, only 5 feet, 7 inches and 140 pounds, played high-level ball until he was 35 years old despite suffering a series of opponent-inflicted injuries including a broken nose and broken ribs during this early rough-and-tumble basketball era. When he stopped playing on the national scene, one of his longtime opponents labeled him as “the greatest individual player I ever saw.”
Famed Pittsburgh sportswriter Wendell Smith summed up his basketball career this way: “a fighting, fiery, dynamic personality on the courts. He was a good winner and a poor loser.”
On the diamond
Smith’s evaluation also described Posey on the baseball diamond. A young, moderately talented outfielder for the local semiprofessional Grays, he took over management of the squad in 1915.
Playing a patient long game, his Grays would meet anyone, anywhere, in the tri-state region, and he built the team into a profitable regional powerhouse within 10 years. By 1930 the Grays, still an independent team, were considered to have the best lineup in all Black baseball.
Posey boasted that from the early ’20s until the depths of the Great Depression, the Grays made money every year. He plowed those profits back into the team in a way that earned him respect, but not admiration, from his fellow owners. By not affiliating with a league, the Grays could court the best players from the organized Negro Leagues, whose “anti-raiding” rules couldn’t stop a non-league team from picking through their rosters.
The seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory for the Grays, and Posey, took a serious downturn in the early 1930s. Not only did the team’s money-making string of seasons end, but the Grays also became the second-place Black team in Pittsburgh.
William “Gus” Greenlee, a genial restaurateur who more importantly was head of the city’s illegal numbers gambling, cast his eye on a promising team of amateurs called the Crawfords. Greenlee took all the steps with the Crawfords that Posey had done to make the Grays popular. Except that Greenlee, flush with cash, did it all in a couple of years, not decades.
The Crawfords were soon the toast of Pittsburgh’s Black baseball fans and champions of the post-Depression Negro National League, of which Greenlee was the president. The Grays were struggling, and men Posey could no longer pay well, Vic Harris, the Grays field manager, and Seward “See” Posey, Cum’s own brother, a Grays official, went to work for Greenlee.
Before the end of the decade, all that had changed. Posey took a leaf from Greenlee’s book on financing and recruited the well-heeled Black numbers king of Homestead, Rufus “Sonnyman” Jackson, as a business partner. At the same time, Greenlee went into the red, partly due to a local police crackdown on the numbers.
Another setback, over which he had no control, was the defection in 1937 of superstar pitcher Satchel Paige and several Crawfords, lured to the Dominican Republic to play for a team owned by the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo.
By 1939 Greenlee was out of baseball. The Grays recaptured their hold on the baseball scene and began a nine-year run of pennants that didn’t end until 1945. They were both an artistic and business success not only in Pittsburgh, but in Washington, which the Grays adopted as a second hometown during World War II.
Years after Greenlee had faded from the baseball scene, Posey was talking with John L. Clark, a journalist who had worked for Greenlee when the Crawfords were ascendant.
Whatever desperation Posey might have felt when he and the Grays were down and out in the mid-30s had vanished, and his normal confidence, flavored with egotism, was strong. He told Clark that he had never doubted he would win the baseball war for Pittsburgh.
As Greenlee’s reign as National League president was coming to an end, Posey became a league officer in 1938, remaining one for the rest of his baseball career. His years as a leader of the league, coupled with his successful building of the Grays, were what qualified him for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
More than baseball
But around Homestead and Pittsburgh, he was known and respected for other accomplishments.
For years he wrote a sports column for the weekly Pittsburgh Courier, which was filled with news of Black professional and college sports, dives into local sports history and, frequently, his opinions on how Black sports were being mismanaged (by people other than himself). It may have been the only person Posey always agreed with was the guy he saw in the mirror when shaving each morning.
Posey became a force in Homestead’s local politics. In 1932 he became the first Black elected to the Homestead School Board, a position he held until his death in 1946. He was first elected as a Republican, but by the time he ran for re-election in 1936, he had become a Democrat, in part due to his long relationship with Homestead political renegade John J. McLean. They had played basketball together, and when McLean bolted the Republican machine of Burgess (Mayor) John J. Cavanaugh in 1934, Posey went with him as the Democrats took control of the borough.
But this road to victory had not been easy for Posey. Once he was assaulted on the street outside the Grays’ offices by the brother of a Republican candidate he had publicly criticized. Cavanaugh’s police force was reputed to be on the lookout for a way to bust him after he switched parties, and succeeded in arresting him one night when he showed up at a nightclub in support of one of his players, who had gotten into a scrape.
In his younger days Posey played college basketball. Penn State, where he was on the varsity in 1910-11, acknowledges him as its first Black athlete, as does Duquesne University, where he starred for three years from 191518.
However, it seems Posey was never enrolled at Duquesne, either under his own name or that of “Charles W. Cumbert,” his alias on The Bluff that provided a thinly disguised cover to play college athletics as a “ringer,” a professional brought in to bolster the hoop squad.
Negro Leagues baseball was on the precipice in the spring of 1946 — the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson, but had failed to offer any compensation to his Black team, the Kansas City Monarchs. The Black leagues were fighting for survival, looking to become a part of white major league baseball or, as Posey proposed, consolidating into their own single strong league which could play alongside the white teams.
Black baseball at this point needed Posey’s excellent relationships with several white baseball executives and his hard-headed approach to business. But he wasn’t able to help.
A lingering illness was diagnosed in 1945 as lung cancer and he died in March 1946, although not before leaving Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital to be driven one last time around Homestead.
As the late 1940s progressed, the white majors took the best Black players. But the Negro Leagues’ executives were almost completely shut out of the new, integrated major leagues. It took years to remedy this near-absolute shortage of Black front-office figures and field managers.
Posey was almost uniquely situated to cross over, but we’ll never know if he could have. After 35 years of being in charge, it’s not clear he ever would have gone to work for anyone besides himself.