He never made it to the promised land
Sam Bankhead, one of the greatest Negro League ballplayers, was immortalized by August Wilson and Daniel Sonenberg but still has not taken his rightful place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, protests baseball historian RICHARD ‘PETE’ PETERSON
In 1971, Satchel Paige became the first Negro League player to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. It was the same year that the Pirates fielded the first all-black lineup in Major League Baseball on their way to a World Series championship.
Since 1971, more than 30 Negro League players have been elected to the Hall of Fame. Those honored include Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and Judy Johnson, teammates with Paige on the 1936 Pittsburgh Crawfords, arguably, with its five future Hall-of-Famers, the greatest team in Negro League history. Also in the Hall of Fame are Buck Leonard, Raymond Brown and Jud Wilson, who, along with Gibson, were part of the Homestead Grays dynasty that won nine consecutive Negro National League pennants from 1937 to 1945 and three Negro World Series titles.
One of the most important members of the great Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays teams, however, is not in the Hall of Fame. Sam Bankhead was among the most accomplished and versatile players in Negro League history. A clutch hitter, aggressive baserunner and skilled infielder and outfielder, he started at five positions (second base, shortstop and all three outfield positions) in the Negro League’s East-West All-Star game. He was also named the top utility player on the All-Time Negro League team selected by the Pittsburgh Courier.
After beginning his career in 1929 with the Birmingham Black Barons, Bankhead signed a contract in 1935 with Gus Greenlee to play with the Pittsburgh Crawfords, where he quickly became Josh Gibson’s closet friend. In 1938, when Greenlee, facing serious financial problems, moved his Crawfords to Toledo, Bankhead joined the Homestead Grays, where he had his best years.
With so many of its star players signing with the major leagues after Jackie Robinson crossed baseball’s color line in 1947, the Negro National League folded after the 1948 season, but the Grays managed to survive until 1950. During its last two seasons, Bankhead became the team’s player-manager and used his influence to convince the Gray’s to sign Gibson’s 18-year-old son, Josh Jr., to a contract. After the death of Josh Sr. in January 1947, just months before Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers, Bankhead and his wife, Helen, had taken responsibility for Josh Jr.’s welfare.
In 1951, Bankhead made history when he became the player-manager of the minor-league Farnham Pirates in Canada’s Class C Provincial League. He was the
first African-American to manage a minor-league team in white organized baseball. Bankhead brought Josh Gibson Jr. with him to Farnham, but Josh Jr. broke his ankle sliding into second base, an injury serious enough to end his baseball career.
After his stint in Farnham, Bankhead returned to Pittsburgh. Out of options in baseball, he took a job with the city’s sanitation department. When he was joined by Josh Jr., the two worked together on the same garbage truck. Bankhead eventually took a job as a porter at the William Penn hotel. On the night of July 24, 1976, Bankhead got into an altercation at the hotel’s bar that led to someone shooting Bankhead to death. The eight-time Negro League All-Star and the greatest utility player in Negro League history was 65 years old.
While Bankhead has been passed over by the Hall of Fame, he was not forgotten by August Wilson, who used him as the model for the Troy Maxson character in “Fences.” Bankhead also became a major character in Daniel Sonenberg’s opera “The Summer King.” Based on the life of Josh Gibson, it debuted in Pittsburgh last year on April 29.
In the final act of “The Summer King, the Bankhead character steps forward at the moment of Josh Gibson’s death to deliver a powerful aria that portrays Gibson as baseball’s Moses, who led African-Americans to “the promised land” but never had the opportunity to play there. At the end of the aria, he laments his own fate now that Gibson was gone. He asks, “What will become of me?”
Sam Bankhead, like his friend, Josh Gibson, never made it to the promised land, never lived the dream of playing in the Major Leagues. Even with all his flaws, including his struggles with alcohol and drugs, Gibson, in 1973, became the second Negro League player elected to the Hall of Fame.
Since that time, other Negro League legends from the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays have entered the Hall of Fame, but their teammate and one of the greatest players in Negro League history is still waiting to cross over.