How the Cactus League helped integrate the Valley. Page 1E
70 years ago, baseball played a role in integrating Arizona
Nearly 20 years before the Civil Rights Act, the presence of baseball players like (above, from left) Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays and Ernie Banks on major-league rosters helped accelerate integration in Arizona.
All four of the players who crossed over from the Negro Leagues participated in spring training in Arizona in the late 1940s and early 1950s, marking some of the earliest interaction between black and white major-leaguers.
The integration of spring training in Arizona brought the integration of social institutions such as bars and restaurants at a time when society remained largely divided along racial lines. Black and white players worked, socialized and in some cases lived together in Phoenix, Tucson, Scottsdale and Mesa before
“We Negro Giants desegregated the Adams Hotel at our Arizona spring training base in Phoenix. At first the dining room and swimming pool was closed to us. Phoenix was then an almost completely segregated city.” MONTE IRVIN FORMER NEGRO LEAGUES AND MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYER
they did so anywhere else.
Arizona’s Cactus League is celebrating its 70th anniversary in conjunction with Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s racial barrier in 1947, and the four pioneering African-American players were inducted into the Cactus League’s Hall of Fame this month.
A small house on Seventh Avenue
Mounted on a wall among a large collection of photographs at an Elks Lodge in south Phoenix are two images that show baseball legend Willie Mays being named an honorary member of the lodge in 1992.
Forty years earlier, Mays became a frequent visitor of the W.H. Patterson Elks Lodge in the city’s predominantly African-American enclave when he lived just across the street, at 915 S. Seventh Ave., during spring training.
Most of his New York Giants teammates stayed at the Adams Hotel (now the Renaissance) at First and Adams streets in downtown Phoenix. Mays was one of three African-Americans on the Giants’ spring-training roster in 1952 who were not allowed to stay at the team’s segregated accommodations.
He found the place to stay, near the Elks Lodge, with a family he knew from his home state of Alabama.
“Willie Mays loved to shoot pool,” said Art Whitmore, a local resident and former exalted ruler of the Elks Lodge.
But he wasn’t very good at it until Giants manager Leo Durocher stepped in to help him.
“They used to hustle him the first two years, but Leo taught him how to shoot pool, and then they didn’t hustle him no more,” Whitmore said.
The small stucco house where Mays lived is still standing, with no marker to denote its place in history.
But Whitmore, now 76, remembers. “That house is a historic house. She had three extra rooms that she used to rent out. Sad Sam Jones, Ernie Banks, this was their hangout,” he said.
How Arizona was selected
Five years earlier, the Giants and Cleveland Indians had moved their spring-training camps from Florida to Arizona.
Indians owner Bill Veeck and Giants owner Horace Stoneham were at the forefront of baseball’s integration movement. Veeck signed four of the first 11 black players in the major leagues, and Stoneham signed four of the first 17.
Veeck’s decision to bring the Indians to Arizona for spring training was at least partly sparked by a racial incident during spring training in Florida when he was the owner of the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers. Local law-enforcement officials told him that he was not allowed to sit in a segregated section of the ballpark, according to his autobiography, “Veeck as in Wreck.”
“Within a few minutes, the sheriff came running over to tell me I couldn’t sit there. I said, ‘I can’t? I am . ... Why can’t I?’ He told me it was for Negroes only,” Veeck wrote.
The mayor came over and threatened to have Veeck removed from the ballpark, citing a city ordinance. In the book, Veeck recounted his response: “‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I told him. ‘What I do know is that if you bother me any more, we’ll move our club out of Ocala tonight. And we’ll tell everybody in the country why.’ ”
He added,, “I sat there every day, just to annoy them, without ever being bothered again. Nevertheless, I had already made up my mind to get out of Florida.”
In the spring of 1948, Doby joined his Indians teammates at Randolph Municipal Baseball Park (later Hi Corbett Field) in Tucson and found that, while it may have been more hospitable than Florida, segregation was still prevalent.
“At Tucson, I discovered, the bleachers weren’t segregated but the hotel was. We weren’t able to talk the management into allowing Larry to stay with us his first year, although we did make it clear — and they agreed — that in the future they would take all of our players, regardless of race, creed or previous condition of servitude,” Veeck wrote.
The future Veeck spoke of would not arrive until 1954, the same year as the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court case declared “separate but equal” state laws were unconstitutional and ordered the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed.”
Staying in Tucson
In the meantime, Doby stayed with the family of Chester Willis, a black foreman for the company that supplied the Santa Rita Hotel with its clean sheets and towels, at his home in Tucson’s Dunbar school district, where the city’s AfricanAmerican children attended a segregated school.
“He lived one-half a block away from Dunbar; that’s where his social life existed, and the rest of us as well,” said Morgan Maxwell Jr. of Tucson, son of the school’s longtime principal, Morgan Maxwell Sr.
“Downtown was not integrated yet. I was living in Tucson in 1948. Larry was part of the neighborhood,” Maxwell said.
Doby and other black players to follow shared space in the Willises’ fivebedroom house. The family had an agreement with the Indians to provide breakfast and dinner.
The family accommodated the players by having the children sleep outside at night. “Sleeping on the back porch was fun; it was like camping out,” one of the children, Dolores Willis Townsend, said in a book titled “Dunbar: The Neighborhood, the School, and the People, 19401965.”
Legendary Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige also stayed at the Willis house beginning in 1949. “My parents gave him their bedroom and took their turn sleeping on the porch,” Townsend said.
The home at 932 Alder Ave. was a gathering place, as neighbors would sit on the U-shaped porch and Paige would regale them with stories.
“He was always telling stories … laughing and telling stories. Nobody asked for autographs; they just talked about growing up, food and being on ball teams,” Townsend said.
The house is now owned by Chet Chalmers, a self-described baseball fanatic who was unaware of the home’s unique history until recently.
“I bought the house in 2001 from the bank, which had repossessed the house from a Willis relative,” Chalmers said. “I’ve lived in historic homes in Tucson most of my life, and I enjoy the styles and learning about the history. I grew up a baseball fanatic and trivia nut. … I’m well aware of Larry Doby and his significance to baseball history. I had no idea he lived in this house.”
Cubs follow in Mesa
The Chicago Cubs became the third team to move its spring training operation to Arizona, relocating from owner Phillip Wrigley’s Santa Catalina Island to Rendezvous Park in Mesa in 1952.
Ernie Banks was the first black player signed by the Cubs. He had previously played for the Kansas City Monarchs, the Negro American League franchise where Robinson and Paige also played.
Banks’ teammate Billy Williams signed with the Cubs as an amateur free agent in 1956. During the time Banks and Williams were with the Cubs in Mesa for spring training in the mid-1950s, the team’s hotel was still segregated.
“I came to spring training in 1957, and I stayed in the barracks at Rendezvous Park with the minor-leaguers for those first few years. When I made the bigleague roster in 1961, I rented a little place in Mesa, which was a doctor’s office,” recalled Williams of his temporary living quarters in the office of the city’s first black physician, Dr. Lucius Alston, near Center Street and University Drive, several blocks from Rendezvous Park.
Banks spoke about the living conditions for Robinson’s 1964 book “Baseball Has Done It”:
“A few years ago we had a little housing problem in Mesa. We stayed at a white hotel with the team, but when we tried to bring our families to Arizona with us we couldn’t rent a place for them. We brought this situation to the club’s attention. They made an issue of it, threatening to move the team to another site. As a result, we now bring our families to Mesa. Our being there has opened up the question of segregation in the entire area. The Chamber of Commerce and civic leaders … all have turned tail and are now fighting against discrimination,” Banks said.
Creating change
In his first full season with Cleveland, Doby proved instrumental to the team’s success, and the Indians won the 1948 World Series. Doby’s .318 batting average for the series was highest among Indians starters, and he hit the game-winning home run in the team’s 2-1 Game 4 victory.
A photograph of Doby and starting pitcher Steve Gromek hugging each other in the locker room after the game appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer the next day and would become an iconic image.
The magnitude of the moment was not lost on Doby.
“The picture was more rewarding and happy for me than actually hitting the home run,” Doby told author Andrew O’ Toole. “It was such a scuffle for me, after being involved in all that segregation, going through all I had to go through, until that picture. The picture finally showed a moment of a man showing his feelings for me. But the picture is not just about me. It shows what feelings should be, regardless of differences among people. And it shows what feelings should be in all of life, not just in sports. I think enlightenment can come from such a picture.”
Two years before Mays joined the Giants, former Negro Leagues All-Star outfielder Monte Irvin made his big-league debut in 1949 and was also locked out of the team’s Adams Hotel.
Eventually the Giants were able to persuade the hotel operators to reconsider the segregation policy.
“We Negro Giants desegregated the Adams Hotel at our Arizona spring training base in Phoenix. At first the dining room and swimming pool was closed to us. Phoenix was then an almost completely segregated city,” Irvin said in Robinson’s “Baseball Has Done It.”
Bill White was a 19-year-old first baseman when he roomed with Irvin at the Adams Hotel during the spring of 1953.
“It wasn’t segregated in ’53, when I stayed there,” said White, who went on to play 13 years, become a broadcaster for the New York Yankees and be named the first African-American president of the National League in 1989.
He recounted those days in Arizona in his book “Uppity: My Untold Story About the Games People Play”: “Willie never stayed there as far as I know. I stayed at the Adams and I would spend time at Willie’s place. We spent most of our time in the black area over at the Elks and would shoot pool and whatever.”
Integration came with some stumbles, as White recalled.
White was friends with actor Jeff Chandler, who was starring as Cochise in a movie and asked him to go see it. “When I got in line for the movie, by the time I got to the window the girl had left and went to get the manager and he said, ‘I’m sorry we don’t have the balcony’ and I said, ‘I don’t want to sit in the balcony’ and it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t go to the movies so I went back to my room.”
“Monte (Irvin) was there and I yelled and screamed about it and he looked at me and said, ‘June Bug,’ he used to call me June Bug, ‘be patient, this will change,’ and obviously some things have changed a bit,” White said.
By their mere presence in Arizona, the first African-American players to arrive for spring training helped to affect change in institutions and businesses relative to the baseball industry, forcing integration in places like the Adams Hotel.
“Baseball helped affect change because of the financial aspect of it,” White said, noting, “It wasn’t that they were all that liberal.”
Charlie Vascellaro is a baseball historian and the author of four books, including “At the Ballpark: A Fan’s Companion.” He has written about this topic for mlb.com and for the San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs magazines.