[Music]
[Narrator] Out of the shadows of the Civil War
arose America's favorite pastime in East Tennessee.
From the farm leagues to the Tennessee Smokies,
baseball ingrained itself in Knoxville's history.
And 100 years ago,
a team of Black men stepped up to the plate
in an East Knoxville ballpark
and became champions.
[Music]
[Aubrey] In 1867 is when we first find that baseball was happening.
The newspaper started reporting on teams.
There were five teams mentioned from the Knoxville area.
One of them was a colored team, the Knoxville Eagles.
[Plott] There were lots of town teams and industrial teams.
A lot of companies had teams for their employees.
You know, there was a lot of baseball being played
but not on a professional level.
Well, in early 1920, some Black businessmen met in Kansas City to form a baseball league
and that became the Negro National League.
There were southern Black businessmen and baseball fans who were also interested in that
and they met in Atlanta just a few weeks later and formed the Negro Southern League.
And so that was the beginning of organized Black baseball in the South.
[Narrator] Two men from Knoxville, William Brooks and Monroe Young,
attended the Atlanta meeting to claim East Tennessee's spot in the league.
Eight teams formed the Negro Southern League:
the Atlanta Black Crackers,
Birmingham Black Barons,
Jacksonville Stars,
Montgomery Grey Sox,
Nashville White Sox,
New Orleans Caulfield Ads,
Pensacola Giants,
and the Knoxville Giants.
[Aubrey] They were a strong club.
They were already established as the Knoxville Giants
going back a couple years to the mid-1910s.
[Narrator] With Brooks named the first NSL secretary and the team's manager,
[tapping]
the Giants were ready to play ball.
The inaugural Negro Southern League season opened on April 19, 1920.
Knoxville faced off against Nashville at Sulphur Dell Park, beating them 6 to 2
thanks in part to a standout pitcher named Walter "Steel Arm" Dickey
who held the White Sox to only four hits.
Soon after, Jacksonville made their way to Knoxville for the Giant's home opener.
[Plott] Knoxville played in, I believe, Washington Park.
A group of African-Americans had gotten together and...
had put some money together to create a nice park for their families and kids.
[Narrator] The Giants beat the Stars 8 to 4 with Steel Arm Dickey striking out eight batters.
[Plott] He was, unquestionably, the best pitcher in the league.
[Aubrey] He went the distance.
Back then, you rarely had two pitchers pitching like now in modern baseball.
Back then, it was...
you pitched the whole game,
you pitched the complete game.
[Narrator] During the 1920 season, the Giants played over 100 games,
taking on teams in and out of the NSL.
[Aubrey] They started playing in, I believe it was, April, finished up in September,
and it was quite a season
[Narrator] While Steel Arm's pitching made national news,
especially as he began a long winning streak,
[thud]
some of his teammates were quickly becoming league stars in their own right.
[thud]
[footsteps]
Players like Forrest "One Wing" Maddox,
a pitcher and outfielder who lost his left arm in an accident as a child.
[Plott] But he did not let that stop him.
He would catch a ball with his right hand in the glove
and then flip it like this to get the ball up in the air,
sling off the glove, catch the ball as it came back down,
and then throw it into the infield.
And on more than one occasion,
he was credited with putting runners out at home plate.
[Narrator] The Giants also had an ace in first baseman Ralph "Pete" Cleage
who, based on data available from the time,
would be the NSL's best hitter by the end of the 1920 season.
With these stars on the roster, Knoxville continued to win series after series
and Steel Arm Dickey claimed a 25-game win streak.
His shot at 26 was squashed, however, on July 29
in a game against the Montgomery Grey Sox,
the Giants' biggest rival.
[music fades]
As the season drew to a close,
Knoxville and Montgomery were the clear front-runners.
But a claim at the championship title would prove to be controversial.
[Plott] The 1920 season was a battle between
Knoxville and Montgomery the whole year,
and they swapped the lead back and forth.
[Narrator] Negro Southern League President Frank Perdue from Birmingham
declared Montgomery the league champions,
but standings published in the Knoxville Journal and the Chicago Defender
showed the Giants as the champs.
Knoxville went to Montgomery and offered up a series to determine the winner.
[Aubrey] Montgomery didn't like that.
So, basically, Knoxville declared themselves champions.
[Narrator] The true 1920 champion remains contested
as some teams played more games than others during the season
and the spotty record-keeping tended to skew toward the hometown favorite.
[Plott] I guess, I will admit to my prejudice,
being an Alabamian, to leaning toward Montgomery.
But at the same time,
if you want to claim for Knoxville and say Montgomery disputed it,
I have no argument with that whatsoever
because it was impossible to actually come up with a definitive answer.
[Aubrey] I think that Knoxville won
based on their head-to-head with Montgomery and their overall record.
[Narrator] Knoxville sent its team secretary to meet with Rube Foster,
the owner and manager of the Chicago American Giants
and founder of the Negro National League.
[Aubrey] They said, "You guys are the champions of the NNL."
"We're the champions of the NSL."
"What do you say we play a colored world series?"
So there's some validity if you have the champion of the Negro Southern League
playing the champion of the Negro National League.
It wasn't Montgomery.
It wasn't Birmingham.
It was Knoxville.
[Narrator] The series was set to host games in
Birmingham, Chattanooga, New Orleans, and Knoxville.
[Aubrey] It did not go well for Knoxville.
Not at all.
The five games that we know were played...
they lost all five.
The first one was by forfeit.
Something went wrong.
Knoxville stormed off the field.
The umpire says, "Nope, that's the game."
[Narrator] Montgomery did, eventually, play the American Giants
with the local Montgomery newspapers
claiming the Grey Sox to be the champions of the Southern League
and referring to their three-game series with the Chicago team
the world championship.
Nevertheless, Chicago dominated.
[Plott] They swept the three- game series with Montgomery,
and then they went to Birmingham
and won two games against the Black Barons.
So they were undefeated in the South.
[Narrator] The following season,
the Knoxville Giants placed last in the NSL standings.
[Aubrey] You had players move on.
So Steel Arm Dickey wasn't with them in '21.
Other teams got better players.
You lost the drive a little bit.
[Plott] In 1920, the Giants had used about
two dozen players total for the whole season that I found
was able to, you know, ascertain really played on the team.
In 1921, there were more than 60 players,
which indicates they had a hard time finding a winning lineup that year.
[Narrator] And at the end of the 1922 season,
the Knoxville Giants fell away from the Negro Southern League.
[Aubrey] You had a couple gaps in there for years
of the Negro Southern League just not being in existence.
They either folded early, didn't have enough teams to make a league.
But the team kept playing.
[Waters] Home plate was right out on yonder end.
The stand was right out through here all along the bank.
This was the right field foul line down this way.
[Narrator] Although no longer affiliated with the NSL,
the Giants' passion never waned.
[Banks] Because everybody contributed.
Everybody...Everybody played well.
A balanced team for one thing.
It wasn't dependent on one man to do it all
or no special, no star, or nothing.
[laughter]
[Narrator] Unlike the Giants of the Negro Southern League,
which drew players from all over the region,
the independent team's dugout was made up only of local talent.
[Banks] Lived right here in Knoxville, most of us,
different sections, Mechanicsville...
[Waters] Ford Street...Galloway... [Banks] East Knoxville...
[Narrator] Leroy Bowerman, the pitcher for the 1935 independent Giants team,
even attended the 1920s NSL Giants games as a child.
[Bowerman] My brother carried me to see them play.
I was just 9 years old when he carried me to see them.
That was when Steel Arm was playing back then.
[Bowerman] This road wasn't up through here.
[Banks] No, wasn't up there.
[Waters] No, nuh-uh.
[Narrator] Walking from ballpark to ballpark within the city limits,
the independent Giants would play local teams, both Black and white.
That is if the Giants' winning streak didn't scare their opponents off.
[Bowerman] The other teams would say, "We're so good."
"We can't beat them."
"There's no need for us to play them."
They wouldn't...we couldn't hardly get a game.
We had a game with Smokies once and...
we went out there and they wouldn't play us.
[Bowerman] My biggest thrill?
Whenever we'd get a chance to play the Clowns, the Ethiopian Clowns.
When we got a chance to play them, that was our biggest thrill.
[Landry] Why?
[Bowerman] Because they were the best team we ever played.
[Narrator] When a game took them on the road,
the team would pile into two or three cars,
sleep in houses or hotels,
and even eat meals with the opposing team.
Their earnings came from whatever was left after expenses were paid.
[Waters] Two dollars, three dollars, sometimes four.
[Banks] Sometimes nothing.
[Waters] Sometimes nothing.
We wasn't playing it for money.
We just played it 'cause we liked it.
[laughs]
[Narrator] The team's camaraderie extended off the field
and even to the opposing teams.
[Bowerman] We just got along fine.
We'd go play a game of ball, get through, and go...
take our bath and come,
maybe we all go down to the pool room, sit around, talk and laugh.
[laughter]
[Narrator] When a visiting Indianapolis team
could not afford to make it back home,
the Giants reached out a helping hand.
[Bowerman] We had to give them money to get gas with.
We played them on Friday and Saturday,
beat them and they played, wanted to stay over,
and we played them Sunday and Monday
and beat them Sunday and Monday.
And they was to go leave Monday and they didn't.
They couldn't leave.
They didn't have nothing to leave on.
[baseball hits bat]
[indistinct cheering]
[Banks] That ball sounds so funny.
Metal bats.
I don't like the sound.
[Waters] I don't like them.
[Bowerman] Who?
[Waters] Mmhmmm.
[Narrator] Despite the Giants' prowess and popularity on and off the diamond,
major league dreams were still more than a decade away for Black players.
[Bowerman] We didn't have a chance to get in the big league.
I hadn't...There wasn't no...
I didn't know any Black people that was in the big league at that time.
[Waters] There wasn't any.
[Bowerman] There wasn't no Black in the big league
back when we were playing ball.
You know, there wasn't no better players than we were back then.
[humming]
We were about the best players that I knew of back then.
[Narrator] Knoxville would reappear under different names
in the Southern League off and on in the 1930s and '40s
before the league officially dissolved in 1951.
Historians point to a Knoxville Packers box score
as the last known record of an NSL game.
[Plott] The Black community was interested in Jackie understandably
because of his groundbreaking role in baseball at that point.
Coverage of the Negro Leagues began to slide
because the newspapers were devoting their attention to Jackie Robinson.
And so the slide is on the way.
[Aubrey] It was a shell of itself.
Of course, by that time, baseball was integrated.
Minor League Baseball was up and running.
Baseball life was changing.
[Narrator] Steel Arm left the Giants in 1921
to pitch for the Birmingham Black Barons and Montgomery Grey Sox.
He also briefly pitched for the National League's St. Louis Stars
before returning to Knoxville for the 1922 season.
His career was cut short in 1923
when he was killed in Etowah during a scuffle over moonshine.
The details of the incident are contested.
[Aubrey] It was in a sundown town.
Something went horribly wrong.
A fight broke out.
Steel Arm Dickey was slashed in the neck and he soon died.
Three or four white men were taken into custody and charged with his murder.
And then, through the court system,
and I'm sure some pressures from outside influences,
Steel Arm Dickey and his friends were then accused of instigating,
and the white men were cleared.
[Narrator] One Wing Maddox went on to pitch
for the Birmingham Black Barons
and Washington Braves.
He then went on to become a professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta
before dying of tuberculosis at 31 years of age.
Pete Cleage managed the Giants for a time
and played for the St. Louis Stars in 1924.
He then went on to notoriety as an umpire
in the Negro National League in the late 1930s.
He died in 1977 and is buried in Knoxville's Crestview Cemetery.
[Aubrey] They weren't all just flashes in the pan.
They may have been a flash in the pan for their baseball career,
but several had long careers outside of baseball.
[Announcer] They say you can feel the ghosts of Rickwood in this facility.
[Narrator] More than a century after the Knoxville Giants
declared themselves champion of the Negro Southern League,
historians are working to give new life to their legacy.
[Announcer] There's a bouncing ball wide to the back.
First baseman's got it,
underhands it to Castillo,
feeds him to the base.
[Narrator] In the 2013 Rickwood Classic,
a game played every year to honor the history of baseball,
the Birmingham Barons hosted the Tennessee Smokies
in an homage to the Negro Southern League.
The Smokies' uniforms echoed those worn by the Giants.
[Torres] This is amazing.
Just looking at all the seats and all the memories
that must go with these Negro League players that played here,
it's just amazing to be here.
[singing] And the home of the brave...
[applause] Woo! Yeah! Play ball!
[Narrator] On June 25, 2014,
ground was broken for the construction
of the Negro Southern League Museum in Birmingham, Alabama.
Opening on August 28 the following year,
the museum offers free admission to the public.
There, visitors can view memorabilia dating back to 1870,
listen to lectures,
and view a wall of over 1,600 baseballs,
all autographed by NSL players.
[Plott] There's just been a national recognition of Black baseball,
of the injustices that those players suffered during those years.
And I think you're now seeing that there's a reconciliation.
I'm glad to see the recognition accorded to these people now.
They did...they played an important role in their communities,
providing a cultural center
and entertainment
and hopes for a better future.
[car drives by]
[Narrator] The Beck Cultural Exchange Center is working with developers
on the new baseball stadium coming to Knoxville to highlight the area's history.
The Knoxville Giants will be featured among the notable names
from The Bottom of East Knoxville.
[Kesler] The Knoxville Giants are critical to our history
because they set the tone and the pace for our community to say,
"There are great ballplayers."
"There are great people here who want to play the game and who are good at the game."
I want us to remember the Giants as
a team who came together,
who believed in what they could do,
who worked very hard
and set the tone from the very first year, right out the gate
that Knoxville has some extraordinary people
and we are a force to be reckoned with.
[Aubrey] It's a legacy that keeps on giving.
And hopefully, for the inquisitive minds, they will dig deeper into it.
They were groundbreakers
on a local level, on a smaller level.
They weren't Jackie Robinson,
but they loved what they were doing.
[Waters] And I think it was the best team around here.
[Bowerman] I always liked the Giants,
always will.
Just loved the game and liked to play.
[nostalgic music fades]