Beating the Klan: baseball coverage in Wichita before integration, 1920-1930.

Baseball fans planning to attend the game at Island Park in Wichita, Kansas, on June 21, 1925, were advised by the Wichita Beacon, the afternoon newspaper, that "strangle holds, razors, horsewhips, and other violent implements of argument" would be barred at the gate. (1) The fear was not of unrest

that might somehow be provoked by the near-record heat wave; the warning had to do with race. The all-black Wichita Monrovians, a "fast colored team" just back from a barnstorming tour in Oklahoma, were to play the Ku Klux Klan No. 6 semi-professional team. (2) To discourage favoritism, the game was to be officiated by two white Catholics, "Irish" Garrety and Dan Dwyer.

Little else is known about what must have been a remarkable baseball game played just months after the Klan had been officially ousted from the state by the Kansas Supreme Court and, a few years earlier, by Kansas governor Henry J. Allen, publisher of the Beacon. (3) Despite the unlikely matchup, few remarked on the game, to judge by newspaper coverage at the time, and few, therefore, have remarked on it since. (4) Coverage of it in the morning newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, in which it was described as a "novel" game, is typical. Under the headline "Monrovians Beat K. K. K.," a tantalizingly short, two-sentence report in the middle of a sports page devoted to white baseball coverage summarized the action from the day before, a day during which "searing winds" drove the mercury to 102 degrees: "The Wichita Monrovians won from the K. K. K. team in a close and interesting baseball battle at Island Park, Sunday 10 to 8. A good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest." (5)

Why did the game take place at all? Who initiated or organized the event? What did the teams seek to gain in playing, other than a paycheck? Unfortunately, the newspapers of the day are silent, and the game's participants, whose names are not known, likely all are deceased. (6) That the game occurred at all, however, reveals something of the state of race relations in the mid-1920s in Kansas, a state with, according to one historian, an ambiguous record on race. (7) Examining newspaper coverage--or the absence of it--of racial conditions in the heartland in the 1920s, we can identify something of the social change that eventuated in the introduction of integration in the 1930s, a decade before Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947 and two decades before the desegregation of public schools was ushered in by Brown v. (Topeka) Board of Education in 1954.