One hundred years ago, on Feb. 13, 1920, Rube Foster — the outsize owner of the Chicago American Giants — walked into the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri. Trailing Foster were 11 other men: three sportswriters, Cary B. Lewis of the Chicago Defender, David Wyatt of the Indianapolis Ledger, and Charles Marshall of the Indianapolis Freeman; attorney Elisha Scott; and the owners of seven other black baseball teams.
This was Foster’s meeting. He’d arranged it and he led it. On his agenda was one item: Create a Negro baseball league with a national footprint equal to that of the white major leagues, on and off the field.
Foster had been dreaming about it — and championing it — for years. The timing was right, said Negro Leagues historian Larry Lester. “With blacks serving honorably in World War I, albeit in segregated units, Americans were more open to African Americans forming their own teams.”
As Foster saw it, black players had already proven in barnstorming tours that they were as talented as white players. So why not create a black league to parallel the white major leagues? Besides, maybe one day baseball would be integrated. Shouldn’t the owners of black teams be ready?
Foster, a big personality in an even bigger body — he stood a few inches taller than 6 feet, and depending on the day, tilted the scale somewhere between 220 and 260 pounds — was an excellent salesman. But he also knew of what he spoke. He had built the preeminent black team of the era, the Chicago American Giants, into perennial winners.
So, on Friday, Feb. 13, when he took out the league charter and incorporation papers and placed them on the table, his fellow owners readily signed. By Sunday afternoon, all eight teams — the Detroit Stars, the Cuban Stars, the Kansas City Monarchs, the St. Louis Giants, the Indianapolis ABCs, the Dayton Marcos, the Chicago American Giants, and the Chicago Giants — had hammered out a constitution, bylaws, and player selections, and appointed Foster president.
They’d also settled on a name: The National Baseball League of the United States. The organization soon took on a less formal title, the Negro National League, and would go on to become the first viable black baseball circuit — and launch what we now refer to as “The Negro Leagues.” (There had been two previous attempts at organizing: The first league never played a game; the other lasted only one season.)
When Foster and the other owners left the YMCA, the league had a vision that was encapsulated in a slogan borrowed from the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass:
“We are the ship. All else is the sea.”