1939 Negro League East-West All-Star Game

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1939 Negro League East-West All-Star Game

As part of our month-long tribute to the Negro Leagues, here’s a repost of the 1939 Negro League All-Star Game, played at Comiskey Park with complete player identifications. This is the East Team. The great Josh Gibson is in the top row, third from right. It says on the photo that attendance for the game was 40,000.

I count five Hall-of-Famers in the photo: Buck Leonard, Willie Wells, Mule Suttles, Leon Day, and Josh Gibson.

Here’s a wonderful quote from Buck O’Neil about the Negro League All-Star Game:

“The game was something very special. It was the greatest idea Gus Greenlee ever had, because it made black people feel involved in baseball like they’d never been before. While the big leagues left the choice of players up to the sportswriters, Gus left it up to the fans …. That was a pretty important thing for black people to do in those days, to be able to vote, even if it was just for ballplayers, and they sent in thousands of ballots …. Right away it was clear that our game meant a lot more than the big league game. Theirs was, and is, more or less an exhibition. But for black folks, the East-West Game was a matter of racial pride. Black people came from all over Chicago every year — that’s why we outdrew the big-league game some years, because we always had 50,000 people, and almost all of them were black people …. The weekend was always a party. All the hotels on the South Side were filled. All the big nightclubs were hopping.”

And here’s a little history about the Negro League All-Star Game from the Wikipedia page:

The East-West All-Star Game was an annual all-star game for the top Negro League ball players. The game was the brainchild of Gus Greenlee, owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. In 1933 he decided to match the Major League Baseball All-Star Game with Negro league players. Newspaper balloting was set up to allow the fans to choose the starting lineups for that first game, a tradition that continued through the series’ end in 1962. Unlike the white All-Star game which is played near the middle of the season, the Negro All-Star game was held toward the end of the season.

Because league structures were shaky during the Great Depression and also because certain teams (notably the Kansas City Monarchs and the Homestead Grays) sometimes played entirely independent of the leagues, votes were not counted by league, but by geographical location. Hence, the games were known as the East-West All-Star Games. Votes were tallied by two of the major African-American weekly newspapers of the day, the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier.

-Gary Livacari
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Photo Credit: Public Domain

Information edited from the Negro League All-Star Game Wikipedia page;
and the Buck O’Neil autobiography, “I Was Right on Time.”