Bud Fowler

Bud Fowler (1858- ), baseball player, manager, and executive. John W. Jackson, Jr. was born in the upstate New York town of Fort Plain, the son of a homemaker mother and a barber father who taught this trade to his son. At the time of his birth, he and his parents were among the only 10% of African Americans not held in bondage. When he was two they moved to the nearby city of Cooperstown, where he attended school and began playing a rapidly growing sport. “Base ball,” as it was then known, had developed in New York City in the early 1800s and spread around the country during and after the Civil War. The first professional team started in 1869, and within a few years the National Association and then National League (which included the team now known as the Chicago Cubs) was formed, along with dozens of lower-level leagues in mid-sized and small towns; these various leagues became collectively known as Organized Baseball. Along with college football, this was America’s first major team sport of non-Native American origin, quickly joining boxing and horse racing as the most popular athletic endeavors in the country. Some of the rules were noticeably different in those early years; for instance, base stealing was forbidden, batters were out if the fielder caught a hit ball on one bounce, and pitchers threw underhand. In 1878, Jackson began playing for an amateur team in Chelsea Massachusetts as Bud Fowler, the name that he would be known by thereafter. “Bud” came from the fact that he called everyone else by that name, but although the origins of “Fowler” are less certain, there is one possible explanation. Professional athletes were often looked down upon by members of the middle class. Fowler’s parents might have been even more disappointed with this career choice, as sons of barbers and other artisans were expected to learn the family trade or complete their formal education rather than enter the less predictable and respectable path of professional sports. For these reasons, he may have taken on the name of Bud Fowler to avoid embarrassing his parents, perhaps choosing Fowler in particular because it was also the name of a prominent Cooperstown businessman.

Fowler first gained notoriety by pitching in an exhibition game against the National League champion Boston Red Caps (now Atlanta Braves), giving up only three hits against a team whose roster included three future Hall of Famers. In a time before radio and television, this feat and many of the others that Fowler and other baseball players accomplished were known to the general public at the time and to historians since then through newspaper articles. Later that season he was signed by the Lynn (Massachusetts) Live Oaks of the International Association. This made him the first black player in Organized Baseball. In a sign of things to come, he won his first game with Lynn, but the game was declared a forfeit when the other team walked off the field, possibly in part due to the players’ objection to black players. When he played for the Guelph (Ontario) Maple Leafs two years later, the local newspaper reported that some of his new teammates “are ill-natured enough to object to the colored pitcher.” In 1882 he played for the all-black New Orleans Pickwicks and then became player-manager for the Richmond Black Swans. Both of these were barnstorming teams: clubs that existed outside of Organized Baseball without league membership or a regular schedule but instead traveled around the country to play exhibition games. He then made plans with a black businessman in St. Louis to form a black professional league, with teams in eleven cities and Fowler – described in the local press as “the renowned colored pitcher of the east” – set to play for and manage the St. Louis team, but the league never formalized. While playing for Stillwater (Minnesota) in 1884, he won five of his team’s first seven victories. That was also the year, though, that pitchers transitioned from throwing the ball underhand to an overhand delivery, and the increased strain on his arm induced him to stop pitching full time. He played catcher, second base, and outfield, and he led the league in hits, with one local paper reporting that “the crowed showed their appreciation of his work by applauding him every time he went to bat.” He was also suspended, however, for refusing to catch one of Stillwater’s pitchers, possibly for racial reasons. Baseball catchers had the responsibility of deciding what the pitcher would throw, and some white pitchers were resistant to taking such orders from black catchers. That same year, for instance, Moses Fleetwood Walker became the first openly black player in the major leagues (a light-skinned player named William Edward White had passed for white and played in 1879), but his team’s star pitcher intentionally ignored Walker’s signs, even though this jeopardized the team’s chances of winning.

In 1885 Fowler signed with the Keokuk (Iowa) Westerns of the Western League, making him the only black player in the entire league. Aside from his brief stints in the South, up to this point he had played in overwhelmingly white cities. Keokuk, on the other hand, was around 10% black, and it is thus possible that the team owner signed Fowler in part to draw black fans. Although this city also had a reputation for racial hostility, Fowler became popular with fans of both races. One local newspaper, for instance, described him as “a good ball player, a hard worker, a genius on the ball field, intelligent, gentlemanly in his conduct and deserving of the good opinion entertained for him by base ball admirers here.” He also openly advocated for player rights, criticizing the reserve clause policy that banned free agency and kept player salaries down; “when a ballplayer signs a league contract,” he asserted, “they can do anything with him under its provisions but hang him.” Before the 1885 season was even over, though, the entire league disbanded due to financial troubles. He played the remainder of the year with teams in St. Joseph (Missouri), Portland (Maine), and Pueblo (Colorado), also opening a barber shop in the latter location. Despite his success in numerous leagues, a chance to play in the National League or the other major leagues of that time did not materialize. The Sporting Life, which at that time was the nation’s leading sports publication, opined that Fowler was “one of the best general players in the country, and if he had a white face would be playing with the best of them…The poor fellow’s skin is against him.”

Fowler led the reorganized Western League in triples in 1886, then played for black teams in St. Louis and New Orleans. In 1887 he helped organize another black league, helping to write the constitution for the League of Colored Base Ball Players and signing with the Cincinnati Browns, but this organization disbanded after only ten days. He then moved to Binghampton (New York) of the International League, which also had several other black players, including his teammates William Renfro and Frank Grant and Newark's star pitcher George Stovey. Here he faced the greatest racial hostility of his career thus far. A Toronto paper noted that “A number of colored players are in the International League, and to put it mildly their presence is distasteful to the other players,” while another writer mockingly proposed that the International League relabel itself a “colored league.” Pitchers intentionally threw at the black players, while one umpire openly made biased calls against Binghampton and the other integrated teams. Fowler and Grant began wearing shin guards because white opponents used their cleats to cut them while sliding into second base; this was in an era when not even catchers had begun regularly wearing this protection. Nine white Binghampton players refused to take the field unless Fowler and Renfro were fired. When the Newark team was scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Chicago White Stockings (now Cubs), Chicago’s star player-manager Cap Anson refused to play unless Stovey was kept off the field. Even team officials who attempted to defend Fowler also used racist language, telling the Sporting Life that “Some say that Fowler is a colored man, but we account for his dark complexion by the fact that…in chasing after balls has become tanned from constant and careless exposure to the sun.” In spite of all this, Stovey won 33 games, Grant led the league in home runs, and Fowler hit .350. When the season was over, International League officials banned its teams from signing any more black players. One newspaper cheered, “Gone coons – Fowler and Renfroe [sic].” All of this was part of growing racial hostility around the country, as southern black men lost the ability to vote, lynchings increased, legalized segregation became entrenched in the South, and northern whites banned African Americans from many professions without fear of legal action. Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Weldy had played one season in the National League in 1884, for instance, but after that league officials agreed that no more black players would be allowed. Fowler later remembered this by saying that “There were six of us in the International, back in ’87, and the white players sent in a protest to the League Directors, who passed a rule that in the future no colored players other than those then under contract should be signed...That is how the color line was sprung by a lot of boot-legs.”

Although the major leagues and most minor leagues now banned black players, Fowler continued his career wherever he could. He next played for Montpelier (Vermont) of the Northeastern League, where he became the first African American to serve as captain of an integrated team, and then for a team in Laconia (New Hampshire), where he drew further attention with strong play in exhibition games against Boston’s National League team; once again, though, his ability to prove that he could compete against major leaguers did not manifest in a major league contract. A team in Lafayette (Indiana) signed him but then released him when, in the words of a local reporter, “the Lafayette players discovered that he was a genuine darkey.” He played the rest of the 1888 season for clubs in Crawfordsville and Terre Haute, leading a Sporting Life reporter to write that “I shall be very much surprised if the ‘coon,’ as he is called, does not have a record equal to any in [the National League] in his position.” Later that year he played for Santa Fe, where after being banned from a hotel dining room, he declared “[Black players] are ‘drawing cards’ and add to the receipts of the game wherever we play” and also argued that if white team owners in general gave more support to black players, the overall quality of play and attendance would improve. After the season, he barnstormed throughout the southwest with a black team. Over the next few years he played with Greenville (Michigan), Galesburg (Illinois), Sterling (Illinois), Burlington (Iowa), Denver, Beloit (Wisconsin), Findlay (Ohio), Watertown (Wisconsin), Milwaukee, and Lincoln (Nebraska), gaining notoriety not just for his quality of play but also for the tall tales that he told about his travels through the west. The Dubuque Daily News noted his passionate following amongst the city’s black residents and quoted the league president as saying that “if only he had been painted white, he would be playing with the best of them.” At the same time, some of the white players in Nebraska left the league when it became integrated, he also sued a hotel in Ottumwa (Iowa) that had refused to serve him in its dining room, and he got into a fistfight with an opponent who tried to spike him at second base.

In 1893 he and a black teammate named Grant “Home Run” Johnson formed the black barnstorming team Page Fence Giants, so named for their sponsor the Page Woven Wire Fence Company. This became one of the first successful black barnstorming teams, signing other stars like Sol White. With Fowler serving as captain, in 1894 they won 118 of 156 games, two of their only losses coming against the National League team Cincinnati Reds. They traveled around the country in a custom railroad car, drumming up publicity in each town by wearing firefighter’s hats, by riding bicycles through the streets, and through Fowler’s exaggerated tall tales. In 1896 he created a new team called the Muncie Londons, but it disbanded after a week because white teams refused to play them. Similar efforts to form an all-black league in Texas, where Fowler would have been player-manager for the Galveston Flyaways, were also unsuccessful. In 1899 he served as player-manager for a new team in Findlay, but the Sporting News reported that “the white members of the Findlay ball club have drawn the color line and have demanded…that Bud Fowler, colored, be ousted from the team. They will quite if their demand is not heeded.” This was the end in Organized Baseball for Fowler and for all African Americans. In addition to the Walker brothers’ brief major league career (and that of the white-passing William Edward White), more than fifty other blacks played in the minor leagues between 1878 and 1899, but by the turn of the century every league had agreed not to sign them. Fowler himself commented on this by saying that “My skin is against me. If I had not been quite so black, I might have caught on as a Spaniard or something of that kind. The race prejudice is so strong that my black skin barred me.”

He spent the next ten years playing for and managing the barnstorming teams Findlay All-American Black Tourists, (Pittsburgh) Smoky City Giants, Kansas City Stars, and Cincinnati Black Tourists. He also tried to create another black league but failed to find enough financial backing. In 1909 he retired from baseball after thirty years as a player, manager, owner, promoter, and publicist. The Berkshire Eagle commemorated the event by writing that “For 16 years he was a pitcher and for 12 years a second baseman, and he never wore a glove, taking everything that came his way with bare hands. He was considered the equal of any man who ever covered the position.” He moved to Frankfort, New York, where he worked as a barber until his death from a red blood cell disorder in 1913. Several years later, his dream of a viable black baseball league finally came to fruition. Although there had long been strong black teams like his Page Fence Giants and the Chicago American Giants, the Great Migration brought more than 500,000 African Americans to northern cities and made possible the creation of the Negro National League in 1920. Meanwhile, although several black players got to the major and minor leagues by passing for white or Native American, there were no more openly black players until Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Ironically, this also led to the demise of the Negro Leagues because black fans started patronizing white teams and because white teams signed black players without financially compensating the Negro League teams. Meanwhile, the Hall of Fame (which, ironically, is located in his hometown of Cooperstown) would not induct individuals from black baseball because they had not played in the major leagues, even though they had been barred from doing so, until public pressure finally forced the Hall to change this policy in the 1970s. Between 1971 and 2006, thirty-three black players, managers, and owners from the Negro Leagues and the pre-Negro League era (along with two white owners of black teams) were inducted, including Fowler’s former teammates Frank Grant and Sol White. Fowler himself was overlooked, in part because of the long passage of time and in part because he had never played in either the major leagues or the Negro Leagues. The Society for American Baseball Research placed a tombstone on his previously unmarked grave in 1987 and later gave him its “Overlooked 19^th Century Base Ball Legend” award. In 2013 the city of Cooperstown held a day in his honor and renamed a street for him. In 2021 he was finally selected for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, 112 years after his retirement and 163 years after his birth.

David Brodnax, Sr., Professor of History, Trinity Christian College