Long before 1947, when Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues, many African-Americans were playing baseball on all-black semipro teams, barnstorming clubs or loosely organized teams.
Catcher Louis "Pud" White was one of them. And when White's son, Frank White, learned late in life about his father's accomplishments, he decided that someone needed to tell his father's story and the stories of his contemporaries and other black ballplayers in Minnesota.
White's new book, "They Played for the Love of the Game: Untold Stories of Black Baseball in Minnesota," does that. "Writing this book has been one of the most difficult tasks I've undertaken," he writes.
The book is filled with names of players (Prince Honeycutt, Harold "Babe" Price and Toni "Tom Boy" Stone — a woman who has a field in the Dunning complex named in her honor) and teams (St. Paul Quicksteps, the Minneapolis Keystones, the Uptown Sanitary Shop) from the late 1800s into the 1970s.
It is illustrated with black-and-white photos of the period; sometimes players are identified, sometimes not. There are team lineups from the 1920s and '30s and even a few boxscores, although most are hard to read.
African-American newspapers in the Twin Cities covered black teams well, until the major leagues became integrated and readers' interest switched to those teams.
White's book includes excerpts of stories that appeared in the Minneapolis Spokesman, the Northwestern Bulletin-Appeal and other local black papers.
White also tells his own stories: about Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House and what it meant to the black community. About Jimmy Lee, an athlete, sportswriter and official. About his memories of the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul — "Everything we needed, it seemed, was contained within the boundaries of Rondo: school, church, the grocery store, open lots where we played sports, the Ober boys club, and so on" — and its destruction by the construction of Interstate 94, which went right through it.
