Shades of Greatness, “A Story That Needed to be Told”

“Buck had the most elegant hands I’d ever seen,” Frazier recalled. “They could play a piano or conduct an orchestra. They were hands beyond baseball.”

Beyond baseball. It’s an interesting choice of words because the Negro Leagues in which O’Neil played for 14 seasons and, with overlap, managed for eight, were about so many things.

They were about community and economic opportunity, joy, camaraderie and celebrity. They were about long bus rides to makeshift, backwater fields and about big stages, like Chicago’s Comiskey Park and New York’s Yankee Stadium. They were about amusing and heroic tales, some accurate, some redwood-tall. And, sure, more than anything else, they were about strikeouts, stolen bases, home runs and fans living and dying, as fans often do, with every win and loss.

But the Negro Leagues were also so very much about limitations, exclusions – a fence higher than the highest outfield wall.

The many facets of Negro Baseball, which ran from the 1800s until about 1960, are found in the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s “Shades of Greatness” art exhibit, now showing through August 23 at Boston’s Northeastern University.

The exhibit, which has toured the country since 2004, includes the work of 28 artists.

Included are Frazier’s “Hitter’s Hands”, individual bronze casts of the hands of three Negro Leaguers clutching their bats. In addition to O’Neil, who helped found the museum, which is in Kansas City, Missouri; Frazier’s art includes the hands of slick-fielding shortstop Byron “Mex” Johnson; and of Ted Radcliffe, who Damon Runyon nicknamed “Double Duty” after seeing him catch the opener of a doubleheader during the 1932 Negro World Series, then pitch a shutout in the finale.

The art is new, both by design and necessity.

Dr. Raymond Doswell, the museum’s vice-president of curatorial services, who developed the idea for the exhibit, noted most art depicting the Negro Leagues had been limited to sports page cartoons from the era and to re-creations of familiar photos.

In planning the exhibit, Doswell, whose museum already owned the three hand sculptures, contacted artists – many Kansas City-based, some employees of Hallmark — and asked them to think beyond pure game action. Before deciding on their projects, some gathered information about the league, its fans and the period by attending a 2003 museum-sponsored meeting with O’Neil; Dewey Alexander, a batboy for the Kansas City Monarchs; and Georgia Dwight, the widow of Monarch second baseman Ed Dwight.

The end product was what Doswell sought – a collection of work that not only centered on the game but on the society around the game.

“The history of the league is steeped in sports. It’s not necessarily just about sports,” he explained… “We were trying to get at some truths in history by not doing a traditional sports exhibit. People connect with this story emotionally.”

“I look back at a very important period in our history. It (Negro Baseball) was one aspect of a larger story, especially for African-Americans. It has to be placed in the context more of African-American history and the civil rights movement. This was part of the process of integration in America..”

Of the show, he said, “It’s an entree into understanding what was going on in black America”.

Artist Kenneth Stanford, who painted “Game Day”, which shows a bus station full of fans heading to a Negro All-Star game at Comiskey, has seen the exhibit multiple times.

“It’s still an eye opening or mind opening experience to look at that,” he said. “Everybody is not educated to the fact of what deep importance the Negro Leagues had on America, across the country, California to New York, the North, South, East, West, everywhere.

“I’ve seen the reactions across the board. Black, white, whatever. They look like they’re in total shock — like this is something that is like not real.”

While some artists knew little about the Negro Leagues before being recruited for the project, Stanford had heard stories about them from the time he was a little boy and his grandmother, Addie Florence Taylor, toted him and his brothers to the bleachers at St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park to watch the Cardinals play.

Taylor had been a big Negro Leagues’ fan and loved Satchel Paige and the Monarchs, he recalled.

“She was telling these stories,” Stanford said… “She used to make comparisons (between ballplayers). People in the stands used to turn around and listen. She was almost like an historian.”

“Back then (when the Negro Leaguers played) everything was so limited. We had to start somewhere… I actually thought growing up that it (Negro League Baseball) was not important.

My grandmother was steadfast. She said. ‘That’s all we had’.”

Stanford learned through his “Shades of Greatness” research that his grandmother was far from  alone in her appreciation.

“I was really surprised how black people followed the Negro League game. They kept stats but in  their heads,” Stanford said. “They were talking about their players. I was surprised particularly how black people took pride in saying, ‘This (baseball) is a part of us. We cannot be denied’. “

But, of course, black players were denied every day.

His grandmother watched her favorite players at St. Louis’s Fairgrounds Park, he said, because Negro League teams weren’t allowed to use Sportsman’s Park.

Stanford recalls telling his grandmother he applauded her, explaining he could not see himself living during the segregated period.

“Prejudice is alive and well today but, my god, people were wearing it like a new pair of shoes (back then),” he said.

“Game Day” deals with the racism but it’s not its entire focal point.

As artist Bonnye Brown does in “Catch Me a Ball Player” (a painting of female fans above a dugout, trying to attract the players’ attention) and Keith Shepherd does in “Sunday Best” (a painting of a laughing, celebrating Monarch crowd), Stanford puts the Negro League fans in colorful, fashionable outfits, a true reflection of the game’s customers.

“At that time, people dressed up to go to baseball games or outdoor events. That was almost like going to church,” Stanford said. “Everyone could go out and be seen in their best… You had diehard sports fans and some women who wanted to be seen. It’s like a happening thing to do.”

If the long, low-waist dresses with low-hanging necklaces, as well as a small poster advertising the All-Star game at Comiskey, don’t give away the era in “Game Day”, a sign that reads, Colored Waiting Room. Bus Departs Hourly, does.

One bearded white man is visible up front but the people near him seem not to notice.

“It wasn’t upsetting because it was something that was accepted at the time,” Stanford said.

Some pieces in the exhibit focus solely on the game and athleticism of the players but others address the racial divide head on.

Artist Rob Hatem fashioned a piece of wood into a bat whose barrel forms a question mark. A wooden ball forms the dot at the base.

Part of the idea deals with the fact that an early headstone on the grave of famed Negro League hurler and 1971 Baseball Hall of Fame inductee Satchel Paige had a question mark for his year of birth. But Hatem also uses the question mark to ask what Paige might have done if he’d pitched in the Majors in his prime and whether catcher Josh Gibson, and not Babe Ruth, would have held the home run record. If so, could the number have been significantly greater than 714 and still unbroken today?

Questions. Donnie Perkins hopes the exhibit gets people thinking and seeking out more information.

Perkins, dean and director of the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity at Northeastern, brought the exhibit to his campus.

“I thought it really appropriate as it relates to art, history, sport and civil rights and social justice,” he said. “We’re reaching out to the entire Northeast and Boston community. We think it’s everybody’s history…. It’s a chance to learn about a segment of society not everyone is fully aware of.“

Perkins, who noted a DVD on the history of the Negro Leagues is being shown with the exhibit, is particularly fond of two pieces.

One, “Willie Foster & Young Fans”, by Kadir Nelson, shows kids on Pittsburgh’s Wylie Avenue in 1933, carrying the southpaw pitcher’s equipment and uniform to the ballpark in the hope of free admission.

Nelson, who did research beyond baseball to make his paintings historically accurate, depicts modest shops in the background. He explained that Negro League players, like the well-dressed Foster, made two-to-three times the salary of most African-Americans. They were, he said, the “pride of the community” and their teams helped sustain African-American-run businesses.

Perkins other favorite was done by Cortney Wall, then a New Jersey high school softball player, according to Doswell.

Wall’s art consists of two chairs. One is neatly marked “White”. On its seat, Hall of Famer Ty Cobb attempts to score. The other chair is somewhat messily marked “Colored”. It shows another Hall of Famer, Jackie Robinson, whose 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the Major League color barrier, also trying to score.

The chairs represent the two worlds of baseball and two worlds that existed in the U.S. at the time.

“That reminds us of what racial segregation and of what Jim Crow was…. It’s really a slice of a much bigger picture,” Perkins said.

“As an African-American male whose father… had the opportunity to see some (Negro League) games, it has particular meaning for me.,” he said. “It represents a time when the country didn’t recognize a key component of society – blacks and African-Americans. It reminds me of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.”

Of the exhibit, which was originally scheduled to tour for five years but now has bookings into 2011, Doswell remarked, “I think it has impressed a lot of people and opened their eyes.”

“It was a story,” Stanford said, “that needed to be told.”

Shades of Greatness will run at Northeastern through August 23. The exhibit is open 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Monday-Friday, with special group tours available weekends by e-mailing gallery360@neu.edu.