Oscar Charleston’s original headstone didn’t say a word about his long career in the Black League Hall of Fame. He didn’t mention his power as a left-handed hitter. It did not include a quote honoring his legacy. In death, he received no more acclaim than in life.
“You mention Oscar Charleston,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Black League Baseball Museum, “and people say, ‘Who?’ “
Kendrick intended to change that, however.
To celebrate the centennial of the Black Leagues, Kendrick created a campaign to give Charleston, the brightest star of that inaugural season, what he deserved. The museum and the Indianapolis Triple-A Indians raised enough money to buy a “proper” headstone and put it on Charleston’s grave at Floral Park Cemetery in Indianapolis.
Kendrick had planned a formal ceremony on May 2 to commemorate Charleston, but the pandemic ruined his plans. This season was supposed to be a one-year celebration of the Black Leagues, but without baseball in full swing, many plans had to be adjusted or abandoned. The goal of celebrating the first season of the Black League was to highlight the contributions of black baseball and to highlight the stories of those like Charleston, who died in 1954 and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.
Even without a formal memorial for Charleston, Kendrick remained steadfast in his belief that no baseball player in the history of “black baseball” or the major leagues was more talented than Charleston, whose Black League career began in 1920 with the Indianapolis ABC. Perhaps no one who played professional baseball proved to be as complex a character as Charleston either.
A veteran of the First World War Army, Charleston didn’t mind a fight from time to time. In the United States, he fought against Ku Klux Klansmen and referees, and one winter while playing baseball in Cuba, he fought against ball players and Cuban soldiers.
The stories of the charismatic Charleston live on in newspaper stories, biographical material, and a scrapbook, which his wife Janie Charleston kept to refresh his legacy.
In celebration of the first season of the Black League, some fans are trying to learn about Charleston’s career in the same way they tell stories about pitcher Satchel Paige, center fielder Cool Papa Bell and catcher Josh Gibson, three of the biggest stars in black baseball. , the general phrase for segregated baseball.
“Oscar was clearly the most popular player – numerous players would say – in the 1920s and until Paige and Gibson, like, in 1934,” said Jeremy Beer, who wrote the 2019 biography. Oscar Charleston: the life and legend of baseball’s best forgotten player. “At 15, he was the most popular.”
The Charleston star has been lost in the glow of Paige and Gibson, and during their investigation, Beer did not find a satisfactory answer why. It could have been, she said, that Charleston left no close heirs, wrote no memoirs, and died before television teams and sports journalists could interview her about her stories, which are not as high as the stories Paige told.
The men and women researching the history of black baseball still scour the fields for more snippets that hint at how talented a Charleston baseball player was. Beer said he thought it might be impossible to separate the fiction about Charleston from the facts about him.
Sports historians and articles in the Black and mainstream media described him as a combination of major league stars Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Babe Ruth. Charleston, who played the game with skills not seen in big or black baseball, was a five-tool player that neither Bell, Gibson, or Buck Leonard were. Even stars like Mount Irvin, Leon Day, and the legendary Jackie Robinson, who crossed baseball’s color line on April 15, 1947, couldn’t claim comparable abilities.
Kendrick said the sports writers who covered the game during the first 50 years of the 20th century, the ball players of the time, and fans also compared Ruth to Charleston, and not the other way around.
Those who viewed baseball through a newer lens compared Charleston to Willie Mays, high praise. They were excited about Charleston’s ability to chase flies.
No one did better, Kendrick said.
Always playing on a shallow center field, Charleston rarely let a blooper drop in front of him, and he could catch balls thrown over his head.
Take Mays’ catch from the ’54 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians. With Game 1 at stake, Mays saved the Giants. He made a basket shot over the shoulder, on the run, tracing Vic Wertz’s lining to the deepest reaches of Polo Grounds in Brooklyn, New York.
“People will always remember that catch,” said Kendrick. “Man, all Black League veterans say, ‘If it had been Oscar Charleston, I would have been waiting for him to come down.'”
Kendrick regrets that most veterans are unavailable to fill in the blanks for Charleston and his career, which suffered from incomplete statistics. Mays and Hank Aaron, who started with a Black League baseball club, were too young to follow Charleston and her exploits, so the scrapbook Janie Charleston kept told more about the man than the oral stories.
Beer, an American Philanthropic professor, editor, and senior associate, reviewed her scrapbook, a gift a historian gave the museum, and she pulled out most of the important stories about Charleston and included them in her biography.
Drawing on other secondary sources for the biography, Beer uncovered story after story of Charleston’s talents, temperament, and ambitions. Charleston might aptly be called Jack Johnson, a black heavyweight boxing champion of black baseball.
“It seems that Oscar Charleston is not just one of the best athletes in American history,” Beer wrote in the preface to his biography. “It is also one of the most fascinating.”
Charleston was undoubtedly a rare talent, a man unafraid of hard work, discipline, and a fistfight. Having made baseball his year-round occupation, Charleston had a memorable fight while playing in 1924 for the Santa Clara Leopards in the Cuban League.
According to news articles, oral accounts, and apocrypha, the fight began when Charleston placed Manuel Cueto in a steep fall toward the third. Cueto fell to the ground in agony, and his brother and a Cuban soldier leaped from the stands and ran to Charleston. Blows flew.
The soldiers had to step in and break up the fight. Cueto went to the hospital, Charleston, to the police station.
The Cubans forgave Charleston, who never knew a fastball he couldn’t hit or a fight he would walk away from. He was revered in Cuba, where he learned Spanish, more than among the people in his Jim Crow homeland.
Paige, Bell and Gibson made the transition to the mainstream, Kendrick said. Charleston never did.
Charleston’s death on October 5, 1954 proved it. Because he came without any of the athlete’s funeral traps worth remembering for one person. His previous tombstone ignored Charleston’s greatness.
The new one, installed in late April, did not. It reads:
OSCAR MCKINLEY CHARLESTON
LEAGUES BLACK BASEBALL NATIONAL
HALL OF FAME LEGEND
OCTOBER 14 OCTOBER 5
1896 1954
“I’ve seen all the great players in the many years that I’ve been and I have yet to see anyone greater than Charleston. “- Honus Wagner
The best player I have ever seen … and one of the best men. – Buck O’Neil
He played, trained, directed, and refereed in the Black Leagues, 1915-52. He played professional baseball in Cuba, 1915, 1920, 1922-1930. Directed and played for the racially integrated semi-pro team in Philadelphia, 1942-44. Scouted by Branch Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers, 1945. Ranked as the fourth best baseball player of all time by Bill James, 2003.
Inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.
Installed without solemnity, Charleston’s new headstone highlights the brilliance of his career.
“Charleston was a big star of the inaugural season, and he shouldn’t be buried anonymous,” said Kendrick, who plans an official ceremony at some point. “Many Black League players played anonymously, but they shouldn’t be buried anonymously.
“People should know who Oscar Charleston is.”
