The Black Baseball Team That Beat the KKK
An important game in the fight to end racial bigotry.
At 12th and Mosely in Wichita, Kansas, there sits an old industrial building on a forgotten corner in a declining part of town.
But this corner once hosted a team that played in one of the most exciting and important baseball games of its time in June 1925.
It is where the home field of the Wichita Monrovians baseball team once stood.
The Wichita Monrovians was an all-black baseball team. They traveled and played teams from all over Kansas and surrounding states.
In June of 1925, twenty-two years before Jackie Robinson would become the first black player in Major League Baseball, the Monrovians played an exhibition game against a traveling team, the Klan Number 6, a team populated and owned by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Wichita team was owned by the Monrovian Park Association, which owned the diamond on which they played their home games.
Named for the capital of Liberia, an African country started by freed and free-born African Americans, the park was an important part of the social life for many of Wichita’s African-American community at that time.
However, so there was no “home field” advantage, the game was played on the city-owned baseball field at Island Park on the now nonexistent Ackerman Island (it was overrun and absorbed by the Arkansas River in Wichita).
To ensure that the game was umpired fairly, it was agreed to hire two Irish Catholic officials. The Irish Catholic umpires were white but also a target of the KKK for being Catholic so somehow this was seen as fair.
Source: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/black-team-beats-klan/
According to reporting in June of 1925 by the local newspaper, The Wichita Beacon, there would be some odd rules enforced:
“Strangle holds, razors, horsewhips, and other violent implements of argument will be barred.”
Source: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/black-team-beats-klan/
The KKK’s motive behind playing in the game was probably to try to regain support that it had been steadily losing in Kansas.
The Klan’s popularity was starting to dwindle in the region, largely in part due to stands against white supremacy taken by several prominent figures including famous publisher William Allen White from Emporia.
Source: https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/benjamin-s-paulen/17116
The game was played on a hot Kansas afternoon in June and little was documented about the actual game. It was said to be exciting and it was certainly close. But one thing is for sure, the Monrovians beat the KKK, 10–8.
Source: https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2012/05/26/monrovian-baseball
The game has even been immortalized in song:
Baseball would still have decades to go before it was ready to integrate the sport. Society’s attitude, while changing slowly, still had a long way to go to achieve true equality.
We certainly are not there yet. But, in the reach for fair treatment of all U.S. citizens and the fight against white supremacy, one should not forget the decisive results of a game won by the Wichita Monrovians against the KKK.
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