Manley continued to be involved in civil rights work in her community. In February 1934, she brought together a small group of progressive African-American women to see what they could do about the inability of Black people to get jobs, especially clerical, along 125th Street. She was the person who initially launched the historic “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” Harlem jobs campaign. One of the things about Manley I’ve always admired was her long and vigorous fight against racial discrimination. Her life didn’t get any less paradoxical. I probed for more, but Lester didn’t have anything else to add, instead suggesting I check out her biographies. “There was a look of awe and surprise when I called Effa Manley the ‘Blackest white woman in Negro League baseball.’ Racial identity is mostly about visual perception,” Lester recalled to me in an email. I can only imagine what it was like to be in the room when Lester dropped that bombshell. Larry Lester, chairman of the Society for Baseball Research’s Negro League committee, immediately set the record straight Manley was not, in fact, Black. It was at this press conference that Jane Forbes Clark, a member of the hall’s board of trustees, referred to Manley as Black.
Created to study Black baseball pre-1960, the Special Committee on Negro Leagues elected Manley to the Hall for her work as a baseball executive, managing and co-owning the Newark Eagles from 1935-1948. The National Baseball Hall of Fame held a press conference to announce Manley would become its first woman inductee. The importance of this place was recognized formally during Black History Month in 2006. Effa Manley’s contributions to their team are where she forged her place in baseball history. The Eagles had six eventual Hall of Famers on its roster: Larry Doby, Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, Monte Irvin, Biz Mackey, and Willie Wells. She and Abe co-owned the team, but management was left to her. (This new birth year would also appear on her tombstone.) A year after their marriage, the Negro National League owners awarded Abe a franchise, the Newark Eagles.
FASCINATING WOMANHOOD 1922 LICENSE
She marked herself “colored” on their marriage license and changed her birth year from 1897 to 1900. She would take the subway downtown as a white woman, and return to Harlem as a Black one.Īfter divorcing Bush, she married Abraham “Abe” Manley. There, she lived as Black, but when she left the “Black Mecca,” she used her lighter complexion to get jobs. Bush, an African-American man who worked as a chauffeur, and settled in Harlem. Her Black identity was part of her legacy finding evidence that hinted otherwise was shocking.Īt 19, she married George A. Throughout her life and career, people who met her assumed she was African American. Despite this information, for much of her life, Manley lived as a Black woman, and was known as such by the Black community. Brooks told her on multiple occasions that she was white. Brooks revealed to her daughter that she had had an affair with an employer, John Marcus Bishop, and she was the result. It was when she was a teenager her mother Bertha Ford Brooks felt compelled to tell her the truth of her illegitimate parentage. Born March 27, 1897, in Philadelphia, to an interracial family, Manley believed her mother’s husband, an African-American man, was her father. In the 1940 census, Manley is listed as 40 years old, female, and Negro. It wasn’t until I started researching more into her life I found out perhaps Manley wasn’t exactly who she seemed. Her race, however, has been a source of quiet controversy for years, one of which I was unaware. Taylor died 1922 - I had always assumed she was African American.
While I knew Manley was not the first woman to own a team - a distinction actually held by Olivia Taylor, who became the owner of the Indianapolis ABC Clowns after her husband C.I. For many years, that’s seemed like the last word on the matter. “Everything in my life has been Black,” Manley told sportswriter Henry Hecht of the New York Post in 1975. For years I’d recognized Effa Manley for many things: her civil rights work, co-owning and managing a Negro League baseball team, her stint as Negro National League treasurer, her role in Larry Doby integrating Major League Baseball’s American League, and being the first African-American woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.īut for everything Manley was, there is one thing she really wasn’t: Black. She was tall, smart, and intimidating, a shrewd businesswoman unafraid to speak her mind. She was sure and confident in everything she did.
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