America’s pastime contextualized in social history ─ Ackmann’s Toni Stone Story

Toni Stone

First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in 

Negro League

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

From a 2011 Detroit Metro Times opening game interview with author Martha Ackmann

Women and Social Change

Martha Ackmann

“I write books about women who have changed America,” Ackmann told Sandra Svoboda. “When I went about searching for a topic for my next book, I knew I wanted to write about sports because I think sports are a great window for looking at American culture.…”

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urveball, Ackmann said, is the story of Toni Stone and the times in which she lived; and besides her story, it “is the story of Jim Crow America, specifically through the lens of Negro League baseball.” She said she “wanted to talk about Jim Crow conditions that Negro League players faced when they traveled around the country. Certainly there were Jim Crow restrictions all over the country but particularly in the South,” she said, “so I talked about what would happen when players tried to get a meal in Washington, D.C.…”

"National pastime"

Always in her books, she said, “I am writing stories about social change in America; in particular, about how women have faced inequity especially when they have a very uncommon dream. I have tried to tell that story in a way that I hope is going to be interesting to a broad audience so they learn something about American women’s history, they learn something about sports, and they also learn something about the struggles for equal rights in our country.”

Remarkable woman and athlete

Toni Stone “was a phenomenal athlete. As a kid she played every single position. She played a lot of outfield; and by the time she entered her late teens to early 20s, she was a second-base player.… She played in Briggs Field (in Detroit, later named Tiger Stadium), one of the many big, big stadiums like Yankee Stadium and Chicago’s Comiskey Park. She loved playing in big stadiums and Briggs wasn’t too far from her hometown (St. Paul, Minnesota). Detroit in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s was a pretty great place to be playing Negro League ball. There was a lot of support and there were always packed games where [Stone] felt she got a lot of exposure.”

 

Discrimination, disrespect

Traveling with teams, Ackmann said, “Sometimes when (Stone) pulled up to a boarding house or a hotel in the (U.S.) South, the 28 (male members of the team) would get off the bus and she would be the only woman.

The proprietor would look and say, ‘You must be a hustler or a prostitute,’ and direct her to the nearest brothel. Toni eventually had no other choice. She would have to stay there.

She said: ‘These were good girls.’

I think (Stone) saw something of the outcast in them as she felt herself a marginalized figure.

Surprisingly to her, the good girls gave her a place to stay and laundered her uniform and sewed padding into the chest of her uniform so she could take hard throws to the chest, and eventually she built up a network of brothels where the ‘girls’ would meet her, sometimes in a car, and take her to the brothel; and show her the respect that she didn’t find elsewhere. 

Toni Stone

Wikipedia note: Toni Stone (b. July 17, 1921; d. November 2, 1996) became one of the first women to play as a regular on a big-league professional team in 1953. In 1985 she was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation’s International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990 she was included in two exhibits at the Baseball Hall of Fame, one on ‘Women in Baseball’ and another on ‘Negro League Baseball’. In 1993 Stone was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame as well as the Sudafed International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990, Stone’s hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota declared March 6 ‘Toni Stone Day’. Saint Paul also has a field named after Toni Stone located at the Dunning Baseball Complex.

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urveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League contains tough truths.

Martha Ackmann's
Curveball

“I tried to get at the truth, Ackmann said, “and sometimes the truth cuts … both disturbing and fascinating ….  I think it’s very important to (chronicle) that kind of documentary evidence to try to be a witness to history — especially a history that not a lot of people know, about a woman who wanted to play America’s game.”

Toni Stone “… was a wonderful storyteller.” She “had a great flair for language and knew what the good stories were,” Ackmann said. “I started (Curveball) long after she had passed away but one of the things I did was that I tried to find every single audio or video tape that I could possibly find to hear the tenor and quality of Toni’s voice; but more importantly (to hear) how she related things.…”

Had the book been researched before Stone died, Ackmann said, “I would dearly love to (have sat) with her in that beautiful little Victorian home that she had in Oakland, California. … I would try to get at what kept her going in the face of such opposition.

How did she manage to continue to pursue what she loved most? What was the fire in the belly that really kept her going?

Sources and notes

“The woman who replaced Hank Aaron: Telling the story of Toni Stone, first female Negro League player” (by Sandra Svoboda, Metro Times’ 2011 Opening Day Issue), published: April 6, 2011, http://metrotimes.com/culture/the-woman-who-replaced-hank-aaron-1.1128410

“Toni Stone’s life and career — from neighborhood pickup game to cross-country barnstorming to obscurity in retirement — aptly recounted in Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League by Martha Ackmann, a senior lecturer in gender studies at Mount Holyoke College (Massachusetts).

The author spoke with Metro Times (Detroit) about Toni Stone, the Negro Leagues and what they mean to America, http://metrotimes.com/culture/the-woman-who-replaced-hank-aaron-1.1128410

Martha Ackmann

Martha Ackmann is a journalist and senior lecturer in gender studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her specializations: Women athletes, women in aviation and space, women in national politics, U.S. women’s movements, Emily Dickinson. She is “a noted feminist and public intellectual” who has appeared on a variety of U.S. broadcast and print outlets. In addition to Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League Ackmann is author of The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, which is a story of American women pilots who were secretly tested to be astronauts in the 1960s. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/facultyprofiles/martha_ackmann

Martha Ackmann appeared on the April 1, 2013, edition of KPFA’s “Letters and Politics,” http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90273

“Letters & Politics,” hosted by Pacifica’s Mitch Jeserich, focuses on burning political issues and debates and their historical context within the United States and worldwide.

  

Toni Stone

Wikipedia note

Toni Stone (b. July 17, 1921; d. November 2, 1996, also known by her married name Marcenia Lyle Alberga) was the first of three women to play Negro league baseball.

This first female player in the Negro Leagues “was not met with open arms. Most of the men shunned her and gave her a hard time because she was a woman.” She was barred from the locker room and if lucky allowed to change in the umpire’s locker room.

Toni Stone (b. July 17, 1921; d. November 2, 1996) became one of the first women to play as a regular on a big-league professional team in 1953. In 1985 she was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation’s International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990 she was included in two exhibits at the Baseball Hall of Fame, one on ‘Women in Baseball’ and another on ‘Negro League Baseball’. In 1993 Stone was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame as well as the Sudafed International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990, Stone’s hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota declared March 6 ‘Toni Stone Day’. Saint Paul also has a field named after Toni Stone located at the Dunning Baseball Complex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Stone

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Delta Woman echoes on International Women’s Day

Edited excerpt for Today’s Insight News by Carolyn Bennett

Fannie Lou Hamer was a hardworking American. Hers was the kind of backbreaking work Americans born after the great Depression will likely never experience. As a civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke boldly to us about us: to Americans about their treatment of one another, their divisiveness from one another that, ultimately, will cause America’s breakdown.

“I work for the liberation of all people because when I liberate myself I’m liberating other people,” Hamer said. “Sometimes I really feel sorrier for the White woman than I feel for ourselves, because she [has] been caught up in this thing ─ … caught up in this thing because you worked my grandmother and after that you worked my mother and then, finally, you got a hold on me.”

Coming out of the poorest state in the nation, from one of the poorest classes, Mrs. Hamer was harsh and frank about the way some college-educated Black women had difficulty embracing her as their sister:

“A few years ago throughout the country the middle class Black women ─ I used to say not really Black women but the middle class colored women ─ didn’t respect the kind of work that I was doing.

“In this struggle, some people say, ‘well, she don’t talk too good.’ The type of education that we get here ─ years to come, you won’t talk too good. The kind of education we get in the state of Mississippi will make our minds so narrow it won’t coordinate with our big bodies. We know we have a long fight, because our leaders like the preachers and the teachers are failing to stand up today. But we know some of the reasons for that ─ this brainwashed education the teachers have got.

“You see now, baby, whether you have a Ph.D., D.D.., or No D., we’re in this bag together. Whether you are from Morehouse or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together. Not to fight to liberate ourselves from the men … but to work with them; then we have a better chance to just act as human beings and be treated as human beings in our sick society.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. America is divided against itself and without considering us [today ‘us’ stretches to women, migrants, Muslims, minorities] as human beings, one day America will crumble!”

Fannie Lou Hamer was a woman of the Delta. She was born in 1918 on a plantation in the Mississippi hill country. Her parents were sharecroppers. She was the youngest of twenty children. When she was two years old, she and her parents moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi. In the time of her youth, the school term was only four months of a year; work took precedence over education. Fannie Lou Hamer loved to read and learned to read while in school though economic circumstances precluded her receiving more than six years of formal education.

Mrs. Hamer married and continued farming until the 1960s. She learned about voting in 1962 and later reflected, “That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it.”

When the civil rights movement began in Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer became a participant, first; then a leader. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] as a fieldworker in voter registration drives. Her work for civil rights led her to becoming a leading figure in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As a member of MFDP, she attended the 1964 National Democratic Convention to challenge the seating of Mississippi’s Regular Democratic Party. During a credentials committee hearing at this convention, she made a famous television appearance describing the struggle and violence encountered when trying to vote in Mississippi.

“The first vote I cast, I cast . . . for myself,” she said ─ “because I was running for Congress.”

Fannie Lou Hamer opposed the incumbent Representative Jamie Whitten from her congressional district.

On behalf of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer traveled widely making speeches in major U.S. cities and colleges. She helped form the farming cooperative, Freedom Farms, in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She ran in 1971 for a seat in the Mississippi Senate.

Fannie Lou Hamer lived and died (March 14, 1977) in the Delta. Eulogized in Ruleville, Fannie Lou Hamer is buried at Freedom Farms Cooperative in Mississippi.


Sources and notes
Hamer should be pronounced as in “name-r” but with an H instead of an n

Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, edited by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Barbara Woods (Indiana University Press, 1993), pp 212-214
Biographical notes Oral Historian, a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage prepared and maintained by the Special Collections Digital Lab, a division of USM Libraries at the University of Southern Mississippi. http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/hamer.htm