Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays: a Biography of the Negro Leagues Owner and Hall of Famer by James E. Overmyer

Author:James E. Overmyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2020-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Grays’ home field for their most important games for many years (Library of Congress).

Greenlee’s letter may have actually been written by his henchman John Clark, and if so, it was one of the few times in this two-year span where Clark took after Posey under any name but his own. Pittsburgh fans of black baseball could be sure of a few things: the Grays and the Crawfords would play each other often, the Grays would win the lion’s share of the games, and John L. Clark and Cumberland W. Posey, Jr., would put aside their personal friendship to fight tooth and nail for their business interests, in the process filling up the sports pages of the Courier and other black weeklies with copious explanations of the other’s shortcomings.

After the Grays left the NNL in 1933, Clark published a detailed version of the affair, in which Posey allegedly told Clark before the June 23 expulsion meeting that he couldn’t make Williams and Binder return to Detroit. The owners, having voted the Grays out that morning with Posey not having appeared to defend his organization, reopened the case when he did arrive, but “the courtesy developed into a waste of time, as Posey evaded direct questioning at every opportunity.” Clark maintained that Posey showed no regrets of any kind over the situation until weeks later, and when he did, his regrets were mostly phony, larded through with claims of the injustices done to the Grays. “And so he continues in his own inimitable style of pity and sympathy for those who do not recognize the Posey rights, conclusions and acquisitions as superior to all others,” Clark wrote.15

Posey certainly was good at staking out and defending his own positions. But while he sometimes had good words for Gus Greenlee’s work on behalf of Negro Leagues ball, he consistently maintained that Clark had no business being league secretary, no matter what his opinions. Besides the fact that Clark was insufficiently versed in baseball management (he was one of the amateurs Posey looked down upon), Posey was aggravated by the fact that Clark was also the Crawfords’ secretary. It was bad enough that the league president was a club owner (and of his chief rival for the Pittsburgh black baseball dollar), but it was doubly insulting that the president’s day-to-day operations man also did the same job for the league. The situation was made worse by the fact that William “Dizzy” Dismukes, a highly experienced baseball man with ties to Posey as recently as the East-West League the season before, was to have been league secretary, but was deposed in favor of Clark as the 1933 season began.16

Although the Homestead Grays were out of the league in 1933, the team name had lived on in the NNL, existing on a sort of baseball life-support. This took the form of a slapped-together Akron Grays team, which played a few games in that Ohio city, where Cum Posey’s team was a regular visitor, under See Posey’s direction before soon expiring.

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