L adies and gentlemen, presenting the strangest game in baseball history: On June 21, 1925, the Wichita Monrovians, an all-black semi-pro team, beat Wichita Klan No. 6 by a score of 10-8 at the Island Park baseball stadium in Wichita, Kansas.
Yes, you read that correctly. An all-black team played baseball against the Klan nearly a century ago. There were no recorded incidents of physical violence, in spite of the former side winning. And, for reasons that remain impossible to explain, this bizarre contest was barely on anyone’s radar for decades.
How little we knew, and still know, about this baffling ballgame is as unusual as the events that led to the teams taking the field. Fortunately, several writers and historians have gradually pieced together a semi-cohesive tale.
In the regrettable era of segregated baseball, the Wichita Monrovians were a short-lived success story. The franchise started in 1920 as the Black Wonders. Jason Pendleton’s summer 1997 piece for Kansas History mentioned the team name was switched to “the capital of the African nation of Liberia” when it joined the Western League of Professional Baseball Teams, or Colored Western League, in 1922. They won the pennant in the league’s only season. Although “no exact record for the entire season has survived,” the Wichita-based Negro Star reported “at the end of July that after sixty games the Monrovians were fifty-two and eight.”
The team was incorporated into the Monrovian Corporation. It had a state charter “with capital stock valued at ten thousand dollars,” according to Pendleton, and became “one of the leading social forces of Wichita’s small black community.” The Monrovians were “a means of financial support for African-Americans,” according to Fletcher Powell’s May 26, 2012, WBUR-FM segment, “often putting money raised from their games into social projects, like the Phyllis Wheatley Children’s Home.”
The Monrovians also had their own ballpark. This was “almost unheard of for a team at their level,” Powell noted. Monrovian Park provided “black Wichitans a place to socialize and be comfortable among other blacks without feeling the stinging pain of racism,” Pendleton wrote, and white Wichitans “who attended the game were more likely to be less openly prejudiced toward black Wichitans than the mass of the city’s population.”
Like other black baseball teams, the Monrovians barnstormed across America. “Teams would usually split the money from attendance,” noted Powell, “so even whites could see the benefit of playing a popular team like the Monrovians, and the Monrovians would play anyone, black or white.”
Which brings us to its wildest barnstorming opponent, Wichita Klan No. 6.
The Klan’s membership in Kansas was reportedly about 100,000 in 1924, with about 5,000 in Wichita. Things were starting to change, however. Zinn Education Project’s Michael Knepler wrote that the “state’s Supreme Court ruled that the Klan was a sales organization, not a benevolent society, so it could not legally operate in the state without an official charter.” William Allen White, described by Knepler as the “legendary newspaper publisher of the Emporia Gazette,” also played a role in the Klan’s downfall. He wrote editorials denouncing them as a “self-constituted body of moral idiots” and “profitable hate factory and bigotorium.” He also ran as an independent, anti-Klan gubernatorial candidate in 1924. Carly Willis’s Feb. 5, 2019, KSN-TV piece noted he “lost the election, but raised awareness about the Klan.”
Hence, this game was “part of a last-gasp publicity stunt,” Kepler wrote, “to demonstrate white superiority and to improve the Klan’s image in Kansas.” With respect to the Monrovians, Donna Rae Pearson of the Kansas State Historical Society told Powell, “from a black perspective, it was a way to show that we were equal to you, that we could compete with you at all levels, including this one.”
Yet, this remarkable contest remains shrouded in mystery. News coverage was sparse. The Wichita Beacon’s brief June 21, 1925, coverage included intriguing descriptions of the game’s odd ground rules. “Strangle holds, razors, horsewhips, and other violent implements of argument will be barred at the baseball game at Island Park this afternoon,” for instance. Meanwhile, “umpires have been instructed to rule any player out of the game who tries to bat with a cross.”
Berry College assistant communications professor Brian Carroll wrote in Baseball Research Journal’s 2008 issue that the Wichita Eagle’s June 22, 1925, recap was only two sentences long. It was described as a “novel” game, played in 102-degree heat under “searing winds,” and a “good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest.”
In Carroll’s view, the fact that the game wasn’t “meaningfully covered” by large dailies “can only be explained by race.” The Negro Star didn’t cover it, either. Why? “Given its limited resources,” Carroll theorized, “the newspaper may not have been able to send anyone to Island Park to cover the game, particularly on Sunday, the busiest news day of the week for a publication devoted to church news.”
Wichitan baseball historian Bob Rives has also dug into aspects of this mysterious game. He told Powell the Island Park stadium “became the predominant ballpark for a good many years” and was “used up until the early 1930s” when it burned down. Meanwhile, he told Willis it was a game “divided into two parts, the score was one to one after the first five innings then all the runs were scored in last four innings.”
Historians don’t know who composed Klan No. 6’s lineup. This team never appeared in any league, nor in other Beacon and Eagle articles. (Carroll suggested it could have been “organized expressly for the one Sunday afternoon in June … an irony against the backdrop of the Klan’s much publicized campaign to ban Sunday baseball earlier in the decade.”) The Monrovians’ lineup is also a question mark. Two players later joined the Negro Leagues’s Kansas City Monarchs — catcher Thomas Jefferson Young and infielder Newt Joseph. The former “hit a critical home run to give the Monarchs the Negro League pennant,” Rives wrote in Baseball in Wichita, and the latter played “for Mulvane in the Oil Belt League, perhaps the first black man to play for an otherwise all-white team in the Wichita area.”
The umpires have been identified: W. W. “Irish” Garrety and Dan Dwyer. Both were First World War veterans and Catholic. Rives, in a June 22, 2020, interview with The Nation’s John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro, believes there was a reason for this. “I think the Klan was fearful that it would lose, and if it lost, it would be considered inferior to the black team,” he said. “And so they announced in advance that the two umpires would be Irish Catholics. The Klan in Kansas then was at least as anti-Catholic as it was anti-black. My opinion is that they were paving the way to be able to say, well, we really didn’t lose. Look at who the umpires were.”
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City houses a small historical exhibit of this sports oddity. I spoke with Bob Kendrick, the museum’s affable longtime president, to get his impressions.
Kendrick first became aware of this game through the “little, non-descript” pieces in Wichita papers. This game “is so unbelievable,” in his view, “it has to be true.” He believes the Klan tried to portray itself as a “kinder, gentler” organization and “pulled out all the stops” with a “really talented” all-black team and Catholic umpires.
I asked Kendrick where this unusual game deserves to be placed in the annals of baseball history. Was it a bizarre moment, anomaly, or strange example of how baseball can bring together disparate people and groups? “By the Monrovians winning this game,” he said, “it proved there was no superiority between white and black.” Indeed, it showed that baseball “bridges the divide in our country.”
The Monrovians disappeared by 1930. Klan No. 6 disappeared as quickly as it surfaced. All participants are deceased — as is, one assumes, everyone who witnessed this game.
“Baseball is a universe as large as life itself,” Paul Auster wrote in Sunset Park, “and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.” Auster captured the essence of America’s national pastime in his short, pithy sentence. What the writer didn’t know was the baseball universe actually contained one game that was good, bad, tragic, and comic rolled into one. It had the look and feel of a Hollywood movie but was as real as real can be.
Michael Taube, a columnist for Troy Media and Loonie Politics, was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.