written by Bill Francis
With the National Basketball Association playoffs in full swing, the baseball and basketball seasons intersect.
Individually, Cumberland Posey may have blended the two sports as well as anyone ever has.
In 2006, Posey, the longtime owner of the juggernaut Homestead Grays, was one of 17 candidates from the Negro Leagues and the era preceding them in black baseball who were selected by a special committee for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
But last month, on April 4, it was announced that Posey was part of a 10-member group, which also includes legends as Allen Iverson, Shaquille O’Neal, Sheryl Swoopes and Tom Izzo, that had been elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The Class of 2016 will be enshrined during a Sept. 9 cere
mony in Springfield, Mass.
STARTING IN STEELTOWN
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Cumberland Willis Posey Jr. was born on June 20, 1890 in Homestead, Pa., a steel town in Western Pennsylvania, six miles from Pittsburgh. A star multisport athlete in high school, he excelled in basketball, football, baseball and track,
During the 1910s, the light-skinned Posey attended Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University (the first reported black athlete at the college), spending time as a varsity athlete in both basketball and baseball.
It was also during this period that the 5-foot-9 Posey would gain the reputation as one of the greatest basketball players of his era. Called a wizard on the court, Posey played guard and coached a number of club teams, including the all-black Monticello-Delaneys and the Loendi Big Five, soon to be recognized as one of the best squads in the country thanks to five Colored Basketball World’s Championship teams.
"When basketball history is written, Posey and the Loendi club, which succeeded the Monticello-Delaneys, will have a very important place.”
Fay Young, "Chicago Defender" columnist
In 1922, the Chicago Defender, one of the leading black newspapers of the day, wrote that Posey was a “basketball magnate and leader of one of the best organizations in the country (white or black).”
Two decades later, Chicago Defender columnist Fay Young wrote, “When basketball history is written, Posey and the Loendi club, which succeeded the Monticello-Delaneys, will have a very important place.”
In the midst of his hardwood success, Posey, a standout figure in sandlot circles, joined the Homestead Grays baseball team as an outfielder in 1911, a squad made up of local steel workers. Eventually, the team’s success during weekends-only play made then an in-demand attraction and led to a full semipro schedule of travel throughout the area. In rather quick succession, his natural acumen for such things led Posey to become the Grays’ captain, manager, secretary and owner in a matter of only a few years.
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BASEBALL LEGACY
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While a solid ballplayer, Posey would become best known as the father of the powerhouse Grays.
In 1927, the New York Age, a leading black newspaper, stamped Posey as the greatest black athlete ever.
“Posey is just completing 20 years activity as an athlete, coach and athletic promoter,” the newspaper read. “His record during this 20 years stamps him as the leading Negro athlete of all time. He has accomplished more as an athlete and coach and has been more successful from a financial standpoint than any of his contemporaries. Since he was captain of a Pittsburgh high school football team back in 1907, Posey has been a professional football, basketball and baseball player, a coach in each of these lines, and a successful promoter of basketball and baseball teams.
“As an athlete, Posey is best remembered as a basketball player, although he was good at football and baseball. For years he retained the reputation as the best Negro guard on any basketball five in the country. He is captain and manager of the famous Loendi basketball team that has, year after year, defeated the best colored and white professional teams.”
Posey, when asked about his athletic record, said: “I have been so actively engaged in athletics since I was captain of the football team of the high school I attended, I have never stopped to keep a record of all the events I have taken part in.”
Another black newspaper, Baltimore’s Afro-American, termed Posey the greatest African-American athlete in a 1929 piece.
“Frequently sports writers on daily papers have asked me, ‘Whom do you consider as the outstanding athlete of your race, past and present?’” wrote W. Rollo Wilson. “Several names present themselves and I vision Paul Robeson, mighty end of Rutgers’ great teams; John Henry Lloyd, still a baseball star after 20 years; Oscar Charleston, peer of any man on the diamond. And another.
“And that other, because he fought to the top without the fanfare of school publicity and the plethoric bankroll of magnates behind him, looms above them all. He made his own organization, he and his fellows financed their own clubs; at last, through as an active athlete, he became an owner of a sports crew. His name is Cumberland Posey Jr.
“Cum Posey the athlete is now Cum Posey the magnate. He is an opportunist who has made sport pay him liberally for his contributions to it. I doubt if any Negro sports figure is known to as many people as Posey. Derelicts and plutocrats call him ‘Cum’ and he replies in kind.
“When he walks to the coach’s box at first base the fans cheer him. When he protests a decision they jeer him. But there is nothing evil, nothing lasting in their venom of the moment. He’s their friend and if they want to cuss him, that’s their prerogative. Cum Posey belongs to the sports world: He is in it and of it and it is proud of him.
“So, if you are still asking me whom I consider the greatest athlete, the one who has meant the most to ‘the game,’ the answer is ‘Cum Posey.’”
GROWING THE GRAYS
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While Posey fought joining a loop for many years, preferring the lucrative nature of an independent squad, the Grays eventually became a member of the Negro National League in 1934. While his playing career had ended in 1929, and he had relinquished his managerial reigns to Vic Harris in 1935 to concentrate on the team’s business matters. This big team from a small town developed into a dynasty by winning nine consecutive NNL pennants from 1937-45.
“For Negro ballplayers, that was the epitome of their achievements – playing for the Homestead Grays,” said former Grays team member Harold Tinker. “We didn’t have any prospects in the major leagues; ‘white baseball’ wasn’t open to us.”
“We do our chores in the major league manner, and we are certain that our greats. . .are as good, if not better, than those so-called major leaguers.”
Cumberland Posey
Among the future Hall of Famers developed by Posey’s key eye for talent with the talent-rich Grays were Smokey Joe Williams, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Oscar Charleston, Jud Wilson and Ray Brown.
While breaking down big league baseball’s racial barriers would ultimately prove ruinous to the fortunes of the Negro Leagues, Posey often spoke of the hypocrisy involved.
“We do our chores in the major league manner,” Posey said late in life, “and we are certain that our greats – Willie Wells, Ray Dandridge, Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Roy Campanella, Buck O’Neil, Willard Brown, Sammy Hughes, and all of our Grays – are as good, if not better, than those so-called major leaguers.”
A LIFE OF HONOR
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Posey passed away at age 55 on March 28, 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson broke the modern big league color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“Negro baseball suffered a severe loss in the death of Cum Posey,” said longtime Negro leagues rival Gus Greenlee, owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. “Few men have played a more important role in the development and organization of Negro professional baseball. Although at times we opposed each other bitterly, I always held the greatest respect for Cum as friend, associate and rival. There will never be a figure to replace the militant Cum Posey in the world of sports. Those of us who knew him will definitely miss him.”
Days after Posey’s death, famed African-American sportswriter Wendell Smith, who would go on to be honored as the 1993 J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, penned a column about the legendary sportsman, which began with a poem entitled “Game Called.” The last of its eight stanzas read:
“There’ll be no cheering in the stands today
“The Captain of the team has passed away.
“Put down the ball, that’s the end of the game
“Baseball has lost its greatest name – Cum Posey!”
In eulogizing Posey, Smith wrote, “Men will come and go in baseball. It’s a game that will live as long as this great Nation survives, but none of them will transgress its rock-strewn roads with the reckless abound that he did. The story of his rise from the dusty sandlots of Homestead to the ownership of the greatest team in Negro baseball, reads like a saga penned by a writer whose sense of imagination surpassed his logic.
“Only a man with the heart and courage of Posey could have scaled such heights on his own. He was a guy who packed a wallop in both fists and he never failed to let one fly if you got in his way. And, when he was coming along, that’s what you needed to make the grade – guts and heart and courage.
“Although he was a great basketball player – in fact, the greatest, according to such a capable judge as the immortal Fat Jenkins – Cum Posey’s life was dedicated to the team he made, the Homestead Grays. Some may charge that his tactics were crude and his aims selfish. Some may say he crushed the weak as well as the strong on his way to the top of the ladder.
“But no matter what his critics say, they cannot deny that he was the smartest man in Negro baseball and certainly the most successful.”
Bill Francis is a Library Associate at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
