Madigan Hall
Manhattan, NY
July 29th, 1904
At ten o clock this morning, in the midst of a lively Legacy Cup series currently headed to Minneapolis, Commissioner Alexander Madigan took to the east garden of the lavish Madigan Hall to announce the formation of a provisional committee tasked with locating and incorporating twenty-four negro universities into an official base ball league.
After the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Fowler vs. the Legacy Baseball League in 1900, compelling the league to fund and form the Legacy Negro Baseball League, the matter of providing young talent for the nascent negro league has been a matter of some debate.
In the Legacy Baseball League, white players are scouted and trained in the innovative and expensive Academy Program, wherein the league has established secondary schools across the nation where regional talent is aggressively recruited. This talent is coached and tailored during their school years for selection to the Legacy Baseball League.
In the Negro Leagues, however, no such development pool exists. Some critics of the Academy model claims that it violates the ruling set forth by the Supreme Court in 1900.
Rather than forming a segregated Academy League, Commissioner Madigan and the board of the LBL elected to fund a collegiate baseball program through negro colleges across the eastern United States—primarily in the deep south. This approach to feeding the Negro League with young talent may satisfy the Supreme Courts mandate for separate-but-equal institutions without digging too much deeper into Madigan Hall’s pocketbook.
Facing declining attendance and increased governmental pressure following the exposure of a vast gambling conspiracy within the league, the contrasting success and spreading popularity of the Negro Leagues across the southern United States cannot be ignored—even by the tight-fisted bureaucrats of Madigan Hall. Non-whites are officially restricted from playing in either the Academy or Legacy Leagues.
Cooper Fowler, the controversial former Richmond Rifle and inaugural manager of the successful Richmond Black Rifles, was selected by Madigan Hall to lead the commission to locate suitable negro universities and establish an integrated baseball league. While Mr. Fowler certainly exhibits the experience for such a task, the appointment seems a targeted slight at Michael Monroe, the owner of the Richmond Rifles—who infamously sacked Fowler and expunged his records when his negro heritage surfaced.
A silent war between Madigan Hall and the powerful Monroe tobacco empire seems to be reaching a climax. Monroe provided a significant portion of the League’s initial founding—and has since made nearly ten times his original investment in the wake of an enormously successful decade. However, as the Brooklyn scandal continues to shake the baseball world, thousands of rooters are migrating away from the ballpark. Madigan’s reputation as a stubborn and inflexible moralist seems badly tarnished by a league-wide scandal fomenting directly under his nose. While Madigan has expressly condemned any talk of integration since the formation of the league, his expansions of the Negro Leagues serve as a moral victory over Richmond and Monroe. The universities will be selected from primarily southern institutions, where negroes are still forbidden, in most cases, from attending white universities.
In any case, the twenty-four universities to be chosen for incorporation under the LNBL will be announced before the first pitch of opening day, 1905.