‘A love for the game’
In 1890, 34 years before baseball player Clarence Bruce Jr. was born, the National Association of Base Ball Players reached a “gentleman’s agreement” to bar Black players from Major League Baseball.
But during the nearly half-century before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Black baseball players established Negro League Baseball, a wildly popular professional league of their own that produced some of the best ball players to ever play the game.
Pittsburgh was home to two of the most dominant Negro League baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays.
And Bruce, who was born in Pittsburgh and whose extended family lives in Washington, was the starting second baseman for the Grays and won a championship with the team in 1948.
“He had such a love for the game. My mother, Joan, was very proud to watch her big brother play professional baseball and would absolutely light up every time she talked about it,” said Bob Griffin of Washington, Bruce’s nephew. “He was humble, and he didn’t talk about himself a lot. He talked much more about the guys he played with – Luke Easter, Buck Leonard, Junior Gilliam – and how good they were. The best players in the Negro Leagues were every bit as good, if not better, than players in organized baseball.”
Negro Leagues teams, in fact, regularly played games against white teams on the barnstorming circuit, and won more than they lost.
In a famous 1934 exhibition game, Satchel Paige and the Crawfords beat the St. Louis Cardinals and pitcher Dizzy Dean, two weeks after the Cardinals had won the World Series.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the launch of the Negro National League, started on Feb. 13, 1920, by Rube Foster, an outstanding former pitcher and a businessman who envisioned a Black alternative to the major leagues.
MLB was set to celebrate Negro Leagues Baseball this weekend, but the COVID-19 pandemic has scuttled those plans.
In its inaugural season, the league fielded eight teams – and it was immediately successful. In the first year, more than 400,000 fans traveled to sandlots, country fields and ballparks to watch Negro League games.
The Negro Leagues’ contributions to baseball were significant, said Dr. Raymond Doswell, vice president and curator of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo.
Without them, Jackie Robinson probably wouldn’t have gotten that chance to play for the Dodgers.
“The Negro Leagues nurtured the opportunity for Black athletes interested in baseball to have a place to ply their trade. Had there not been a Negro League to help nurture the Black athlete, we wouldn’t have the players we have in baseball,” said Doswell.
Bruce’s son, Kirk Bruce, said his father was grateful for the opportunity to play with, and against, baseball greats.
In the 1948 World Series, Bruce and the Grays squared off against the Birmingham Black Barons, led by Willie Mays, and Kirk Bruce said his father often expressed that he considered it a privilege to face Mays, who went on to become one of the best to play the game.
A passion for baseball
Bruce was born in 1924 in Pittsburgh, the oldest of six children of Clarence Bruce Sr., a head waiter at the Roosevelt Downtown Hotel, and Blanche Bruce, a homemaker.
Bruce shared his father’s passion for baseball, and from the time he was 10 years old, he accompanied his dad to Crawfords and Grays home games to watch future Hall of Fame players, including Paige, Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston, play.
Bruce developed into a star athlete at Westinghouse High School, and attended the University of Pittsburgh until 1943, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II.
Bruce fought in the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944 – a fact his family only learned about after finding his military records following his death from a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 65.
Bruce was discharged from the Army in 1945, after the war ended, and the following year he signed a contract with the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. In 1947, he joined his hometown Grays, where he played for two seasons and earned $300 a month.
The Grays split their home games between Forbes Field and Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. According to Doswell, the Grays often played day games at Forbes Field and then rode the team bus to play night games at their alternate home.
When they were on the road, Bruce and the Grays players either had to stay at African-American hotels or with Black host families.
“They played for the love of the game. They endured a lot and they encountered some things when they traveled,” said Bruce’s daughter, Jennifer Bruce Scott.
While the Negro Leagues enjoyed a heyday, they began to struggle after Jackie Robinson started to play with the Dodgers and other major league teams signed the best African-American players, and attendance at games declined.
So Bruce headed to Canada, where he was signed by the Provincial League’s Farnham Pirates in Quebec.
He played for the Pirates for two years before he hung up his cleats after the 1950 season.
Bruce returned home to Pittsburgh, and in 1952 he married Marguerite Cole, a former high school volleyball player who had graduated from West Virginia State University and was a physical education teacher.
Kirk Bruce said his father was offered a tryout with the Cleveland Indians in 1953, but turned it down.
Bruce worked for 35 years as a clerk for the U.S. Post Office and U.S. Postal Service.
He also discovered a love for the game of golf, and the natural athlete became a skilled golfer and instructor. He played often at The Dandy Duffer, an African-American golf club, and taught golf lessons at Cool Springs.
Bruce and Marguerite passed their athleticism to Kirk and Jennifer, and the couple were staples at their children’s sporting events, cheering them on – Bruce animatedly, Marguerite silently.
Kirk Bruce was a starting point guard for Pitt and was a key part of the 1974 basketball team that went 24-5 and reached the NCAA quarterfinals. He later served as Pitt’s women’s basketball coach, leading the Panthers to their first 20-win season in 1993, and associate athletic director before he retired.
Jennifer is the second-leading scorer in Pitt basketball history, men’s or women’s, and will be inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame this fall. She is an outpatient nurse for Allegheny Health Network. A former girls’ and women’s basketball coach, she now is a high school and college referee.
“I couldn’t have had two better role models than my parents,” said Jennifer.
Mainstream newspapers didn’t regularly cover Negro League games, so statistical information on many of the players, including Bruce, isn’t available.
But the stories of players like Bruce “are as important to us as any other,” Doswell contends.
“His may be more important because here is a person who made a choice, even though all these things were imposed on him – segregation, racism – and he had agency, the ability to act independently, despite all those things, and to overcome those major obstacles,” said Doswell. “He may not be the most talented or the most recognized Negro Leagues player, but he used his choice to make a world for himself. Those are the important stories to understand why the Negro Leagues and baseball are so important to the Black community.”
Sean Gibson, executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation and Josh Gibson’s great-grandson, said Pittsburgh has embraced its Negro League teams and their history.
“This is a sports town, and the fans haven’t forgotten about the Negro League teams. They realize we have two of the greatest teams to ever play,” said Gibson. “The city has embraced the tradition, and they recognize the significance of the Negro League.”
Kirk said one of his father’s happiest moments occurred in September 1988 when the Pittsburgh Pirates raised a Homestead Grays flag to commemorate the 1948 Grays championship team, and Bruce was selected to speak on behalf of his teammates, who stood alongside him.
It’s not lost on Gibson that the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues is occurring amid calls for racial equality following the death of George Floyd.
“Josh Gibson has been dead for over 70 years, and it’s a shame that the things he was going through then, we are still going through today,” he said.
Jennifer said it wasn’t until she was a student at Pitt that she realized the significance of her father playing in the Negro League.
“The importance of the league, and the significance of what my father and the other players did, didn’t occur to me while I was growing up,” she said. “I remember thinking, wow, this is a really big deal. I’m proud of him.”