Home » Mind & Soul » Care of the Soul » Oscar Charleston and U.S. - Numbers, Names, Dates and Places

Oscar Charleston and U.S. - Numbers, Names, Dates and Places

© Thomas James Martin

. . .and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything.
~Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Oscar McKinley Charleston is considered one of the greatest baseball players who ever played the game. He played in the Negro Leagues along with such outstanding and somewhat better known black players as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. Oscar played and managed baseball teams from 1915 to 1954.

He played without recognition from white American society in those days of the Twentieth Century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball's major leagues. Robinson took the field as a Brooklyn Dodger in the Fall of 1947; by then Oscar's playing days were over.

From photographs and according to recollections, he was a barrel-chested man blessed with extraordinary strength, coordination and speed. His intuitive grasp of the game was legendary. He was popular with the fans and well liked by his teammates, and, consequently, spent quite a few years as a successful team manager.

Though he was also infamous for his temper and the occasional brawl, he often protected rookie players, and developed numerous young men into fine ball players over the course of his career. Eventually he learned to channel his strength and temper into the spirited competition for which he was famous on the playing field.

His biography is a cavalcade of the history of the United States and Black America. Note particularly the Supreme Court decisions affecting African Americans that parallel his birth in 1896 and death in 1954.

1896
Oscar McKinley Charleston is born in Indianapolis, Indiana on October 15, 1996, the son of Tom, a Sioux Indian, and Mary Jeannette Thomas.

In 1896 The Supreme Court ruled against Homer Adolph Plessy, who was one-eigth Negro, in Plessy v. Ferguson. When Plessy had entered a railroad car reserved for whites, he was arrested. He challenged the constitutionality of the statute. The Supreme Court, by a vote of seven to one, found it valid. The dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote:

"The destinies of the two races in this country are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law. . . The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, or atone for the wrong this day done."