Tales from The b.a.SKET: Black Art Sketches for the Contemporary Art Lover

By D. Amari Jackson

This week, we reach into the b.a.SKET and pull out one of the greatest baseball players to ever walk away from the game…

Connie Mack was impressed. It was the heart of the Great Depression, and the legendary baseball figure, team owner, and Hall of Famer—now recognized as the longest-serving manager in major league baseball history—was mesmerized by the extraordinary talent of the Boston University student pitching for the Boston Tigers, a semi-professional, all-Black team from the nearby Roxbury area. A highly-intelligent, multisport transfer from Lincoln University, the young pitcher was also the star fullback for the Boston University football team, and he had further groomed his baseball skills by playing exhibition games against Negro League teams, even pitching against the legendary Satchel Paige.

As the owner of Major League Baseball’s oldest franchise and multiple world champion Philadelphia Athletics (now the Oakland A’s), Mack wanted the young man to pitch in “The Big Leagues” for his storied team. So, 15 years before Jackie Robinson became the first Black player to break major league baseball’s longstanding color barrier, the powerful owner offered Romare Bearden a baseball contract with the Philadelphia Athletics.

However, there was a catch. Numerous sources have since reported how Mack told Bearden that, to play major league baseball, he would have to pass for white.

Romare Bearden photograph attached to his 1929 application to Lincoln University; Courtesy of Langston Hughes Memorial Library, Lincoln University.

That didn’t happen. Bearden bounced.

Proud of his culture and identity, the talented young man elected not to pass or play for the Athletics and, in doing so, turned down substantial fame and fortune. Bearden would pitch for two more summers with the Boston Tigers until an injury forced him to rethink the time and attention he was giving to baseball.

Instead, Romare Bearden—one of the greatest baseball players you never heard of—poured that extra time and attention into his art.

And the rest, as they say, is history. In his March 2012 article on the topic in The Atlantic, Jason Parham wrote that “the end of Bearden’s short semi-pro career was perhaps the singular turning point for Bearden as an artist. Bearden’s one chance to make it in the big leagues, to actually cross over and make a career out of playing baseball (and a successful one at that), came at a price. He would have had to pass for white and turn his back on his family and his race. If Bearden hadn’t rejected the offer from the Philadelphia Athletics, it is uncertain if he would have ever become the visionary painter and collagist he did.”

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Amari Jackson is a creator, author, TV/web/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence; creator/writer/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series The Book Look; writer/coproducer of the 2016 film Edge of the Pier; and current writer/coproducer of Listen Up! on HBCU GO/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.

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