• Founded the Associated Negro Press, the first international news agency for black newspapers
• Advocated against segregation in the military and the segregation of the blood supply

Claude Barnett was born in Sanford, Florida.  His parents were domestic workers, and their marriage didn’t last. While still a baby, Barnett moved with his mother to Oak Park, Illinois so they could live near his maternal grandmother.

As a child, Barnett worked when he could to help ends meet. When he graduated from high school he was admitted to the Tuskegee Institute where he completed his degree in only two years (1904-06).  His time at Tuskegee gave him a strong network of alumni and professors, which helped Barnett accomplish what he did personally and professionally. Barnett also took quickly to the principles espoused by the school’s founder, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915): moderation, respectability, vocational training, capitalism, and taking responsibility for oneself.

First Job at Post Office

Barnett’s first job was working for the post office (1906-15). It was here that he gained an awareness of the number of newspapers and magazines that were published, and he was fascinated by the advertisements and all they promised.  In 1913 Barnett began reproducing photographs of notable African-Americans and selling them by advertising in black newspapers.  Within four years the business was doing very well, and he and partners set up another sideline business selling cosmetics.

In 1915 Barnett took a job as a traveling ad salesman for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. As he traveled, he noticed a common trend; the newspapers for African-Americans were in dire need of substantive news to report. This led to his next business.

In 1919 Barnett created the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a service designed to provide a reliable stream of news stories for publications. Over time, he built a reliable team of news reporters (mostly freelancers) who provided stories of interest to African-Americans.

Barnett charged publishers $25 per week for access to the latest stories. Because most black papers were weeklies, the service began with mail delivery instead of delivery by wire.  At the start, packets were sent out once a week, eventually increasing to three mailings per week.

By 1935, the ANP was serving about 225 newspapers and magazines across the country. After World War II its membership grew to include more than 100 African newspapers as an increasing number of countries on the African continent moved toward independence.

The Fight Against Military Segregation 

During World War II, Barnett and other black journalists pressured the U. S. government to accredit black journalists as war correspondents. Barnett traveled widely and wrote many accounts on the adverse effects of segregation in the armed forces. (For an example of segregation in the Navy, read “Dorie Miller, Pearl Harbor Hero.”)

Using the ANP to reach black Americans all over the country, he also spearheaded a campaign to desegregate blood donations.

Another story that hooked Barnett’s interest was the story of the terrible living conditions of black tenant farmers. This caught the attention of the government during World War II, when food production was vital for feeding troops, and in 1942, Claude Barnett was named as a consultant to the Secretary of the Agriculture in an effort to improve their conditions. (He served in this capacity until 1953.)

For many years he was a trustee of the Tuskegee Institute and Barnett became involved with the Booker Washington Institute in Liberia.  Through this involvement and his friendship with President Tubman of Liberia, Barnett became an advocate for greater understanding between Africans and African-Americans.  This also brought him to the attention of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and on to its board.  Phelps-Stokes was started in 1911 upon the instructions of an early female philanthropist, Caroline Phelps-Stokes who wanted to fund educational opportunities for the underprivileged both here and abroad.

Barnett was also a governor of the American Red Cross, and on the board of director of the Supreme Life Insurance Company and Chicago’s Provident Hospital.

Personal Life and Awards

In 1934 Barnett married popular entertainer Etta Moten. In 1942 the couple temporarily relocated to New York City when Moten starred as “Bess” in  Porgy and Bess” on Broadway.

In 1949 Barnett was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humanities Degree from Tuskegee Institute.  Two years later, Paul Eugene Magloire, the President of Haiti presented him the Chevalier Order of Honor and Merit and in 1952 Liberian President William V.S. Tubman bestowed the honorary title, “Commander of the Order of Star of Africa.”

The Associated Negro Press was heavily based on the magnetism and management of Claude Barnett.  When his health declined in the early 1960s, he began to realize that the need for the service was winding down. With more interest in civil rights issues, black newspapers were becoming more prosperous and could afford wire services. In addition, the white press was doing a better job of covering civil rights news.

In 1964 he closed the business. Barnett died at home of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1967.

To read about other news reporters who broke the color line read about Alice Dunnigan and Harry McAlpin. McAlpin was the first Black to cover the White House; Dunnigan was first Black woman to cover a president.

Baseball, Politics and the Press

A significant moment in baseball occurred in New York City on July 5, 1930, but the event was not covered by the traditional press.

For the first time ever, Yankee Stadium hosted a game featuring two teams from the Negro Leagues, but no one in 1930 could have read about the game in the New York Times.

On Monday night (July 26, 2010), the Museum of the City of New York hosted a panel to talk about the Negro Leagues and the game that was held on July 5. The panel was moderated by baseball historian Jim Thorn and featured Negro Leagues player Jim Robinson and Dr. Lawrence Hogan, a professor and author of Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball.
How the Negro Leagues Came About

Shortly after the Civil War, baseball became a popular sport for both blacks and whites. Professional baseball teams formed, and there were sporadic incidents of African-Americans playing on white teams, but that came to a halt in 1887 when white Hall of Famer Cap Anson (1852-1922), who served as both a player and a manager of Chicago’s White Stockings team, refused to let his team play an exhibition game against the Newark Giants because the squad had two black players. Only after the two men were ejected from the game would the White Stockings enter the field. Within a few years, professional team owners had come to a “gentleman’s agreement” not to give contracts to African-American players.

But the game was still popular; pick-up games could be played with little more than a bat and a ball, and the game grew among all socio-economic classes. By 1920, African-American entrepreneurs began to put together their own professional teams, known as the Negro Leagues. Crowds would and could come in big numbers to watch these baseball players, and the business owners quickly found they had little competition for the black entertainment dollar. Stadiums were built specifically for these teams, and the Negro Leagues also often barnstormed, playing wherever they could get a crowd.

So why did a clearly white stadium, Yankee Stadium, opened its field to the Negro Leagues in 1930? Baseball historian Jim Thorn indicated that generating income was almost certainly a factor. Thorn pointed out that the stadium had only been built in 1923 and that prohibition would have had a big impact on the Yankees’ owner, Jacob Ruppert, Jr., who was son of a brewing magnate. As the Depression deepened and prohibition remained in effect, the profits from the stadium would have been down in 1930. (The brewery kept its doors open by making “near-beer,” a concoction that the government allowed that contained less than .05 percent alcohol, but the company must have struggled.)

Ruppert surely saw the 1930 game as a way to open the gates to a new business opportunity. Starting that year, the Negro Leagues often played at Yankee Stadium if the Yankees were out of town.

Monday night’s speaker, Jim Robinson, who represented the players’ point of view, was born in 1930 and started out in the Negro Leagues. He moved up to a minor league professional team, and then finished his career in 1958 back with the Negro Leagues, the Kansas City Monarchs. He went on to get a masters degree in social work at the City University of New York and worked for the Housing Authority; later he taught and coached baseball at the college level.

A young man in the audience asked Robinson about the difficulties of playing for the Negro Leagues. Robinson expressed great love for the game and for his teammates but said the life was hard: “We traveled a lot, all by bus, and because of segregation, we weren’t permitted in many hotels or allowed to eat at a lot of eating establishments. That made life on the road more difficult [than for anyone playing on a white team].”

Additional Significance to the 1930 Game

Author Lawrence Hogan pointed out that the double-header played on July 5 was significant for another reason:

“The game was played as a benefit for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor organization to receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor,” he noted. The Brotherhood, headed by A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), went on to lay important groundwork for the civil rights movement.

Hogan also noted that despite the Negro Leagues’ popularity, the only way to get regular reports on these baseball games was to follow the black newspapers. One of Hogan’s previous books, Black National News Service, actually concerns what he described as the black Associated Press.

Integration of Baseball

The integration of professional Major League baseball began in 1945 when Branch Rickey, one of the owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers, made a deal with the first African-American ball player, Jackie Robinson, to leave the Kansas City Monarchs to play for one of the Dodger feeder teams (the Montreal Royals) for the 1946 season. A year later, Robinson moved from Montreal directly to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Other African-American players soon followed him to the Major Leagues.

Speaker Jim Robinson pointed out that what spelled opportunity for the players was the beginning of the end for the black entrepreneurs who had run the Negro Leagues and stadiums. As the best players got picked off by the white teams, the prospects for the Negro Leagues began to dwindle. Crowds dropped off as the teams began to have to fill their ranks with the “too old to move up” players or those who weren’t quite of professional caliber.

While white Major League team management soon saw the competitive wisdom of adding these great athletes to their rosters, the traditional types of acclaim to which white players could aspire took a long time to follow.

The Baseball Hall of Fame did not agree to admit their first black honoree until 1971. At an earlier date, the Hall of Fame had suggested a “separate but equal” distinction for Negro League players, but players, fans, and the press angled for equal treatment. Finally, in 1971 Satchel Paige became the first African-American inductee, and a few more followed over the years but there were still a great number of players who had been overlooked.

About five years ago, the Baseball Hall of Fame formed a new committee to correct the continuing inequities, and in 2007, the committee selected 12 former Negro League players and five Negro League executives to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

A comment made by player Jim Robinson during the evening offers the best conclusion:

“If progress involves standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, then this is too important a chapter of American history to be set aside.”

* * *

For more on this topic: Catcher Roy Campanella and the color line are discussed in “Baseball and Politics: A Reminder of a Time They Intersected.”

To read about Jackie Robinson’s effort to travel via passenger plane from his home in Los Angeles to his first season of spring training with the Major Leagues in Florida, read “Airline Passengers Needed Their Own Rosa Parks.”

To read about the dropping of the color barrier in public pools, see “Pools and Politics.”

There is a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO.

You might also like to visit Nick Diunte’s site: baseball happenings.