Telling the story of Toni Stone as 1st woman in Negro Leagues

Some years ago when I met Mamie “Peanut” Johnson at one of those events where former Negro Leagues players sign autographs, I was surprised and delighted to learn that black women were Negro Leaguers, too.

Later while researching Johnson, I learned that she was not the only one. Before her was Toni Stone and coming in alongside her was Connie Morgan.

Last week, I was introduced to Stone and her year with the Indianapolis Clowns as a character in an Off-Broadway play in New York that ended on Sunday. Written by playwright Lydia R. Diamond, the play was simply titled “Toni Stone.” It was based on a 2010 book with a longer title, “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League” by Martha Ackmann.

Actor April Matthias narrated the story of Stone and the barnstorming shows that were the linchpin of the Negro Leagues in the early part of the 20^th century.

For me, it felt like a sanitized view of Stone and the ordeals she certainly faced as a black woman among the black men on the team and as a black person in America. There were snatches of the humiliating treatment: white hotels refusing to give them a place to sleep (she stayed in a brothel because a boarding house owner thought she was a prostitute on a busload of men); ignorant and hateful taunts from “whites” in the stands (the play consisted of Matthias and eight black men sometimes playing their tormentors); a husband who wanted her to stay home and “bake pancakes,” as she put it, and Stone downplaying her femininity to gain respect as a serious ballplayer and chopping 10 years off her age so she could play.

I also never really saw who she was personally. The character, well portrayed by Matthias, was full of stories – some of them very funny – but who was Toni Stone? It was not a linear play – she was born here, she moved there, she did this, she did that from the start of her life to the end. It was instead a series of anecdotes about the road life of the Indianapolis Clowns but was indicative of other Negro Leagues teams. Not that that was a bad thing, but it wasn’t what I expected.

In several interviews online, Ackmann noted that by the time she began researching the book, Stone had died. (Both Stone and Morgan died in 1996. Johnson died in 2017.) So she learned the bits and pieces of Stone’s existence from the players who teamed with her, played against or knew her.

It’s not surprising that there were scant details about her to put into the book and the play. That was the norm for black women trying to survive in a segregated country where men considered them less than par. The play is important because it showed Stone as a woman so determined that she didn’t scar from the bruises left by opponents’ cleats in her back or other punishments meant to deter her.

Toni Stone loved baseball and could recite the stats of her favorite players. It had been that way since she was a girl growing up as Marcenia Lyle Stone in St. Paul, MI, during the 1920s. She wore down the owner of a baseball school for white boys (who happened to be a Klansman) by showing up every day until he apparently got tired of saying “no” to her pleas to attend.

Stone played on several semi-pro teams until Syd Pollock, owner of the Indianapolis Clowns, hired her purely as a novelty to bring back fans to Negro Leagues games at a time when the majors were starting to pick off the good black players. He hired the 32-year-old to replace a young Hank Aaron who’d just moved to the Milwaukee Braves. (She had put her age as 10 years younger.)

In a March 1953 column, a writer in the Oakland Tribune noted that Toni Stone was headed to spring training for the Clowns in Virginia. “About this time some readers will growl that Toni is no way to spell Tony and what does Stone mean by using an “i” where for generations a robust, masculine “y” has existed? That being the case, this column had better explain that Toni Stone is a woman. … She almost surely will be the only woman playing on a man’s professional baseball team. That’s right, a baseball team. Not a Softball team.”

After the 1953 season, Stone was contracted to the Kansas City Monarchs, and the Clowns hired Morgan and Johnson. Stone retired from professional baseball in 1954.

The Clowns was the team portrayed in the 1976 movie “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings,” a comedy featuring Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor. Much as “Toni Stone,” it recounted the barnstorming and on-the-road lives of a group of Negro Leaguers.

Barnstorming was what was expected of the team by both blacks and whites. In the play, the cast performed one of those boisterous shows but with a little less of the original foolishness. Afterward, the audience clapped. I didn’t. It was a little unnerving for me because black players had to do this out of necessity and not because they necessarily wanted to. It felt wrong to clap at such an indignity – even if it was just on stage.

Like Stone, all these Negro Leaguers wanted to do was play ball commensurate with their talents and without restrictions – just like Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio and Dizzy Dean in the major leagues. And many of them were very good at it: Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, Josh Gibson, James “Cool Papa” Bell and Jackie Robinson, the first to get a chance.

That doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.