The history of racial caricature in baseball goes back nearly as far as the organized game itself. As early as the 1870s, blackface performers began, in the words of the historian James E. Brunson III, to “exploit the game’s lucrative possibilities.” Many decades later, a team called the Zulu Cannibal Giants pushed this minstrel tradition to a dreadful extreme, taking the field in bare feet and grass skirts with “war paint” slathered on their bodies.
The man who created the Cannibal Giants in the 1930s was a former Negro Leagues pitcher. The team’s Northeast booking agent was a New Yorker with a background in vaudeville. His name was Syd Pollock, and he would become best known for owning another barnstorming team: the Ethiopian Clowns. Pollock’s Clowns wore wigs and pancake makeup and played under faux-African pseudonyms such as Abbadaba and Tarzan. They also trafficked in humor that was, at best, minstrel-adjacent.
Richard “King Tut” King, who’d previously had a stint with the Cannibal Giants, was the team’s most prominent comedian. He would emerge from the dugout looking like an escaped prisoner, or pantomime shooting craps before dropping his pants. His main collaborator on the Clowns was a dwarf known as Spec Bebop. (His real name was Ralph Bell.) In one recurring skit, a dentist gag, Tut would place a lit firecracker in Bebop’s mouth.
In the early 1940s, Negro Leagues owners banded together to try to prohibit their teams from playing Pollock’s franchise. The ban proved impossible to enforce, though, because the Clowns were so popular—with both white and Black fans—that cash-poor Black-owned clubs felt they had no choice but to book them.
The Negro American League eventually eased up on its Clowns ban, admitting them to the league in 1943. The Clowns, for their part, promised to lose the makeup and stop calling themselves Ethiopian. The team, which had been nominally based in Miami, rebranded itself, becoming the Cincinnati Clowns before moving to Indianapolis. They got rid of the paint, too, though not right away. At Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, I found a 1945 program touting the Clowns as the “Most Sensational Ball Club in the World.” Next to that caption was a photo of 15 men with white clown makeup slathered on their faces.
The Clowns were at times competitive in their new league, but the NAL—and Black baseball as a whole—was soon decimated by integration. When Major League Baseball plucked away the likes of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and Roy Campanella in the late 1940s, Black fans abandoned the Negro Leagues en masse.
The Clowns were better positioned than their peers to navigate the Negro Leagues’ collapse. That was largely because Pollock had a knack for making his team the center of attention. In 1953, the Clowns’ owner signed Toni Stone, declaring that baseball was the “latest masculine enterprise to fall before the advance of wearers of skirts and panties.” The team’s new female second baseman was a media and box-office sensation, reviving interest in the entire Negro American League. “Give the fans something they want to see,” a triumphant Pollock said, “and they’ll come out.”