Effa Manley was the first (and only) woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. She also may have been the First Black Woman but there is some uncertainty about her ethnicity. She certainly had a black stepfather, married a black man, and identified as black.
Manley and Baseball
Effa Manley with her husband Abe owned and managed the Newark Eagles in the Negro National League from 1935 to 1948. It was Effa Manley who handled promotions, publicity, financial management, scheduling, recruitment and contract negotiation. In 1946, her work bore fruit, when the Eagles won the Negro World Series.
Manley worked for better pay and accommodations for players and tried to convince black owners to build their own stadiums so they were not subject to the whims of the owners of stadiums built for white teams. She pushed owners to be more professional and was incensed when Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson without compensating the owners of the black team that had recruited and trained him.
When one of her own players, Larry Doby, was recruited by the Cleveland Indians, she encouraged the move, while negotiating compensation for his contract. The amount paid was well below what was paid to white owners, but she pushed for the principle. Earlier Manley had tried to get the white major leagues to incorporate black teams into their organization. That did not happen and she knew that the integration of major league baseball would be the death knell for the Negro Leagues.
It wasn’t until the twenty-first century that a committee of the National Baseball Hall of Fame reviewed the teams of the Negro League to see which players might have merited induction but had been overlooked. Twelve players and five executives were inducted in 2006. Effa Manley was among the executives included; her husband was not.
Manley and Social Responsibility
In 1934, before she took over the Newark Eagles, Manley organized a boycott through the Citizens’ League for Fair play. Her slogan was “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” As a result Blumstein’s Department Store, which had a significant number of black customers, began hiring black clerks. Manley also was treasurer of the local chapter of the NAACP.
She did not hesitate to use her baseball team to make statements about the way in which blacks in this country were treated. On one occasion she held an “Anti-Lynching Day” at one of the stadiums where the Eagles played, playing a part in pushing Congress to pass an anti-lynching law.
She also scheduled entertainment for black troops at Fort Dix, when the military was still segregated and raised money for Booker T. Washington Community Hospital. Mindful of those who could not afford to attend games, and perhaps as a marketing tool to build future fans, Manly made sure that black youth could attend her games for free.
Manley’s Legacy
Effa Manley’s name was forgotten for many years. This was partly because black teams had never been accepted as equivalent to white teams and then she had another “strike” against her; she was a woman. Now her name is known, although the recognition came posthumously, and she is enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
