ATLANTA — Buried in storage at a sprawling antebellum Georgia plantation is a film clip that has baseball enthusiasts buzzing.
At first glance, it looks ordinary. The
grainy, out-of-focus black-and-white footage shows black men playing
baseball in a grassy field for 26 seconds. Nobody hits a ball or runs
toward a base.
But University of Georgia archivists say the
film is remarkable for its age: If shot between 1917 and 1919, as they
believe, it is the oldest known film of African-American baseball
players.
“It’s truly a great find,” said Raymond
Doswell, a curator at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City,
Mo. “We haven’t seen any black baseball footage from that era.”
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and
Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., has analyzed the film but not determined
whether it is the oldest of its kind, said Craig Muder, a spokesman.
A film of black ballplayers,
possibly around 1917, was found at the Pebble Hill Plantation in
Thomasville, Ga., and given to the University of Georgia.
“Unfortunately our archivists do not have a
point where they can say, ‘This is the first or this is among the
first,’ ” Mr. Muder said. But historians there are continuing to analyze
the film.
Blacks played baseball as early as the
mid-19th century, historians say. They joined college teams with white
players by the 1880s in the Midwest.
But no film had been found from before the
creation of the Negro Leagues in 1920. The earliest came from a 1921
movie, “As the World Rolls On,” which has footage of an all-black Kansas
team in the background.
The Georgia footage was donated to the
university last year with 140 other reels by thePebble Hill Plantation, a
3,000-acre farm in Thomasville. For decades, they sat in boxes in a
dusty room of the plantation’s main house.
Margaret A. Compton, an archivist at the
university, said the baseball clip caught her eye as she scanned the
hours of footage. Most home movies are of birthday parties or babies
playing, she said. A baseball game at a Southern plantation featuring
black players was different. “The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh my
God, this is really something special,’ ” she said.
With Barbara Cohenour, the manager of the
plantation’s museum, she began piecing together clues about film clip’s
age. Plantation records show that the property’s owner, Howard Melville
Hanna, received the camera as a Christmas gift in 1915. The players’
uniforms closely resemble those in photographs taken at the plantation
around 1917. An emblem in the final frames suggests the film stock was
bought around that time.
The players were plantation employees, Ms.
Cohenour said. Initials on the uniforms show that Pebble Hill was
playing the neighboring Chinquapin Plantation. The games were
recreational, not spectator sports, she said.
“We don’t know the players’ names,” Ms.
Compton said. “But they might have been the horse trainers or the
butlers or the chauffeurs — any jobs available at the plantations.”
Ms. Compton hopes other baseball experts will
offer opinions and analysis. Mr. Doswell, of the Negro Leagues Baseball
Museum, said he had never even heard of plantation workers playing one
another in baseball.
Ms. Compton said she would be pleased if more
footage was discovered. “I’m hoping someone says, ‘Hey, Grandma had one
of those weird cameras, and our footage is even older.’ ”
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