But whatever Douglass thought of sports on the plantation during slavery, he saw matters differently with the advent of freedom. His youngest son, Charles, who was twenty-three years old in 1867 when he started working for the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a fervent player. More than that, he was an organizer on a Black team in Washington, D.C., called the Alerts, immediately after the Civil War, when Black baseball teams began appearing in the East.
Indeed, when Charles’s father attended an Alerts game, it made headlines in New York: “Fred Douglass Sees a Colored Game.” Many government workers like Charles Douglass played baseball (or “base ball,” as it was written at the time). In fact, the White House lawn was a popular site for play. Despite Black interest in a game that had a considerable white following and much white participation, there was no mixing of the teams and not much interracial play. Racial lines had already been drawn.
Douglass helped his son Charles raise money for the team, and for Black baseball generally, by writing a letter urging Black Washingtonians to support the Alerts team. He donated his own money as well. When his son switched teams to become the president of the rival Black Washington team, the Mutuals, joining his brother, Frederick Jr., Douglass Sr. switched his allegiance as well, becoming an honorary Mutual in September 1870. It is not overstating to say that Douglass was a baseball man. He attended games, supported his sons’ involvement, and even played catch with his grandchildren.
Douglass’s support gave Black baseball an imprimatur of race approval as an activity that uplifted the race. It was not frivolous for Black men to pursue this sport as an avocation, or even as a vocation. Baseball conveyed a kind of Black social capital. Black men as ballplayers were seen as entrepreneurs, as “manly” (which they were not when enslaved), as supporting a meritocracy and having standards of excellence, and as being role models to Black children.
They were also playing the American game and thus underscoring their identification as American and their right to make such a claim. After the debacle of the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which held that Blacks were not citizens and were never intended to be, such a claim was not to be taken lightly. If the Black public could not make a claim as Americans, what could they make a claim to being? For Black people after the Civil War, playing baseball was not a way to a future, but the way of the future.