This Monday will be the 71st anniversary of two events — disparate in nature, but eerily connected in the tapestry of our nation’s history. If you’re a baseball fan you should enjoy this. That is, unless you follow the White Sox. On March 18th, 1942, two handsome, well-muscled black men from California walked onto the green grass of the spring training camp of the Chicago White Sox at Brookside Park in Pasadena. One of these young men was a 25-year-old Negro League pitcher from England, Arkansas (a suburb of Little Rock) named Nathaniel Edmund Moreland Jr., known to his friends as “Nate.”
Nate was joined that day by his childhood friend and teammate, 23-year-old Jack Roosevelt Robinson, known to his friends as Jackie. Eventually, Robinson would ascend to the heights of secular sainthood while Moreland would descend to the depths of American tragedy. But on that day 71 years ago, the pair were on equal footing.
Born on April 22nd, 1917, Moreland lived in Arkansas until he was about 13 when his family moved to Pasadena, California. Nate grew up in the same neighborhood as Jackie Robinson, who was a friend of the family. Moreland and Robinson both attended Muir High School in Pasadena and played baseball. Afterwards, Moreland attended Pasadena Junior College and the University of Redlands. In 1939, he and Robinson played together on a semi-pro baseball team and won the state championship. The following summer, the six foot-one inch tall 195 pound hard-throwing left-hander caught on with the Negro League’s Baltimore Elite Giants. The next year, Moreland signed with Tampico Alijadores of the Mexican League where he played well. Moreland’s performance drew attention from the baseball elite and by 1942, Nate and his childhood friend, Jackie Robinson, were ready to test the boundaries of the long established baseball color line.
The White Sox were in position to change the course of baseball history and manager Jimmy Dykes agreed to give the dynamic duo a look. Ironically on that day, Dykes was the Major League minority in that he was willing to accept black players. The two players performed well, often outpacing their white counterparts on the diamond. Even as, midway through the workout, Robinson was hobbled by a charlie horse on the base paths, Dykes told a local reporter, “I’d hate to see him on two good legs. He’s worth $50,000 of anybody’s money. He stole everything but my infielders’ gloves.” However, the duo’s hopes were dashed when Dykes fell back on the familiar big league line by saying that it was, “strictly up to the club owners and Judge (Kennesaw Mountain) Landis to start the ball a-rolling.”
The tryout gained little attention by mainstream media outlets and was not even mentioned in Robinson’s 1972 autobiography “I Never Had It Made.” The only white newspaper to cover the tryout was the Daily Worker, the official voice of the Communist Party in America. The paper used the incident to continue their attack on the baseball color line by denouncing the incident as “a relic of the slave market long repudiated in other American sports.” The paper published the address and phone number of Commissioner Landis, urging their readers to voice their displeasure. As for Dykes, the Daily Worker noted that Jimmy was a Philadelphia native who owned a bowling alley that barred black folks from the facility. It must also be noted that Dykes refused to pose for pictures with Nate and Jackie. Seventy-one years ago, the Chicago White Sox passed on their chance to change history. Two weeks later on April 3, 1942, after being drafted, Robinson was assigned to a segregated Army cavalry unit in Fort Riley, Kansas.
Later that year, Moreland was among a group of Negro League players who were offered tryouts in the all-white Pacific Coast League. However, by the time tryouts came in the spring of 1943, the offers were withdrawn. Moreland pitched with various semi-pro clubs in 1943 before returning to the Mexican league with Tampico in 1944. In the spring of 1947 Moreland finally got his chance to try out for a minor league team. On May 21st, 1947, by signing a pro contract with the El Centro Imperials of the Class C Sunset League in California, Nate became the first black professional baseball player in the state of California and among the first to play minor league baseball as a whole.
With his stint in the Army fulfilled and after starring with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues and the minor league Montreal Royals, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier with Brooklyn in 1947. On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson made his major league debut at Ebbets Field before a crowd of 26,623 spectators, including more than 14,000 black patrons.
Nate Moreland pitched with El Centro from 1947-1950 before joining the Mexicali Eagles and enjoying a career in the Southwest International League and Arizona-New Mexico League from 1950-1956. Moreland, like Robinson, was a catcher at Muir Tech high school, but became a pitcher at Redlands University and pitched 10 years in the minor leagues. His lifetime record was 152-104. He briefly worked as a minor league umpire in 1958 before his baseball career came to an end. By then, Jackie Robinson was an all-star fixture at second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on his way to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Robinson retired from baseball on January 5, 1957.
On February 15th, 1959, Nate Moreland was arrested for trying to sell a controlled substance and was sentenced to prison. He was paroled in 1964, and died in Alameda, California on November 27th, 1973. He was buried in Los Angeles National Cemetery with only a few friends and family in attendance. Robinson did not long outlive his friend Nate. Complications of heart disease and diabetes weakened Robinson and made him almost blind by middle age. On October 24, 1972, he died of a heart attack at home in Stamford, Connecticut, aged 53. Robinson’s funeral service on October 27, 1972, at New York City’s Riverside Church attracted 2,500 mourners.
Ironically, on the very same day that Nate Moreland and Jackie Robinson walked onto that west coast field to try and change history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was making history on the east coast. Four months after the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority. Its purpose, according to his executive order, was to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.” An estimated 120,000 men, women and children were rounded up on the West Coast. All internees were shipped to 10 relocation centers in California, Utah, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming. The government closed the last camp in March 1946. In 1990, Congress approved reparations for the surviving internees and heirs. Each received a formal apology and a check for $20,000.
Jackie Robinson ended up in the Hall of Fame with countless schools, stadiums, streets, buildings, coins, stamps and even an asteroid named in his honor. On April 15, 1997, Robinson’s jersey number, 42, was retired throughout Major League Baseball, the first time any jersey number had been retired throughout one of the four major American sports leagues. Of the four principal parties involved in those events of March 18, 1942; FDR became an American institution, the Japanese internment camps an American abomination, Jackie Robinson an American hero and Nate Moreland an American anecdote.
Al Hunter is the author of “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Indiana National Road” and “Haunted Irvington” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
