Later Years
For the next decade or so they alternated leagues before being bought by Memphis, Tennessee, funeral home director Tom Hayes and joined the Negro American League in 1940. Early in the decade the team was sold again to Abraham Saperstein who also owned the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. In 1943 and 1944 they won back-to-back pennants. Starting in 1945, they became full members of the Negro American League and continued their success, winning a third pennant in 1948 with the help of teenage outfielder Willie Mays. They ended up losing three Negro League World Series to the Homestead Grays that decade, forging a notable rivalry. As the Major Leagues started signing talented African American players, the Black Barons tried to form a new Negro Southern League with three other Southern teams.
The franchise was owned by William Bridgeforth from 1952 to 1955, and by Sid Lynor and Floyd Meshac in 1955. Dr. Anderson Ross purchased the franchise in 1956 and renamed the team the Birmingham Giants.
The new NSL played from 1956 to 1960 before folding. The Black Barons played their last game in 1960.
Read more about this topic: Birmingham Black Barons
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
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—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)