Recruited To Play For The Homestead Grays
At 6-foot 3-inches and 220 pounds (100 kg), Fields played quarterback at Virginia State University in Petersburg but left school when he was recruited to play for the Washington Homestead Grays in 1939.
The Grays were one of the finest teams in the Negro League, winning nine league championships before folding in the wake of desegregated professional baseball. The Grays played many of their home games at the old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. and some in Homestead, a neighborhood of Pittsburgh. After Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and broke the color line in Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues began to struggle.
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Famous quotes containing the words recruited, play and/or homestead:
“No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Called on one occasion to a homestead cabin whose occupant had been found frozen to death, Coroner Harvey opened the door, glanced in, and instantly pronounced his verdict, “Deader ‘n hell!””
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)