Joe Black

Joe Black

Joseph Black (February 8, 1924 – May 17, 2002) was an American right-handed pitcher in Negro League and Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cincinnati Redlegs, and Washington Senators who became the first black pitcher to win a World Series game, in 1952. Black died of prostate cancer at age 78.

A native of Plainfield, New Jersey, he starred at Plainfield High School. Black attended on a baseball scholarship and graduated from Morgan State University in 1950 and later received an honorary doctorate from Shaw University. He was a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity. He appears prominently in Roger Kahn's classic book, The Boys of Summer.

Read more about Joe Black:  Negro and Minor Leagues, Call Up To Brooklyn, Black's Decline, After Baseball, Comments On Black, Honors and Awards

Famous quotes containing the words joe and/or black:

    This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.
    Maya Angelou (b. 1928)

    Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as “not black enough.” ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.
    bell hooks (b. c. 1955)