Newark Eagles Records

The Newark Eagles, a professional baseball team, played in the second Negro National League from 1936 through 1948. The team was organized in 1936 when Abe Manley and his wife Effa Manley, owners of the Brooklyn Eagles, purchased the Newark Dodgers franchise (no relation to the Brooklyn Dodgers). The Manleys combined the two teams' assets but retained only three of the original Newark Dodgers players, Bill Evans, Johnnie Hays, and future Hall-of-Famer Ray Dandridge. When in Newark the Eagles played at Ruppert Stadium, home of the Newark Bears, a New York Yankees farm team, owned by Colonel Jacob Ruppert.

Abe Manley, “Cap” to his players, acted as talent scout and often accompanied the team during spring training and to games, but the business side of running a team, including negotiating player contracts, scheduling games, advertising and promoting the team, and thrashing out deals with booking agents and other owners, fell to Effa Manley. Nor were her organizational skills confined to baseball. She was secretary of the Citizens League that organized the 1934 “Buy-Where-You-Can-Work" boycott of Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem. In 1939 she was on the planning committee for the John Borican Victory Dinner honoring track star Borican in Newark. By 1947 she was treasurer of the Newark branch of the NAACP. In the 1950s she was a member of the Newark City Hospital Citizens' Advisory Committee and she was a consummate fund raiser and promoter, especially for causes related to the civil rights and social welfare of African-Americans.

Abraham Lincoln “Abe” Manley (1885-1952) was born in Hertford, North Carolina. He first made his fortune in Camden, New Jersey, running an illegal numbers racket, and later expanded his portfolio by investing in real estate in New York City.

Effa Louise Manley (c. 1900-1981) was born and raised in Philadelphia. Her mother, Bertha Ford Brooks, was a white seamstress; her father John M. Bishop, was a wealthy white businessman who had at one time employed her mother. Bertha’s husband, Benjamin Brooks who was African-American, sued for divorce not long after Manley’s birth. Bertha Brooks later married another African-American man, B. A. Cole, with whom she had several children. Manley, raised with her half-siblings from the Brooks and Cole families, did not learn the identity of her biological father until she was in her teens. After graduating from William Penn High School in Philadelphia, Effa Manley moved to Harlem, worked as a milliner and was married briefly.

Effa Manley was divorced by the time she met Abe Manley at a Yankees Game in 1932. They married the following year, the second marriage for each, and lived in Harlem until they founded the Newark Eagles. Under the Manleys’ leadership the Newark Eagles survived the end of the Depression and the lean war years when many of their best players were in the armed services. In 1946 they bested the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League to win the Negro World Series. That year the team drew 120,000 fans. With the integration of Major League Baseball in 1947, however, the crowds for the Eagles’ games dwindled. By 1948 the Eagles counted only 35,000 fans in attendance. At the end of the 1948 season the Manleys sold the Eagles and the team was relocated to Houston.

Effa Manley waged one last battle for the Eagles before they left Newark. Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, attempted to sign the Monte Irvin from the dismantled Eagles in 1948. Effa Manley activated her lawyer and lobbied the baseball commissioners of the Major and Minor Leagues to protest Major League teams that ignored the contracts players had with teams in the Negro Leagues. The Dodgers, to Irvin’s dismay, rescinded their offer. The New York Giants soon picked him up, however, paying $5,000 to the Eagles for his contract — a coup for the Eagles and the Negro Leagues.

In 1952 Abe Manley died. The pall bearers at his funeral included two former Eagles players, Monte Irvin and Larry Doby. Manley was buried in Fairmount Cemetery in Newark. A few years after Abe’s death, Effa Manley sold their home on Crawford Street and moved closer to her family in Pennsylvania. Still later she moved to Los Angeles. Over the years she lobbied the Baseball Hall of Fame on behalf of players from the Negro Leagues and eventually seven former Eagles players were inducted: Larry Doby (the first black player in the American League), Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, Monte Irvin, James Raleigh “Biz” Mackey, George “Mule” Suttles, and Willie Wells. In 2006 Effa Manley joined them, the first woman ever to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Sources:

Cummings, Charles F. “Knowing Newark: Manleys Changed Face of Black Baseball; Couple Enshrined Sport in City’s Heart”; The Star-Ledger. October 21, 1999. http://knowingnewark.npl.org/manleys-changed-face-of-black-baseball-couple-enshrined-sport-in-citys-heart/

Gray, Christopher. “Streetscapes/Blumstein’s Department Store; How a Black Boycott Opened the Employment” New York Times. November 20, 1994. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/realestate/streetscapes-blumstein-s-department-store-black-boycott-opened-employment-door.html?mcubz=0

Overmyer, James. Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles; American Sports History Series, No. 1. Metuchen, NJ & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1993.

Newark Eagles Records, Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center, Newark Public Library.

Nutt, Amy Ellis. “Manley, Effa” in eds: Braukman, Stacy Lorraine and Susan Ware, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century, pages 409-411. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Ribowsky, Mark. A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884-1955. New York: BIrch Lane Press Book, 1995.

“Jocko Maxwell: Voice of the Negro Leagues” National Baseball Hall of Fame. http://baseballhall.org/discover/jocko-maxwell-voice-of-negro-leagues