Black history in Wichita: The day the KKK lost a baseball game to the Monrovians

Nearly 100 years ago, on a sweltering June day, the all-Black Wichita Monrovians beat the local Ku Klux Klan at a game of baseball.

“The game was very close for the first five innings, then it was back and forth between the two teams, before ultimately the Monrovians prevailed 10-8,” said John Dreifort, a history professor at Wichita State University. “It was a big deal in a charged atmosphere.”

Dreifort, who has studied baseball history, teamed up with the Kansas African American Museum for a virtual discussion Thursday on the Monrovians. The conversation, available online through TKAAM YouTube and Facebook pages, was part of Juneteenth ICT, the local festival celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.

The event was co-sponsored by the Wichita Public Library as part of its Candid Conversation series on diversity in the city’s baseball history.

Twenty-two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, local Black ballplayers beat the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.

“In terms of the charged atmosphere of the city and the background to interracial baseball, this was a major issue in the early 20s and the KKK was stirring that pot,” Dreifort said. “So it puts even more emphasis on the fact that Wichita could play a game, maybe for reasons that were not all that altruistic on the part of the KKK, but Wichita could play it and play it cleanly.”

A newspaper clipping from the time previewed the game as “Klan and Colored Team to Mix on the Diamond.” It urged people to leave “strangle holds, razors, horsewhips and other violent implements of argument” at home, noting the ballgame’s “peculiar attraction due to the wide difference of the organizations.”

Dreifort said he thinks that language “was a little bit of hyperbole, but you never know.” He suggested the allusion to violence may have been intentional to draw a larger crowd.

“By and large, most people behaved themselves very well. It was the event, really, of that summer.”

The game was played June 21, 1925, on the former Ackerman Island in the Arkansas River. The temperature was above 100 degrees. The ballpark was packed with fans.

“The KKK was under heavy pressure from politicians in the state to begin behaving a little bit more appropriately,” Dreifort said. “They were not nice guys. But they were in danger of losing their charter.

“It wasn’t that they were so eager to play the Wichita Monrovians, I think they needed to show themselves as being a bit more civil than they had been. Keeping in mind, the KKK was anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant.”

At the time, there were about as many KKK members in Wichita as African Americans, Dreifort said, making the game “more important and more relevant.”

Three days after that game, there was a national convention of at least 2,500 Baptists held in Wichita.

“This was an element that was not favorable toward African Americans at that time, either,” Dreifort said. “So you have a rather charged atmosphere in the city.”

In an attempt to prevent bias from umpires, the plan was to use two Irishmen.

“Part of what was going on at the time was that the governor was anti-KKK and was really in favor of them leaving,” said Lona Reeves, the museum’s education director. “At the same time, the Wichita Monrovians, they were on a roll, really playing some dynamite baseball at the time. They had a standing challenge that they would play anybody.”

Kansas was led by Gov. Henry Justin Allen, who is also known for the Allen House in Wichita, which was designed by famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Monrovians started in the Western Colored League, but the league folded after one season. Dreifort said it is unclear why, though internal league politics and accusations of misappropriation of money were likely a factor. Additionally, racial prejudice and lack of media attention may have played a role, as “the Monrovians did not get the coverage that they deserved.”

When the Monrovians beat the KKK, the newspaper story recapping the game was just two sentences long, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.

The team continued to play after the league disbanded, barnstorming around the region to make money.

“The Wichita Monrovians, they were the darlings of the African American community,” Reeves said.

The team supported the community by donating money raised from games to social causes, including the Phyllis Wheatley Children’s Home, Reeves said.

Some Monrovians went on to play for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro leagues, perhaps most notably catcher Thomas Jefferson Young.

“There was an interracial, integrated team in 1933 from Mulvane that TJ Young was on and tried to get them into a higher level of baseball. He didn’t leave and go to Kansas City and just wave goodbye. He came back periodically to the city and was a factor in African American baseball for the rest of the 20s and 30s.”