Fourteen students at Ball State University have spent their spring semester interviewing former Negro League baseball players, bat boys, and historians as part of the Black Baseball in Indiana project, an interdisciplinary course for which they are producing a documentary film and a collection of essays.
The course meets five days a week and amounts to a full credit load for the semester. Students earn credit in, say, telecommunications, English, or photojournalism, depending on what they work on.
Geralyn M. Strecker, an assistant professor of English who directs the project, was drawn to studying the Negro Leagues when she researched the life of Oscar Charleston, an Indiana Negro League hero. “His life was an amazing lens to look at African-American history,” she says, and she wanted to share that experience with students.
Q. Have the students uncovered anything in their work that surprised you?
A. One student is researching the women of Negro Leagues baseball. The Negro Leagues are unique in that there were three female players on league teams from 1953-1954—their names were Toni Stone, Connie Morgan, and Mamie Johnson. The student discovered that the Indianapolis Clowns, the team that Toni Stone was playing for, had hired two understudies that would be able to take the field in case Toni got hurt, and that’s new information.
Q. The Ku Klux Klan had a major presence in Indiana in the early part of the 20th century. What was the environment like for players there?
A. After Griffiths’s The Birth of a Nation came out, in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan reignited in the South, but then it also quickly developed a Northern realm that was centered in downtown Indianapolis. It was just a few blocks away from the ballparks where the Indianapolis Negro League team was playing. For the book of essays, some of the students are exploring the rise of the Klan and how that affected the development of black baseball. That includes things like the politics of leasing a ballpark, because the Negro Leagues were at the whim of the minor-league teams for the ballparks and the city for the municipal parks. When the Klan takes over, it becomes nearly impossible to lease space.
Q. The project seems like it has a lot of moving parts. Are you overseeing everything?
A. The entire project is student-driven. I came up with the idea for the topic and the two products, and then the students had to work out among themselves who was going to be in what leadership role and who had the strengths to do what tasks.
Q. How did the students work out a hierarchy for the project?
A. Some of the hierarchy is based on age. The producer of the film is a senior. But age and academic year don’t always dictate that. Our three-person editorial group has a junior, a sophomore, and a freshman. The freshman has amazing editing skills. The way the group interacts, that student gets the same amount of respect as the rest of the group—most of the time. We drove out to the [National Baseball] Hall of Fame, which was a 12-hour road trip. Outside the research center of the Hall of Fame is an old Cracker Jack baseball card with the face cut out. They got the freshman to put his head in so they could take a picture. We all laughed, but then the director of research at the hall came out and said, “That’s OK, Ichiro Suzuki does that every time he comes.”
Q. How does this compare with your other teaching experiences?
A. It just doesn’t. It’s utopian education.
