Celebrating Baseball Heroes of the Past: The Branch Rickey League

As baseball fans across North America rejoice over the opening of the 2025 Major League Baseball season, Atlanta History Center celebrates baseball heroes of the past by examining the teams and players of the Branch Rickey League. From 1956 to approximately 1969, Black baseball players from Atlanta and surrounding areas participated in highly competitive amateur leagues filled with future professional baseball players. Atlanta History Center has launched a project to locate and interview former players and participants in these leagues.

African Americans have a long and rich history of excellence in professional and amateur baseball leagues in Atlanta. Among the most notable local teams were the Atlanta Black Crackers, who played professionally from roughly 1919 to 1949. Lesser-known teams such as the Atlanta Panthers, East Point Bears, College Park Indians, and Robinson Dodgers competed in the Branch Rickey League, named for the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who played a decisive role in desegregating the sport at the Major League level by signing Jackie Robinson, a talented and courageous young Black player.   

African Americans have played baseball since the beginnings of the sport in America in the 1860s and 70s. By the turn of the century, however, so-called “gentlemen’s agreements” banned African Americans from Major League Baseball. In response, Black baseball players and entrepreneurs formed their own professional teams and leagues that became collectively known as the Negro Leagues.

The Branch Rickey League was not affiliated with any of the Negro leagues. It was a league of amateur players organized by Black entrepreneurs in the era of Jim Crow.

In 1956, league organizers including team owners J. B. Jones, Judge W. Spearman, Benjamin Rucker, Neal Morgan, Willie Butler, Harvey Young, Hubert Brooks, John Lay, and league commissioner Elmer Knox launched play in the spring with eight teams featuring mostly local talent who had been stars on their high school squads and were looking for opportunities to play and extend their careers.

College Park resident Michael Majeed has fond memories of those early years of the league. “In 1958 I was maybe seven years old and saw them play in College Park” Majeed recalls. “…the ballpark would be packed with people. They looked forward to it on Saturdays and Sundays…it was like the Fourth of July.” Majeed was a star athlete at Eva L. Thomas High School in College Park and served as a batboy for the College Park Indians from the time he was seven years old until he was a teenager. He was later drafted by the Kansas City Royals.

Most of the big games were played at Hull Stadium on Simpson Road in the Dixie Hills area in west Atlanta. “Hull Stadium was like Yankee Stadium,” Majeed recalls. “Every big game to be played was at Hull Stadium” which Majeed said brought out the big crowds. Championship games and all-star contests were often played at Ponce de Leon Park where the Atlanta Crackers and Atlanta Black Crackers played.

As a young man, Marvin Barber was a talented baseball and basketball player for South Fulton High School in East Point. Barber joined the East Point Bears at the age of sixteen under the direction of manager Mo Simms. He remembers some of the stars of the league including Charlie Daniel, a power-hitting third baseman for the College Park Indians, and Frank McGee, another long ball hitter who played in the outfield for the same team. Barber was also one of the top players in the league and was later drafted to play professionally for the Cincinnati Reds.  

Each year, the Branch Rickey League champion would have the opportunity to play in the annual National Baseball Congress championship tournament in Wichita, Kansas. In 1960, the College Park Indians represented the Branch Rickey League. Robert Worle, a native of LaGrange, Georgia, who pitched for the Indians remembers having to beat out teams like the Atlanta Cardinals, Athens Stars, Forest Park Braves, and Atlanta Panthers to become league champions.

There were other amateur leagues featuring Black players such as Rube Foster League, Georgia-Alabama League, and Josh Gibson League, which along with Branch Rickey League, represented a robust era for all Black teams. These leagues were represented by dozens of teams from fourteen counties around Metro Atlanta. Atlanta History Center continues to seek former players and others with memories about these historic leagues.