CAU and Morehouse Split DoubleHeader in Oldest HBCU Baseball Rivalry
EMERSON, GA
Clark-Atlanta University and Morehouse College have been playing baseball longer than the Black community has been observing Black History Month, which began as a week-long celebration during the second week in February in 1926.
Baseball or a game similar to it was popular among Blacks before the Civil War. It was played on plantations for the amusement of slave-holders and their families.
According to researcher Jay Sokol in his unpublished manuscript on Black College Baseball, enslaved Blacks were documented as having played baseball as far back as 1773. The first Black college known to organize a baseball team was the Institute for Colored Youth, which is today named Cheney State University. It was founded in 1837, which makes it the oldest HBCU. In 1867, Octavius Catto, an instructor at the Institute, organized an amateur baseball team made up of current and former students.
Fleetwood Walker is the first Black person to play collegiate baseball. In 1881, he was the catcher on the Oberlin (Ohio) College team. To add perspective, both Spelman College and Tuskegee Institute were founded in 1881.
Seven years later, in 1888, Clark College and Atlanta University organized a game of baseball against each other and…
