Recently, I solved a family mystery. There is an old photo of my grandmother: she’s standing on a baseball field with a bare-chested man, wearing a grass skirt and white face paint. Where is she? Who is she with? Why?
What I ultimately surmised from this mid-century photograph, is that she’s standing with a member of the Negro American League baseball team the Indianapolis Clowns, or the Ethiopian Clowns, which was one of their names from their storied past.
Indy’s Negro American League team made the local press last October, when the Savannah Bananas announced that they were resurrecting the Clowns as one of the teams in the Banana Ball Championship League. The Bananas are an entertainment exhibition baseball team known for their comedic play. They’re often described as baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters.
The Indianapolis Clowns drew headlines again in February as part of Indy news outlets’ Black History Month coverage and also during their May 15-16 games against the Party Animals, another Banana Ball Championship League team, at Victory Field.
I’ve always been interested in baseball’s history of the Negro Leagues, having spent many a summer evening at a ballpark. After listening to a recent episode of the NPR podcast “Code Switch”, I learned that there’s a lot more to the Indy Clowns than was captured in recent local reports. The “Code Switch” podcast is about race, and the hosts interviewed journalist Josh Levin, who wrote about the Clowns recently for The Atlantic.
The history of Black baseball
According to baseball scholars, Black baseball’s “clowning” around goes as far back as the 1880s. Players combined their skills with a style of entertainment that borrowed from Vaudeville minstrel shows, which depicted white actors in blackface engaged in slapstick comedy.
The rise of Black baseball teams coincided with the first luxury hotel boom in Florida. Black players were said to entertain white patrons on the field by day and serve them in hotel restaurants by night.
The Clowns originated in Florida in the 1920s, first as the Miami Giants. By 1936, they became known as the Miami Ethiopian Clowns, and had perfected their antics on the field. Syd Pollock, the Clowns’ longtime owner, was known for his marketing savvy. Over time, Black sportswriters and Negro League executives came to loathe him, reporting that he exploited both the players and the growing Black audience.
The team was considered problematic in the Black community, drawing the ire of sportswriters in Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and The Chicago Defender. The Indianapolis Recorder published a story on Jan. 3, 1942 about one of several bans against the Clowns. Other Negro League teams found the Indy Clowns offensive, saying “the painting of faces by the Clowns players, their antics on the diamond, and their style of play was a detriment to Negro League baseball.” The Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith once called them a “fourth-rate Uncle Tom minstrel show.”
Yet, people came in droves to see the Clowns play. They attracted large crowds at places like Yankee Stadium and Comiskey Park. They were added to the Negro American League season in 1943 as the Cincinnati Clowns, having relocated several times before that, and eventually landed in Indianapolis in 1946.
The team was known for legendary players like Henry “Hank” Aaron, who joined the team in 1952, and an aging Satchel Paige, who pitched for the team in 1967, his last year as a professional.
When Major League Baseball finally integrated in 1947, many of the Negro League teams lost both fans and talent. The Clowns managed to survive by adding baseball’s first female professional player, second base player Toni Stone, who also attracted an audience.
Aside from mentioning the team’s more famous players, recent local coverage of the Clowns’ resurrection sorely lacked much of this historical detail. Most stories, like this IndyStar article, focused on the revival of a Negro League team and the segregated past of professional baseball. Even Black History Month news features didn’t cover the team’s complete history. When the team came to town in May, news stories highlighted the community’s excitement and the fact that the Clowns were the inspiration for the creation of the entertaining and athletic Savannah Bananas.
It is remarkable that Indy had a Negro League team and that the team lasted until the late 1980s. I wish more of the journalists who reported on the Clowns over this past year would have dug into that remarkable history. Most of the stories were incomplete in a way that borders on making them inaccurate. Only one outlet, WFYI’s “Across Indiana,” even touched on the Clowns’ controversies.
That short documentary was originally produced in 1996 by Todd Gould (who now works for WTIU) and re-released this year. Gould had previously created a two-part series on Black baseball before he made the eight-minute documentary on the Clowns. For part of his research, Gould said, “I also had the great good fortune to interview a couple players and managers that worked with the Clowns and toured with that successful barnstorming team during the 1940s and 1950s.”
Interviewing Clowns players of that time is obviously impossible in 2026, but the historical data is available.
Institutional knowledge in today’s newsrooms
It’s no mystery why Indy newsrooms’ stories about the Clowns were incomplete. Journalists must often report, write and produce stories with very little time. And when a light, interesting feature story arises, complete with a timely hook and a press kit, not everyone immediately thinks about digging further.
It’s important that we don’t lose our history in the fast pace of news production, or thinning newsrooms, or the rapid turnover of reporters. All of these are excuses.
I asked Josh Levin about his research for his Atlantic article, which entailed reading many books but also included accessible historical reports found online.
“I think if you’re doing a feature, or something as part of Black History coverage, then there’s more responsibility to learn about what the history actually is, because otherwise it becomes a sanitized or Disney-fied version,” Levin said.
“Like how people learn MLK and Rosa Parks, but not the background or struggle,” he continued. “The same happens with the Negro Leagues — well-intentioned celebration sanded down to family-friendly stories. But at the time, if you read Wendell Smith or other Black journalists, those debates were public. As stories have been retold and marketed, they’ve become more incomplete.”
Susan Hall Dotson, Indiana Historical Society curator, was a little more forgiving of local press and their coverage, noting that reporters aren’t historians and stories aren’t documentaries, and even documentaries are influenced by who’s directing them.
“So can the media, and should the media sometimes talk about those controversies? Sure,” she said. “Do they need to create a new controversy about what’s going on today? I’m not so sure. And so, it’s a real fine line on informing today’s public about what happened in the past and a three-minute news story can’t possibly tell the whole story.”
Dotson said that it is important that people today understand the Clowns’ full history to know “from where we come from so we know where we are.”
The Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s only Black newspaper and longest running publication, also missed out on telling the Clown’s whole story in their recent coverage. This surprised me. At my prompting, publisher Robert Shegog acknowledged that the Recorder has lost institutional knowledge in the newsroom. He said reporters should have dug into the paper’s archive before publishing the story.
To ensure that future generations of Recorder reporters are informed about the paper’s body of experience with Indy’s Black community, he leads staff in weekly reflections and articles that dive into historical coverage.
Shegog sent me a two-page statement answering my questions about their coverage and touting the value of the Recorder’s history. Here’s a shortened excerpt:
Too often, modern reporting looks at historical figures, organizations, or events through a single lens. In the case of the Indianapolis Clowns, many recent stories understandably focused on the team’s importance to Negro League baseball, its connection to Hank Aaron, and its revival.
Those are important facts. However, history becomes incomplete when we fail to discuss the debates that existed within the Black community itself.
The Recorder covered the Indianapolis Clowns over multiple generations, documenting these stories as they unfolded and as community members actively discussed them, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to capturing history in real-time.
That perspective is valuable because Black newspapers historically served as both news organizations and community institutions. We captured the celebrations, criticisms, disagreements, and triumphs. We understand that two truths can coexist.
Dotson and Levin both pointed out that understanding the historical context and diversity of opinions at the time of the early Clowns matters to our understanding of them today.
Explaining practices like blackface requires research, Dotson said. “In the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, it wasn’t something that we liked to see, but it was something that we did see. So Step’n Fetchit, or Bojangles, whichever one it was, and Shirley Temple – it was just a thing,” she said. “And it wasn’t illegal and it’s still actually not illegal. Distasteful, absolutely. Problematic, for sure.”
Levin said his Atlantic story about the Indianapolis Clowns matters because “it’s important to embrace the complexities and nuances of American history — especially race.” He noted a trend he’s seeing now to sanitize or erase hard history. He said his goal in writing about them was to “add information to the internet.”
“There wasn’t consensus about the Clowns then, nor is there now,” Levin said. “Maybe this can help people think deeper or do their own research.”
Back to that photo of my grandmother. Before, my family quizzically regarded it asking, ‘what in the old-timey-racism is going on here?’ Now, one of my family members remarked that “seeing both this piece of family history collide with this piece of community history is really special to me.”
This new knowledge is special to me too. I am so grateful to learn this history about the city and the Black community at the time, when my grandmother was alive and attending baseball games. It gives me a new appreciation and understanding that history is nuanced. We call daily journalism “the first draft of history.” But the news is also an echo of actual history. That echo should be complete and accurate. It should show respect for the audience and the facts. Anything less than this is a disservice to the public.
I’d love to hear from you this summer. Please join me at my next “News & Nibbles: Let’s Talk Media” event at the Nora branch of the Indianapolis Public Library, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., Monday, June 15. (8625 Guilford Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46240)
Tracey Compton is Poynter’s Indianapolis Public Editor. You can send your questions about local media to her at indypubliceditor@poynter.org.
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