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Feb. 28--Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played in the Major League World Series with the New York Giants and the Negro leagues World Series with the Newark Eagles, has more than a historian's perspective on the late Effa Manley, the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame.
Irvin was on her team. In the 1940s, before MLB was integrated, he was a star outfielder on the Newark Eagles team owned by Manley and her husband, Abe.
"She's deserving; she did a lot for the game," Irvin said of Manley's inclusion among 17 chosen Monday by a special committee voting on Negro leagues and pre-Negro leagues candidates.
All 17 are deceased, but they will join former reliever Bruce Sutter in the Hall of Fame Class of 2006.
Manley "was an attractive, intelligent woman who tried to improve the life of her players," said Irvin, who turned 87 on Saturday.
There is no record of Manley "ever playing baseball in any organized league," sports history professor Leslie Heaphy said. "But she understood baseball and she and her husband both loved baseball."
Manley worked hard for causes ranging from improving playing conditions for her team to integrating her players into the Newark community to "being a pioneering, leading voice" for advancement of all African-Americans, Heaphy said. "She promoted her team well, had players make appearances at local businesses and championed civil rights causes."
Manley was ahead of the times as a successful businesswoman, and she combined her sense of justice with a gift for promotion. She once held "an anti-lynching awareness day at the ballpark," said Heaphy, an associate professor of history at Kent State University.
But if Manley was a crusader, she was far from a stern or stodgy one.
"After we beat the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro leagues World Series in 1946, she bought us a brand-new air-conditioned bus," Irvin recalled. "We truly rode in luxury."
And when she got $5,000 compensation from New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham after he signed Irvin away from her team, "she bought a fur stole with the money after she paid her attorney's fees," Irvin recalled. "I saw her at an old-timers' reunion in 1980, wearing a stole, and I asked her if it was the same one. She said, 'It still looks good and it still keeps me warm.'"
Manley died in 1981 at age 81.
Her legacy includes getting compensation for her leagues' teams when their rosters were rifled by major-league teams after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
That put Manley in the awkward position of "standing up for her leagues and being vilified for standing against integration," Heaphy said. "But she won her point and was compensated when Larry Doby (an Eagles player) signed [with the Cleveland Indians].
There remains an aura of mystery about Effa Manley to this day, as evidenced by questions Monday about her race.
Irvin, in a phone interview, described her as "a fair-skinned black woman who could have passed for white but chose to live as a black person."
But in response to a question at Monday's news conference announcing the special election results, author and voting committee member Larry Lester explained that though Manley's mother was white and married to a black man, she had an affair with a white man who fathered Effa.
"I guess you could say she's the blackest white woman in the world," Lester said. He said she was raised with black siblings in a black neighborhood and "carried herself as a black woman." She eventually married Abe Manley, a black man.
If she kept that part of her life vague, however, her connection with baseball could not have been more straightforward. Her gravestone at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, Calif., reads, "She Loved Baseball."
mhirsley@tribune.com
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