In August 1934, Denver sent waves through the baseball world when Denver Post sports editor Poss Parsons invited the Kansas City Monarchs, champions of the Negro National League, to play in the
newspaper’s renowned baseball tournament. “The Little World Series of the West,” as the paper liked to call its tourney, had a well-earned reputation for showcasing the best baseball talent west of the Mississippi and as a launching pad to the big leagues. When the Monarchs came to play, it was the nation’s
first look at racially integrated professional baseball since the game had been segregated in the late 1800s.
The Monarchs, featuring future Hall of Famers like Bullet Joe Rogan and Turkey Stearnes, won baseball games during the day and enjoyed the jazz and nightlife of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood after
their job was done. They dominated the tournament until the championship series, when they ran into an otherwise all-white team from Michigan that had hired Satchel Paige—then the most famous pitcher in the Negro Leagues, and one of the best pitchers of all time—to be sure it could compete against them. Paige earned his fee, defeating the Monarchs 2 to 1.
Denverites flocked to the games in record numbers. Remarkably, in a nation where Jim Crow segregation tainted every part of daily life, and in a city and state that had been controlled by the Ku Klux Klan less than a decade before, no racist displays—no bottles thrown on the field, no players refusing to play against Black men, none of the hate-fueled invective Jackie Robinson endured more than a decade later—were recorded during the tournament.
Two years later, Paige returned with a hand-picked team of Negro League All-Stars. Fielding all-time greats including Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bill, and Paige himself. They may have
been the best baseball team that’s ever played in Denver, and they cruised to the title. The following year, they did it again.
As sportswriters transmitted stories of the tournament to newspapers nationwide, the tournament offered a powerful testament to Black players’ abilities, making it increasingly difficult for segregationists to claim that the Negro Leagues represented an inferior form of the big league game. With each stolen base and every home run, Black baseball players were advancing toward equality. Their path ran through Denver.
Adapted from Game Changers: 100 Years of Negro League Baseball by Jason L.Hanson, published by History Colorado in 2020.