THIS BARNSTORMING BLACK BASEBALL TEAM AND MINSTREL SHOW TRAVELED THE MIDWEST WINNING GAMES AND HEARTS WITH THEIR TALENTED ENTOURAGE

PHOTO: Browns Tennessee Rats Baseball team 1914, Holden, Missouri Norman P. Little, 3rd from Left, Front Row, great-grandfather to Aurelia Little Thomas-Ray, from Warrensburg, MO.

The Tennessee Rats was a small club of black baseball players formed in Holden, Missouri running from approximately 1911 to 1926. Run by W.A. Brown, the Tennessee Rats was almost purely a traveling team, and toured much of Iowa and surrounding states, playing baseball and in the early years, producing a minstrel show to add to the box office take after the baseball games. The audience was also entertained by Norman Little (Warrensburg) the expert Hoop Roller and Juggler, and gave some very fine attractions and also his trick dog Diana performed some very wonderful feats.

While the Negro National League was not formed until 1920, the Tennessee Rats did manage to find some top notch players, and at least one of them, John Donaldson, would go on to play with the All Nations, Kansas City Monarchs and several other teams. Another great player was Bill Drake.

Many researchers do not consider the Tennessee Rats a “formal” Negro League team. However, like other barnstorming teams of the time, they had considerable impact on the desegregation of baseball. Today, the Tennessee Rats are rarely mentioned in Negro baseball history, and stats and rosters are hard to find.

Norman Little the Hoop Roller and Juggler, and a member of the baseball team known as Brown’s Tennessee Rats, is in the city visiting his father, George W. Little.  Oct. 10, 1914 Book cover :John Holway’s “Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues” Revised Addition.

Browns Tennesse Rat Visitors Jersey

TIDBIT ABOUT THEIR NAME: The Tennessee Rats, an independent Negro team, went by the state name because the rivers of American at the turn of the century, i.e., Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri, were so polluted with garbage the rats regularly swam in them. America in the nineteenth century was just as polluted as it was in the twentieth century when government regulations finally started to clean up by the 1950s.

Sometimes a team would go by anti-heroic or unwholesome nicknames to debase themselves, on purpose, as a marketing ploy; i.e., Burglars, Kickers, River Rats, Savages, Rats.

1911 Browns Tennessee Rats

Walter A. Brown – Manager

John Donaldson – Pitcher and Left Field

Sam Butler – Pitcher and Short Stop

Eugene Bell – Pitcher, Short Stop, Left Field, 1st Base, and Catcher

Morton – Pitcher, 2nd Base, and Left Field

Williams – PitcherGreene – Catcher

Jackson Noble Wilson – Catcher

Norman Little – Infielder, Right Field, and Pitcher, hoop roller

Bille – 1st Base and 2nd Base

Will Pertell (Purtell?) – 2nd Base

Herman Goodall – 3rd Base, Left Field, and 2nd Base

Archie Lee – Left Field, 3rd Base, Pitcher, 2nd Base, and Left Field

Johnson – Left Field and Center Field

Will Anderson – Center Field

Harrison Clay – Right Field

Barker – Right Field and Pitcher