Banana Ball's racial minstrelsy past

The rise of the Savannah Bananas

0:00Hey, everyone. You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm B.A. Parker. And I'm Gene Demby. And, all right, Parker, I think you especially will rock with this episode because you are a baseball girly, or I guess I should say a Baltimore Orioles girly. That's true. I am a baseball girly. We love the Orioles. They're doing okay. I don't know if people know this, but you threw out the first pitch at an Orioles game last year, which is bananas. Birdland, please join us in giving a warm Oriole Park welcome to Baltimore's own B.A. Parker.

0:34I did. It was, okay, greatest moment of my life, next to being born. But also, like, the most terrifying to, like, stand. Oh, of course. I mean, to stand in front of a stadium and living your dream, and, like, I can't even talk about how happy I was. I made it across home plate. That's all that matters. That's all that matters. That's all that matters. Okay, so, have you heard of the Savannah Bananas? Yes, I have. I see them on my Instagram all the time. Okay. They're the baseball team that wears yellow, right?

1:05Yeah, yes. They're so fun. They do these dances. They're twerking and breaking out into choreographed dances in the middle of an inning. They're also singing. I mean, they're putting on, like, a whole show. Yeah, they're doing, like, backflip catches, you know, wearing stilts when they throw pitches. You know what I'm saying? Stuff like that. So, kind of like the baseball version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Yeah, like, traveling, silly, barnstorming kind of entertainment. To be clear, there's a lot of lip syncing and dancing, like what you're hearing right now, right?

1:38This is a social media clip featuring some of the Savannah Bananas players in tutus, in princess shoes, dancing with a little girl, second base. Gene, I know these videos well. They're very popular. It's a sort of remarkable and quick rise that they've had from being this team that was legitimately the Savannah minor league small-time baseball team and then is now just a full-time traveling circus.

2:09I know that voice. Yes, because that is Josh Levine. And they go around the country. They provide nine innings-plus of entertainment, some of which is baseball, some of which is singing, dancing, things optimized for TikTok. And they're wildly popular. Josh has been on the podcast a grip of times. Once, to talk about his book, The Queen, which was about the woman who was the basis of the welfare queen trope. Right. And he wrote about the marketing forces that conspired to sell menthol cigarettes to black folk.

2:44Yes. And Josh said the Savannah Bananas and the teams they play as part of their extended universe, if you want to call it that, teams like the local Beach Coconuts and the Texas Tailgaters, they are made up of a mix of some very good baseball players whose careers never quite took them to the majors. And Josh said, these teams do numbers, Parker. Like, the Bananas alone have over 4 million followers on Instagram. Like, just by way of comparison, your beloved Orioles, who've been around forever, by the way, ain't even cracking 800,000 followers until this season.

3:17And that's okay. That's fine. That's fine. That's okay. Last year, the five teams in the Banana Ball League sold more tickets than 11 major league baseball teams. Very recently, they filled up 102,000-seat Kyle Field at Texas A&M, which was their biggest crowd ever. And so it's a lot of families. It's some people who are, like, out for, you know, a fun night out on the town. And the party animals, they have this sort of aesthetic that's, like, very shirtless.

3:50They do appeal to older people who find it wholesome. They appeal to younger people who want a beefcake. And they appeal to, like, kids. Because the one thing that really blew me away about this experience, and it might be different if you go to a football stadium, but in this AAA park, is just how unbelievably accessible the players are. If you get there a little bit early, they're out on the concourse greeting you. There are players that are signing autographs in the middle of the game. So, Gene, do you think the bananas are bananas?

4:25Listen, that's my go-to expression. I don't know what to do. Like, you're not the only one to call me out on this episode, Parker. That is... I was going to say bananas, but this is too obvious. I'm sorry. You already said it once, Gene. We got to keep you on a quota here.

4:40Okay, this is fun. I want to go. Because of the shirtless dudes, you ain't got to lie, Parker. It's okay. I enjoy sportsmanship. Sure. But my antennas are up. Because, I mean, okay, I want to know when the code-switchy stuff comes in, Gene. I'm scared. Yeah, you're looking for the shoe to drop.

Resurrecting the Indianapolis Clowns

4:56Okay, so Josh has a recent piece about one of the teams in the whole Savannah Bananas universe in particular. And I read an article for The Atlantic about the brand new but also old Indianapolis Clowns. Oh, like the Indianapolis Clowns, as in the Negro League team back in the day? Yes. The Savannah Bananas resurrected the Indianapolis Clowns in 2026, this year, as a nod to the Negro Leagues. Okay. Also as a nod to this whole vibe of the original Indianapolis Clowns because they used to put on, you know, popular circus-like games of baseball.

5:32You know, lots of hijinks, lots of bits, lots of crowd work. They were popular enough that they outlasted the Negro Leagues by decades. But, and this is the shoe drop part, Parker. Mm. Uh, lots of black folks and lots of people in black baseball really did not rock with the Clowns. So, we can go back to the 30s when they started as the Ethiopian Clowns. The Ethiopian Clowns? Yes, and that team was itself downstream from another team called the... The Zulu Cannibal Giants.

6:02The Zulu Cannibal Giants? What? Yes. No relation to the San Francisco Giants, by the way. And the Zulu Cannibal Giants used to wear grass skirts and bare feet. It was a whole thing. Oh, no. Right? And Josh said that the Clowns were part of this tradition of racial minstrelsy. Like, they were literally wearing white clown makeup sometimes because they were supposed to be laughed at. And even though the Clowns were this big box office drawl, a whole lot of folks just saw them as a barrier to taking black baseball seriously and to racially integrating the major leagues.

6:37I mean, because they made black players look buffoonish, I presume. Yes. And when Josh was talking to some historians from the Negro League Baseball Museum for his piece, they said the Clowns, even now, remain this source of deep ambivalence. Like, they said to him, we don't like to talk about the Clowns, we don't like to foreground them, but they just won't go away. And so we're revisiting our episode about this reckoning with the Clowns, their kind of singular role in the evolution of black baseball and the long history of racial minstrelsy in America's pastime.

7:12All right, Gene. It's all you.

History of minstrelsy in baseball

7:14Josh Levine's piece, In the Atlantic, is about the new but also very old Indianapolis Clowns baseball team and their, how do we say this, tricky history. So, yeah, we can go back to the 1930s when they started off as the Ethiopian Clowns. And the players painted their faces, the players— Like Clowns. Like Clowns. And they played under faux African names.

7:48There was a player who was listed in the box score as Tarzan. Oh, my God. And they were sort of widely reviled in some circles of black America. They were also popular in some circles of black America and in white America, but they were a big box office draw. And what they would do in these games is play baseball and do comedy routines that were minstrelsy or minstrel adjacent, if you want to—

8:24On the same block as minstrelsy, yeah. Yes. They received mail in the same block. So there was a guy named Richard King who went by King Tut, who was their sort of main comedian. And he would emerge from the dugout looking like an escaped prisoner. He would play a game of craps, like he would play dice on the field. There was a routine that he would do with his main comedy partner, Ralph Bell, who went by Spec Bebop, where they would do a dentist routine that would involve kernels of corn and a lit firecracker, where the firecracker was dropped.

9:09And there were efforts made by other Negro League teams—this was in, you know, early 40s—to prohibit their clubs from playing against the clowns. Because they thought these guys were, like, making black baseball look bad, or black people look bad. There were a sort of constellation of reasons. That was definitely one of the reasons that the image that the clowns were projecting was not an image that black owners, black teams, other black players wanted for black baseball.

9:44There were also more just business disagreements, like the clowns stealing other teams' players and things like that. So there was a combination of reasons. But a ban was put into place. The clowns were banned, and it just was never enforced because these other teams were like, we just can't—we can't do it. They're too popular. They needed the money. Like, we're playing them. We need the box office, right? We need the box office. And so they were eventually admitted, allowed into the Negro American League under the stipulation that they would no longer be known as the Ethiopian Clowns and that the players would no longer wear face paint.

10:26And so that's where we now know them as the Indianapolis Clowns. The Indianapolis Clowns are the team that was in the Negro American League. They're the team that's in Banana Ball now. The reason they're the Indianapolis Clowns is because they were required to stop being the Ethiopian Clowns. Why were they the Ethiopian Clowns? Just to decide, like, why that country? Was it just, like, short-haired for Africa? Like, just— Yeah, Ethiopia was really big in the news in the 1930s. There was a fight for independence. And the Ethiopians were seen as heroic in sort of beating back Italy, right?

11:00So it was sort of this evocation of what would have been thought of then as, like, you know, this heroic black movement across the world, but also there was resentment about the appropriation of that name. It's like you're going to take this, like, truly revolutionary thing that's happening in Africa and attach it to your— It's like clowns. It's into this minstrelsy thing. Attach it to your baseball team. Yeah. Why Indianapolis?

11:31Sort of like why Harlem for the Harlem Globetrotters? It's just this sort of notional place. You write that, like, a lot of the black folks at the time, sports writers, other players, felt that they were, like, actively harming the sort of project or the idea that black baseball could be taken seriously, but also that black people could play in the majors because of the sort of image they were projecting. Yeah, consider the time. This is in the early 1940s.

12:01Integration of Major League Baseball is going to come later in the decade. But there has been a push, a desire to integrate for a while. This is, like, a slow-building process and a campaign that's being conducted largely in black newspapers. And Wendell Smith was the primary driver of this idea. He was a very influential columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, and he was the leading voice pushing for the integration of Major League Baseball.

12:35And he believed that the Indianapolis Clowns and their act and what they were doing on the field could ruin the entire project, that it could tarnish the image of every black baseball player, not just the individuals who were suiting up for the clowns. He referred to the clowns as a fourth-rate Uncle Tom minstrel show. Tell us how you really feel. And there were others who signed on with that opinion.

13:07He was the leading voice, but he was not a lonely voice. And so... How did the black players who played for the clowns feel about this idea that was out there that they were, like, sort of counterproductive to the project of racial uplift via baseball? You have to consider the economic choices that players were forced into at the time. This was a job, and they needed a job, and this was the job that they could get and the job that they did. And they, you know, the vast majority of players on the clowns were not clowns.

13:43Like, they had a couple of guys, and it, you know, it changed over time the sort of ratio of comedy to baseball. But for the majority of time, it was a couple of people who were dedicated comedians, and the rest were baseball players. And so they were baseball players who just happened to be employed in this particular team and, like, did the best that they could under those circumstances. Then, if you talk to the clowns' opponents, sort of those voices and the way that they're, you know, what they say, a lot of resentment that the clowns did create this image, this perception that the entire Negro Leagues were like this.

14:19That it was just all a clown show. That it was all comedy. That they didn't take baseball seriously. Especially that they weren't the caliber of major leaguers, because they were just joking around out there. The thing that was, like, surprising to me when I was reading the article was that, like, this kind of caricature that that was pissing everybody off in the 1940s, the 1930s and 1940s, that the clowns were doing, you say that it was happening, like, basically since baseball began in the United States.

14:50Yeah, so, you know, scholars will point to the 1870s, that there's minstrelsy and baseball together. And the sort of extremely disturbing culmination of this is, in the 1930s, this team called the Zulu Cannibal Giants that you can... There's a wild name, by the way. You can sort of imagine it and picture it based on the name. They played into every conceivable stereotype.

15:21Buck O'Neill, who is a baseball hall of famer, one of the co-founders of the Negro League Baseball Museum, and a guy who sort of became the face and voice of the Negro Leagues in his later years, he played for the Zulu Cannibal Giants for a year and hated to talk about it, was ashamed of it. And you can understand why. A super interesting fact about the clowns is that after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, he would go on these off-season barnstorming tours with a team called the Jackie Robinson All-Stars.

15:59You know, make a little extra money, go on a tour, bring, you know, the game to places that wouldn't ordinarily get to see him. You got Jackie Robinson, you got Roy Campanella. And they brought along King Tut Spec Bebop to provide entertainment. So there was certainly a segment of very influential and important opinion in the black press, in Negro League's ownership, and among Negro League's teams, among the players, that was very anti-clown.

16:31But it was not universal, and I'm not aware of them going to, you know, cities and people protesting or anything like that. Like, I don't want to create the idea that they were just, like, going around the country creating this, like, blaze of controversy. I think they were, you know, playing these games and playing shows, however you want to term it, and they had happy paying customers. You mentioned that in the late 40s.

17:03Obviously, Jackie Robinson integrates Major League Baseball in 1947. It changes everything, right? And you see this interest that black folks have in baseball, sort of, all their attention sort of diverts to the majors, which is kind of a death blow to the Negro Leagues. So what was happening with these two sort of parallel baseball trajectories, right? Like, what happened to both the Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues, and what happened to the clowns as this was happening? Yeah, so what the Major Leagues do is that they sort of pick off systematically the best black talent from the Negro Leagues.

17:38You have Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Larry Doby, and it goes on from there. And there's compensation given to Negro League's owners, but it's not very much. It's economically devastating to the Negro Leagues. Attendance dwindles because the reality is now that the best talent is in the majors. Plus, there's this idea that it's the culmination of, you know, this dream and decades of work, and it's this huge moment for civil rights in America. So, you know, we want to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers.

18:11We want to watch these stars that are, you know, striking a blow for equality for black America. We want to root them on. It makes a lot of sense. And then back in the Negro Leagues, you have hollowed out rosters, you have diminished interest, you have smaller gate receipts, and you have leagues start to crumble, you have teams start to fold.

Integration and the final decades

18:37And then you have a team that, in this environment, is better equipped than anybody else to weather this, which is the team that is not just a baseball team, that is more of a circus, that is an entertainment act, that has these other things and other attractions that bring people to the ballpark. And that's the Indianapolis Clowns. The Clowns, in 1952, sign an 18-year-old from Alabama named Hank Aaron. He's on the team for a few months, then they sell him to the Braves.

19:07I feel like, probably because, I feel like... Do we need to pause on that? I know, I mean, it's wild to give an explanatory comment about Hank Aaron. So, Hank Aaron is, like, one of the most important baseball players of all time. He had the home run record for a long time. And, like, his, the run-up to him breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record was, like, this giant moment that everyone paid attention to. He was, like, greeted with all this racist abuse, but, like, he broke the home run record in the 70s after playing for decades. It was his first pro team was the Indianapolis Clowns. They signed him out of Mobile, Alabama, and he had the opportunity to sign a pro contract, and he jumped at it.

19:40He wanted to get out of Mobile. And he writes about it in his autobiography, but he did not do any of the clowning stuff. Like, he was a baseball player. And there was an economic imperative for the team at that time. As soon as you have a young player who shows talent, you sell him off to the highest bidder in the major leagues. So, that's 1952. Then in 1953, Sid Pollock, the owner of the Clowns, signs Toni Stone, who is a woman. She plays second base, and she is the first woman to have a sustained regular position on the field for a big league ball club.

20:20And in 1953, because of Toni Stone, there is a huge burst of interest in the Clowns and in the Negro American League. You're getting crowds back like they used to be before, you know, Jackie Robinson left the Negro Leagues. And that lasts for a year. Then the next year, they bring in a couple more women, Connie Morgan and Mamie Peanut Johnson of Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., yep. And it's just the interest dwindles.

20:50Like, they're not able to sustain it. The women are all out of baseball after that season. And the Clowns make the decision that the Negro Leagues are not going to last. And they went independent. They became a full-time barnstorming club after that, you know, into 1954, 1955. And they were still going, but just as an independent team, until the 1980s. That's bananas to think, sorry. That is wild to think they were still out there until the 1980s, like the Reagan years.

21:25What did the Clowns look like at that point? So the Clowns reverse integrated. They added a white player after they, you know, left the Negro Leagues. And by the 80s, they were all white. Oh, they gentrified the Clowns? And it was a really shoestring operation. They weren't paying the players at a certain point. They were playing smaller and smaller venues. And as time went on, they leaned more and more into comedy. These were not world-class players. And it was just more and more like the circus is coming to town.

22:00We're going to do sort of silly and ridiculous things. And that was sort of where the Clowns left off. Like, they weren't able to stain it anymore. They stopped in the late 80s. And so it was just sort of a name. It was a memory. And then the Bananas brought them back. How does the Savannah Bananas sort of enterprise, how do they talk about it? How do they reckon with this history of minstrelsy and, you know, controversy that sort of be, like, sort of inescapable when you talk about the Clowns?

22:34So, when I saw the team, and based on what I've seen that they've put out on social media, which is a lot of how they communicate with their fans, they don't reckon with that history at all. They lean in heavily to the history of the Clowns, but it's a very particular version of the history that I would say is a kind of Disney-fied version. Or it's, like, you know, what you might learn in elementary school about civil rights heroes, but not about what they were struggling against.

23:07So they're not saying things in their presentation that are wrong or false or inaccurate. It's just extremely incomplete. And the history of this team is fraught. It's contentious. It was fraught and contentious at the time. They weren't totally reviled. There were people, black writers at the time, who were down with the Clowns, who didn't have... You're waiting to see that. It just popped out. Who didn't have a problem with what they were doing.

23:39And so there is a history here that is nuanced. And, you know, they're a corporation that does family-friendly entertainment.

Whitewashing a fraught past

23:50There's no history within this company of presenting things that might make people mad, that are contentious, that are, like, politically fraught. Like, they are out there, like, singing show tunes. So this is not the venue, or has never been the venue, to tell a story about, you know, the bad things about America, or to tell a story about when America was not at its best, or when people were put in really, you know, terrible, untenable position to, like, make a choice about, should I be in this team or not have a job, maybe?

24:29So, it's more a sin of omission, I would say.

24:36Sins of omission are pretty common, it seems, when it comes to clown history. Like, Parker, have you ever heard of the 1970s movie, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars, and Motor King? Oh my gosh, Gene? Okay, I just watched this recently. You serious? That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a wild cast. It's Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, and Richard Pryor. It's about a Negro League team in the 1930s that is traveling around the country, just, like, womanizing and doing clown stuff on the field. And, like, a lot of the movie is Richard Pryor trying to get around, like, segregation laws by pretending to be Cuban and Native American.

25:11No more this challenge, no stuff. Now I'm going to be known as Carlos Navarro. The real atletico del mundo. I'm going to break into the majors as a Cuban. Ah, what a time. Anyway, like, that movie, which I didn't know about, but Josh said that movie is loosely based on the Indianapolis clowns. And, you know, it's a feel-good story, for the most part. Like, it made a bunch of money, it was well-received by critics. And it mostly, though, apparently skirted a lot of the thorny stuff about the way the clowns, or, you know, the version of the clowns in the movie pissed people off with their hijinks?

25:44Like, that they were a very sort of lightning rod kind of team. I mean, that's par for the course, though. I mean, not to mix sports metaphors, but you get the sunny version of history. Right, right, right. And Josh said that when it came out in the 1970s, a lot of the surviving Negro leaguers were really not happy with it because the clowns remained, like, such a sore subject. And so this conversation about the clowns that we're having today is one that's been relitigated and revisited over and over over the decades. Or, you know, as Josh put it,

26:16Every generation in America apparently gets a new version of the clown. And that, listener, is our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Codeswitch. That's all one word. This episode was produced by Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Dalia Mortada and Jasmine Romero. And we would be remiss, of course, if we did not shout out the rest of the Codeswitch Massive.

26:46That's Christina Kala, Courtney Stein, Jess Kung, Leah Dinella, Barton Girdwood, Maya Dangerfield, Nor Gill, and Yolanda Sanguini. As for me, I'm Jean Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. Be easy. Hydrate. Hydrate.