This is a draft. It is published so it can be read and corrected, not because it is finished.
Avon Park had a Black baseball team, the Avon Park Tigers
The Miami Times of 7 June 1952:
The Florida Giants of Miami, [Babe] Ruth, manager, will meet the Avon Park Tigers in a two-game match on Saturday night, June 7 and on Sunday June 8. They will play Sarasota on the following Friday and Saturday. Last Sunday the Giants were defeated by a Fort Meade team.[mt-1952-06-07]
That is the whole notice, and it is the only reference to the Avon Park Tigers found so far.
What it tells us
The Tigers were a Black town team on a circuit. The Florida Giants were a Black semi-professional club out of Miami, and the fixture list in this one paragraph — Fort Meade, Avon Park, Sarasota, on successive weekends — is the shape of the Black barnstorming circuit through the middle of Florida. Avon Park was a stop on it.
They played on Saturday night, which means lights, and a ground good enough for a visiting team to travel a hundred and fifty miles for two games.
The manager’s name is given only as “Ruth.” The OCR renders it in quotation marks — “Babe” Ruth — which is a nickname, not the Yankee. Black clubs of the period frequently had a “Babe” on the roster. Who he was is unknown.
Why it matters
Avon Park’s baseball history, as the town tells it, is the St. Louis Cardinals: three springs at Head Field from 1927 to 1929, Babe Ruth’s home run into the street, the commemorative bat in the Historical Society’s baseball museum.[aphs-baseball-museum] That story is entirely white, and it stops in 1929.
Twenty-three years later the town had its own Black nine playing a Miami club under lights, and nothing about it survives in the local record. The Tigers are the kind of thing a museum should be able to tell, and at present it cannot.
One sentence in one newspaper is not a history. Head Field is the obvious candidate for their home ground, but a segregated town may well have had a separate one in the southern part of the city, near Voting Place No. 2.
References
- mt-1952-06-07 — The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.). Baseball Sun., Mon. — the Florida Giants at Avon Park, The Miami Times, 7 June 1952, page 2. 7 June 1952. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83004231/1952-06-07/ed-1/?sp=2
- aphs-baseball-museum — Avon Park Historical Society. Avon Park Baseball Museum. 31 August 2026. https://avonparkhistoricalsociety.com/business/baseballmuseum/
Related
- Entity: The Avon Park Black Tigers
- Entity: Willie James McRae
- Entity: Hal McRae
- Entity: Head Field and the St. Louis Cardinals at Avon Park
- Finding: Castle Street and the Hal McRae Boulevard Renaming
- Finding: the record of Black Avon Park is almost entirely missing
- Finding: the Episcopal church camp at Avon Park was desegregated in June 1955
- Finding: in 1951 the Avon Park city council threw out every vote cast in the Black precinct
Where this comes from
- Evidence
- single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
- Review
- unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
- Rights
- society
Sources
- The Miami Times (Miami, Fla.), Baseball Sun., Mon. — the Florida Giants at Avon Park, The Miami Times, 7 June 1952, page 2 (1952)
- Avon Park Historical Society, Avon Park Baseball Museum (2026)
Something here wrong, or incomplete? The Society would rather know. Tell a volunteer.
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