CLIFTON -- For the past 70 years, Frank Grant has lain unnoticed and forgotten in an unmarked grave in a shaded corner of East Ridgelawn Cemetery. This afternoon, he will become immortal. Grant will join Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams and the rest of the 278 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. Grant, who died in 1937, was regarded as one of the best baseball players of the late 19th century. But he never played a Major League game because he, along with all other black players, were excluded.
When he died in 1937 at 71, he apparently did not leave enough money to pay for a burial, so he was laid to rest in an unmarked plot in a cemetery off Main Avenue. Grant will be enshrined today as one of 17 former players and executives who made significant contributions to Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues baseball. The 17 inductees were chosen from a group of 39 players and executives by a committee of 12 historians. "This was designed to pretty much bring the black baseball membership in the Hall up to speed," said Jim Overmyer, a baseball historian from Massachusetts, who served on the 12-member committee. Overmyer spoke about Grant's life and career in a telephone interview on Friday.
Before the selection of today's 17 inductees, just 18 Negro Leaguers had been elected to the Hall since it was established in 1936. Grant was born in Pittsfield, Mass., on Aug. 1, 1865, just months after the end of the Civil War. In 1886, he debuted with the Buffalo Bisons of the International League, a nearly all-white league that was the most competitive of baseball's minor leagues. A Buffalo newspaper described the new second baseman as a "Spaniard," according to "Only the Ball Was White," a history of Negro Leagues baseball by Robert Peterson. At the time, leagues tolerated black players as long as they were passed off as Latinos, Arabs or American Indians. In 1887, Grant was one of about 20 black players in "white" organized baseball, Peterson writes. But within a few years, blacks were driven from white baseball by bigoted white players. Segregation put an end to Grant's successful career in white baseball.
"He hit over .300 in every white league that we have stats for, which is five different seasons with six teams," Overmyer said. In addition to Grant's prowess as a hitter, "the papers then just raved about his fielding," Overmyer added. After baseball became segregated, Grant went on to star for all-black teams until he retired in 1903, Overmyer said. One contemporary wrote, "Were it not for the fact that he is a colored man, he would without a doubt be at the top notch of the records among the finest teams in the country." Baseball's color line, as it became known, remained until 1947, when Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Overmyer said the little that is known about Grant has been gleaned from old newspapers and census information.
After he retired, Grant moved to New York City, where he worked as a waiter and a laborer in a wool factory. He was married more than once and apparently did not have children. His only known descendants are the grandchildren and great-grandson of his older brother, Clarence. Grant died in New York's Bellevue Hospital on May 27, 1937. Among the pallbearers at his funeral were Smokey Joe Williams, a Negro Leagues pitcher who was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 1999, and Negro Leagues pioneer Sol White, who will be inducted today with Grant, Overmyer said. Grant was buried in Clifton on June 2, 1937, in a section of the East Ridgelawn Cemetery owned by the City of Passaic, said Barbara Brayya, the cemetery's office manager and bookkeeper. Brayya said she did not know how Grant, who does not appear to have had any connection with Passaic or Clifton, ended up in the cemetery. It is possible New York City had an arrangement with Passaic, she said.
With his induction to the Hall of Fame, Grant is likely the most famous person buried in East Ridgelawn. But because his grave is shared with two other people who could not afford their own burial plot, it must remain unmarked, Brayya said. For more information about Grant and today's Hall of Fame induction ceremony, visit www.baseballhalloffame.org.
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