Credit Photograph by Oscar Daniels
It’s a Wednesday afternoon in April, and Bill Evans Field is dotted with players taking batting practice, fielding grounders, shagging flies. The Clark Atlanta Panthers practice on a lot at the corner of Princeton Drive and College Street in College Park, Georgia, behind the library, across from the police station, a twenty-five-minute drive from their campus just west of downtown Atlanta. Clark College, founded in 1869, was the first four-year liberal-arts institution in the country dedicated to serving African-American students; Atlanta University, founded four years earlier, was the oldest predominantly black graduate school. They merged in 1988. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the Panthers are almost exclusively black. But, these days, even among the baseball teams of historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, this makes the Panthers a rather remarkable exception.
Sports fans know that black participation in Major League Baseball has dropped precipitously in the past few decades. According to a report published last year by USA Today, less than eight per cent of major-league players in 2015 were African-American; that figure was nineteen per cent in 1986. And the decline can be seen at every level of the game: Little League, the minors, high school, college—even H.B.C.U.s. Thirty years ago, it was virtually impossible to find a white player on an H.B.C.U. team. Today, Winston-Salem State, Florida A&M, Prairie View A&M, and North Carolina Central all field teams in which the majority of players are not black. Only a few schools—Clark Atlanta, Morehouse College, and Lane College—regularly fill their rosters entirely with black players.
How did this happen? Kentaus Carter, Clark Atlanta’s head coach, thinks it’s a matter of economic realities and recruiting priorities. “Baseball is an expensive sport,” he said, sitting in his large, cluttered office on that Wednesday morning, before practice. “Some parents are fortunate enough to get their kids personal lessons,” he noted, “but, in reality, more white kids get personal lessons than blacks.” Carter, a thoughtful man who speaks with a husky Southern accent, was raised in Decatur, a suburb of Atlanta. When he was growing up, the big leagues were brimming with black players, and he followed them all: Rickey Henderson, Deion Sanders, Otis Nixon, and especially Lenny Webster, one of the game’s rare black catchers. After high school, Carter went to Florida A&M and played right field for the Rattlers. He got into coaching after he graduated, first serving as an assistant with the team. He then took the same position with the Winston-Salem State Rams, in 2010. That school was doing all that it could to win—and that meant recruiting white players. The Rams became a Division II powerhouse. With a mostly non-black roster, they won three straight Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (C.I.A.A.) titles, and made three straight trips to the N.C.A.A. Division II Atlantic-Region Tournament.
When Carter arrived at Clark Atlanta, as head coach, in 2014, he was not pressured to win immediately. He did, on the other hand, have to hold practices nearly a half-hour drive away from campus, and he was given precious little in the way of a budget. Clark Atlanta allocates only three scholarships to baseball, so Carter often loses candidates to other schools offering more financial assistance. Just recently, a coveted left-handed pitcher chose Georgia Gwinnett because Carter couldn’t come up with more than ten thousand dollars in scholarship money. When he stumbles upon a talented black player from an affluent family—one who has played on travel teams, taken personal instruction, and acquired the skills needed to excel at the college level—he winds up competing with deep-pocketed white schools.
And so, out of necessity, he turned his attention to the local talent pool, which he soon learned was fuller than he realized. He searches for athletes with unrealized potential—a high ceiling, as the scouts say—and then spends his time working on fundamentals and improving what he calls their baseball I.Q. “Most of those other H.B.C.U.s … want to win right away,” he said. He prefers to “develop, develop, develop—build a foundation, and then that way I can get a talented black kid that will turn down a scholarship to a higher division program and come play with me.”
John Young, the founder of Major League Baseball’s Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (R.B.I.) program, who died on Sunday, at the age of sixty-seven, took notice. “The coach at Clark is adhering to what, I think, is the mission of the historically black colleges and universities,” he said, over the phone, just a few weeks before his passing. Young complimented Carter’s focus on developing African-American athletes, and he contrasted him with Mervyl Melendez, who, in the mid-nineties, while an assistant coach at his alma mater, Bethune-Cookman University, began recruiting players from his native Puerto Rico. Bethune-Cookman won eleven conference titles in twelve years. In 2012, Melendez brought that same approach to Alabama State University; in his first four seasons there, the team had a hundred and twenty wins, the highest four-year total in its history. This season, Alabama State’s thirty-four-man roster has as many Puerto Ricans as black players on it. Most of the other players are white. “There’s not one player from Montgomery on the roster, there’s not one player from the state of Alabama on the roster,” Young said. “And Alabama State is a state school.” He believes that the school has sacrificed some of its purpose in order to win. “I have no problem with Melendez,” Young explained. “I have a problem with the university.”
Kentaus Carter, meanwhile, takes pride in fielding a team made up almost entirely of black players. According to Jason Howell, the Panthers’ promising first baseman, the team’s makeup helps amplify the benefits of going to a school like Clark Atlanta. “Attending an H.B.C.U., you’re getting an experience that you can’t get at a P.W.I.”—a predominantly white institution—“or other institution,” the soft-spoken freshman said. “It’s more than baseball when you’re at an H.B.C.U., it’s about getting back to your roots, getting back to the people that have laid the foundation for us.”
Few other coaches can claim Carter’s success at fulfilling the H.B.C.U. mission—but most have beaten the Panthers on the playing field. Since 2008, Clark Atlanta has accumulated forty-seven wins, two hundred and thirty-six losses, and one draw. Carter says that that’s fine; he’s still excited about the future. “I think history is going to come back around,” he said, adding, “Hopefully, in the next ten to twelve years, you’ll see more African-Americans playing baseball.” Being back in Atlanta, and “just looking at the hotbed of talent,” has encouraged him. “It’s probably going to take just one school to have some success with an all-African-American team to show that it can be done.”
