Effa Manley

ONLY woman ever to manage an all-male pro baseball team

Seamstress Bertha Ford Brooks gave birth to Effa on March 27,1900. Her husband Benjamin Brooks sued her employer, financier John M. Bishop for having an affair with his wife and received a settlement of $10,000. The Brookses divorced shortly afterwards. Bertha later married B.A. Cole and had six more children. Brooks and Cole were men of African Descent, Bishop was white. Bertha Ford Brooks was also white, but Effa choose to live as a Black person along with her six bi-racial brothers and sisters. Throughout her life, she was thought to be a light skinned Black until she revealed these details of her birth in 1973.

In 1916, Effa graduated from William Penn High School in Philadelphia and married for the first time. There are no details reported on what happened to end that marriage or how she lived. But in September 1932 at the World Series in New York City, she met businessman Abe Manley.  While there is no dispute he was wealthy,  reports vary on whether the source of his wealth was astute real estate and other investments or the numbers racket. Effa and Abe married in June 1933 and became owners of a baseball team in Brooklyn two years later.

Named after the local newspaper, the Eagles first played in the Brooklyn Dodgers' Ebbets Field. In 1936, the Manley's purchased the Newark Dodgers franchise and moved their team to Newark, New Jersey. Abe Manley concentrated on other business ventures so left the management of the team to Effa. While she has been described as a beautiful woman who was photographed in the latest fashions, she was primarily known for her hands on management style, support of ballplayers and social activism.

Effa Manley's social activism included work on the Citizen's League. She walked in the picket lines organized in 1934 to boycott stores in Harlem that refused to hire Black salesclerks.

The Citizens' League negotiated for the hiring of blacks for non menial jobs and a year later over 300 Blacks were  employed in retail businesses on 125th Street. In 1936, she led a group to save the mortgage of Edgecombe Sanitarium in Harlem where Black private pay patients could recuperate under the care of medical staff who cared. The Sanitarium was built by Dr. Wiley Wilson with the proceeds of his divorce from cosmetics heiress A'Lelia Walker. She was also treasurer of the Newark NAACP and held much publicized  "Anti-Lynching Days'" at her Ruppert Stadium ball park.

  The day to day operations of the Eagles was handled by Effa as well as negotiations for salaries and percentages of ticket and vendor sales.  Although criticized by other owners, she was asked to handle finances for the entire Negro League. The ball team was only one of the Manley businesses.  One of the other more visible ones was Club 83 in Newark. She also believed in Negro League  teams building their own ball parks instead of paying to use Major League parks.

Effa was very much a player advocate eventhough she was the team owner.  She fought to change game schedules to allow players more rest and time with families, better accommodations while on the road, and better salaries. The Manleys provided the Eagles with an air-conditioned, $15,000 Flexible Clipper bus -- a first for the Negro Leagues. During the winter, she arranged for players who wanted to continue witih the game to play in Puerto Rican leagues. Under her management the Newark Eagles won the Negro World Series in 1946. The team was sold in 1947 without  even recouping the investments the Manleys poured in. By 1948 they and most of the other Negro teams folded as attendance declined and premier players were recruited by Major League teams. She was a vocal critic of the Major League owners who decimated the Negro Leagues without compensation to the owners who recruited, developed and in many cases supported the players.

When she died on April 16, 1982 at 81 Effa Manley was believed to be the last surviving franchise owner of a Black baseball team. Her tombstone reads "She loved baseball".