Photo from the Personal collection of David Skinner John Ford Smith pitched for the International League’s Jersey City Giants.

Arizona’s sole Negro League baseball player made a name for himself as a pitcher, community leader and civil rights activist.

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier when he joined Major League Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, but scores of talented black baseball players had already played alongside him in the Negro Leagues for years, including Phoenix’s own John Ford Smith.
 
 Historians believe Smith is the only Arizonan to play in the Negro Leagues, earning him the unofficial title of the state’s black baseball pioneer. He was a standout high school and semi-pro player locally in the 1930s, and later went on to join the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs dynasty and ultimately a Major League Baseball farm team. His impressive baseball career was eclipsed later in life by his work in the business world and as a civil rights activist.

“You could really say that he had three careers – as an athlete, as a banker and as a politico,” says David Skinner, a baseball historian in Bisbee. “There were certainly connections between the three of them. He was at the right place at the right time. He was kind of a big fish in a little pond in black Arizona, in black Phoenix.’’

That Smith became one of the state’s pioneers is perhaps no surprise given his upbringing. Smith was born in Phoenix in 1919, into one of Arizona’s pioneer families. His father was a Buffalo Soldier who relocated here after being discharged from the U.S. Army, according to a Smith profile written by Skinner for the Society for American Baseball Research’s 1999 book Mining Towns to Major Leagues: A History of Arizona Baseball.

The Smith family had eight children, and John and brother Louis showed athletic promise. John chose baseball, and Louis chose basketball (though he died as a teenager from pneumonia).

The Kansas City Monarchs proved to be one of the Negro Leagues’ dynasty teams in its heyday.

Smith and Arizona baseball sort of grew up together. The state’s first minor league system launched in 1915 but didn’t last a full season, says Rodney Johnson, president of the Arizona chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research. Another minor league team formed in 1928, and the next year, the Detroit Tigers held a spring training game in Phoenix. Baseball flourished from there, with baseball parks in Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe and elsewhere around the state hosting semi-pro games.  

But like the rest of the country, Arizona was segregated, and Smith’s baseball coming-of-age happened in ballparks for blacks and other minority players.

Smith, a pitcher, became a star at Phoenix Union Colored High School in south Phoenix and went on to Phoenix College, though his college career was cut short by illness. He later joined the all-black, semi-pro Arizona Compass, which would become his springboard to the Negro Leagues.

By that time, the Negro Leagues were a thriving operation. They first organized in 1920 in the Midwest as the Negro National League. That spurred rival leagues in other parts of the country, and soon black teams were traveling around the United States, Canada and Latin America playing ball.

The Negro Leagues had their dynasties – chiefly the Kansas City Monarchs – and teams played to enthusiastic crowds in cities big and small. The annual East-West game, which drew the best players from different teams, enjoyed as many as 50,000 fans. Next to Robinson, the league brought up players such as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson.

Still, Negro League teams generally didn’t draw players born in western states with relatively small black populations because they were so concentrated in the Midwest and East. By 1940, about 4,200 blacks lived in Arizona, making for a smaller talent pool here.

In 1941, Smith left Phoenix for Kansas City as the Monarchs headed to their third of four straight Negro American League pennants, according to Skinner. Smith joined Paige on the pitching crew.

“The Monarchs were the New York Yankees of the Negro Leagues,” says Bob Kendrick, marketing vice president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Missouri. “They sent more guys to the Major Leagues than any other Negro League team. They barnstormed frequently around the country…. As a result, they had a huge following.’’

By 1942, with the country at war, Smith was called into military service. He played baseball with various military teams and rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Army Air Force.

Smith rejoined the Monarchs between 1946 and 1948 and became an ace pitcher, and he also spent the off seasons playing ball in Latin America. By 1949, Smith signed on with the New York Giants’ farm team in New Jersey at age 30. He watched other teammates from the Negro Leagues move to the majors but never made it there himself.

Smith continued to play until 1956, enjoying a stint in Canada and then with various teams back home. By that time, leagues in Arizona were integrated, with black players, managers and umpires, and Smith pitched his final year with the mostly white Arizona Cotton Kings, Skinner says. 

Smith became immersed in the community, with jobs in education and banking, a position as director of East Lake Park (the epicenter of activity for blacks in Phoenix), an unsuccessful run for the state Legislature and a post as executive director of the Arizona Civil Rights Commission.

Skinner notes that when Smith died in 1983, he was lauded by local news outlets for his civil rights activism much more than his baseball career. Skinner says, “He was kind of a renaissance man.”