Another View
First of two parts
Effa Manley (1897-1981) was the first female Negro Leagues team owner, the only woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and a civil rights activist.
Manley first became the team’s business manager after her husband bought the Newark Eagles, and later bought the club herself and therefore joined the male-dominated baseball industry “and a sports world that would rather see this woman back in her ‘place’ at home,” noted a Harper Collins press release on Kaia Alderson’s new novel “In a League of Her Own” (May, 2024).
Alderson recently talked about her latest work in an MSR phone interview.
About Manley’s life story, “She basically spoke her mind and was in this very rigid boys club and did not care, and she would tell these Black baseball owners what she thought,” explained Alderson. “She would tell those white baseball owners what she thought and did not care and got things done.”
Manley posthumously became the first and still the only woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, chosen by the Special Committee on Negro Leagues.
Her new book serves as an excellent follow up to “Sisters-In -Arms” (2021), Alderson’s novel about the first and only all-Black female battalion to be deployed overseas during World War II. The author again uses real people, or in this case a real person in Manley to base her fictional novel on.
She pointed out that writing fictional accounts on real people can be both fun and challenging. Alderson is a historical fiction author who specializes in Black women’s history. She is a Spelman College and the University of West Georgia alumnus and has published romantic comedy and historical romance works, as well as comic short stories under the name Kaia Danielle.
“I was doing preliminary research and up popped an article about the four women who owned a Negro League team,” she recalled. “I was like, that’s interesting, and her story was fascinating to me.”
“Black women or women in general could only do certain things in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and here you have this woman who basically defied everything about that. I just found that very empowering.”
Alderson often is called a historian but says she doesn’t see herself in that fashion. “Other people have called me that. And I say maybe it’s to the extent where I do the research,” said Alderson.
“In writing fiction…I can play and have the creative license to play with [facts] within fiction.”
Alderson said she owes a lot to the Black Press in doing her writing. “I have immense respect and debt. I could not have written either one of these books without the archives of the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier,” and other Black newspapers, she stressed.
“I think there’s a lot to be learned from the past when there were less resources,” surmised the author. “A lot of things that we experienced today are not new… I was shocked to see how in terms of Jim Crow or racism, some of the stuff we’re still experiencing today is not anything new.”
Her next project? “I haven’t nailed down my next subject, but I’m eyeballing the Montgomery Bus Boycott from the perspective of the people who worked versus the people who organized it. Everyday women that were doing incredible things during the time when we’re being told that we weren’t allowed to, or didn’t have the intelligence or the creativity to do things.”
Next: A new book on two legendary Black sportswriters and their place in civil rights history.
Just to clarify, while May 2024 was the original intended intended release date, it wasn’t actually released until August 6,2024.