Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI – Effa Manley, who used baseball as a tool in the fight for civil rights, became the first woman elected to the Hall of Fame on Monday when she was among 17 people voted in by a special committee of historians.

Also among the five executives and 12 players chosen by a 12-member panel were Cuban stars Cristobal Torriente and Jose Mendez, who will join Florida Marlins executive Tony Perez and former Negro League great Martin Dihigo as the only Cubans to win baseball’s highest honor.

Manley, who was white but married an African American and carried herself as a black woman, made her mark on the Negro Leagues off the field. She co-owned the Newark (N.J.) Eagles with her husband Abe and, from 1936-47, ran the business end of the team handling scheduling, travel, payroll, promotions and contracts.

And though she was a pioneer in the use of advertising to promote her team and the city, she might be best remembered for the way she used baseball to promote civil rights, once staging an Anti-Lynching Day at Newark’s Ruppert Stadium.

“She was ahead of her time,” said Jane Forbes Clark, chairman of the Hall of Fame board. “Being both black and a woman in those days was not easy. To say she was a pioneer I think is an understatement.”

Yet that’s the word that was repeatedly used to describe Manley during Monday’s news conference – and not just because of what she did in baseball.

“She was a pioneer in so many ways in terms of integrating the team with the community, in terms of using her opportunities with baseball to push forward a civil rights agenda,” said Kent State professor Leslie Heaphy, a member of the selection committee.

Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Max Manning and Leon Day were among the stars to play for Manley’s Eagles, who won the Negro League World Series in 1946. A year later, when Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the major leagues – followed closely by Doby – Manley lobbied big-league owners to compensate Negro League for preparing players for the majors.

“She was a campaigner for equal pay for the value of her talented athletes,” said Larry Lester, a baseball author and member of the voting committee. “She campaigned to get as much money as possible for these ball players, and rightfully so. She was very adamant about that. That was one of the reasons why she’s in the Hall of Fame today.”

Manley, who died in Los Angeles in 1981 at 84, also coauthored a book in on black baseball and regularly wrote to the Hall of Fame, encouraging it to recognize players such as Mule Suttles and Biz Mackey, both of whom will be enshrined alongside Manley this summer.

Monday’s special election was the culmination of a six-year comprehensive study by more than 50 scholars who examined the history of blacks in baseball before 1960. More than 94 names were originally forwarded for Hall consideration and that list was cut to 39 by a screening committee in November.

This past weekend a panel of 12 researchers, professors and baseball historians met in Tampa under the direction of former commissioner Fay Vincent and voted to send 17 of those candidates to the Hall, falling just one short of doubling the number of Negro Leaguers enshrined in Cooperstown before Monday.

To be elected candidates needed from nine of the 12 panelists, who voted in a secret ballots. Results of the voting were not released.

Torriente, who died in 1938 at the age of 44, hit .339 in 17 seasons in the Negro Leagues and is pre-revolutionary Cuba’s all-time leading hitter with a .350 career average. Mendez, who went 76-28 over one 12-year stretch in Cuba, held the all-white Cincinnati Reds scoreless for 25 innings during a 1908 exhibition series. He died in 1928, two years after retiring, at age 31.

Both were members of the Cuban Hall of Fame’s inaugural class in 1939.

Also voted into the Hall on Monday were former players Frank Grant, Pete Hill, Ray Brown, Jud Wilson, Willard Brown, Andy Cooper, Louis Santop and Ben Taylor and four Negro League executives Cum Posey, J.L. Wilkinson, Sol White and Alex Pompez – the later the Key West-born son of Cuban immigrants who helped internationalize the Negro Leagues, then made the transition to major league baseball by signing Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, Willie McCovey and Felipe Alou for the San Francisco Giants.

Monday’s electees will be enshrined in July along with former reliever Bruce Sutter – the only player voted in by the baseball writers this year – making the class of 2006, at 18, the largest in the Hall’s history. The previous record was 11, in 1946.

Among those who failed to earn support on 75 percent of the ballots cast in Monday’s special election were Florida native Buck O’Neil and Cuban-born Minnie Minoso, the only living candidates among the 39 who were considered.

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