“Colorado’s baseball tradition got started long before the Rockies. You can trace it back to the 1920s to a team called the Denver White Elephants.
Bob Kendrick has dedicated his life to talk about one of the forgotten chapters in American sports history: Negro League Baseball. Kendrick is the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.
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Colorado never had an affiliated Negro League team, but it had the Denver White Elephants, the longest lasting African-American semi-pro team in Denver from 1915-1935. The White Elephants were owned by Albert Henderson Wade Ross, or A.H.W. Ross for short. He was a businessman and politician who owned the Rossonian Hotel in Denver’s Five Points.
The White Elephants would barnstorm around Colorado and also play in the Denver Post Tournament which became the first American tournament to integrate in 1935.
“Although they weren’t official members of the Negro Leagues, they were a dominant black baseball team competing primarily against white baseball teams because they didn’t have that influx of black baseball teams in and around them. So they were going all over the state taking all comers and whooping all comers,” Kendrick said.”
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Adams, Justin. CBS 4 News 15 September 2019.