The history of the Chicago American Giants is divided into two district parts:  the Rube Foster years and the post- Foster years.  The American Giants had been black baseball’s most celebrated institution for a full decade before the ambitious and able Foster took on the most formidable challenge of his distinguished career:  the creation of the first successful black baseball league, the Negro National League, in 1920.

 Chicago, with its accessible transportation and the abundance of jobs occasioned by wartime labor shortages, provided hope and opportunity for a burgeoning African American community lured from the South by promise of a better life.  In 1911 Foster, player-manager of Chicago’s Leland Giants, struck off on his own and created the Chicago American Giants.  Not coincidentally, he also embarked upon becoming the country’s most successful African-American booking agent.  Rube Foster capitalized on black Chicago’s growth and prosperity, using baseball savvy, business accumen, and a forceful personality to build the greatest sporting institution that black America had ever seen.

 Copies of the Chicago Defender were distributed throughout the South by the Illinois Central Railroad’s African American porters, and the American Giants (as the name implied) soon had a following of unrivaled breadth.  Small Southern towns revelled in a carnival atmosphere whenever Rube Foster’s ballplayers came to town, barnstorming their way to and from their winter playground in Palm Beach, Florida.  Foster, in turn, fortified his already great team by recruiting talented Southern players.  He made similar forays to such distant places as California and Cuba.

 Foster had thus been a dominant force in black baseball for a full decade by the time of his Bismarkian deed of unifying the Midwest’s strongest African-American teams into one great black league.  Playing in the 5,000-seat stadium on 9^th and Wentworth that Charles Comiskey foresook when he built the Baseball Palace of the World in 1910, the American Giants’ success continued in the NEGRO National League through most of the League’s twelve seasons.  The American Giants received Foster’s most minute attention until he was stricken with mental illness in 1926.  This despite his various obligations in overseeing both his own team and the entire league operations.

 Foster’s teams were famous for their pitching and defense, and their speed and guile.  Every player (even power hitter Cristobal Torriente) was drilled to proficiency in bunting.  Foster guided the American Giants to NNL championships and Negro league World Series crowns against Eastern successor as team manager, Dave Malarcher.

 Unable to withstand the Great Depression’s withering blast, the American Giants suffered through the league’s inglorious collapse in 1931.  In 1932, the team, now called Cole’s American Giants after new owner Robert A. Cole, won the Negro Southern League championship.  The following year (1933) they joined the reorganized Negro National League created by the Pittsburgh Crawford’s Gus Greenlee.  In the first season, Cole’s Giants had their rightful championship snatched from them by Greenlee, who declared his Crawfords the champs.  In 1934, an unfavorable protest ruling proved fatal in losing the championship series, four games to three, to the Philadelphia Stars.  Malarcher had piloted the club through the NSL title season and the new NNL’s initial pair of campaigns before retiring after the 1935 schedule of play.

 H.G. Hall, president of the American Giants, let the next reorganization of black baseball in 1937 by creating a western circuit, the Negro American League, with the Negro National League becoming an eastern league.  The American Giants played in the Negro American League from 1937 through 1952.  While continuing to be highly competitive in the NAL the American Giants were unable to capture another championship.  They came close on three occasions but were defeated in NAL championship playoff series in 1937, 1943, and 1949.

 The club featured many great players throughout the years including Hall-of-Famer John Henry Lloyd (ss), Preston (Pete) Hill and Cristobal Torriente (of), Burce Petway (c) and Dave Brown (p) during Foster’s reign.  Malarcher (3b), and Rube’s half brother Bill Foster.  Webster McDonald (p) and Alec Radcliff (3b) starred for the post Rube American Giants.  These and other American Giants provided countless rabid fans with the highest caliber of American baseball on the very cusp of the great black metropolis on Chicago’s South Side.