The Homestead Grays made Washington a second home at Griffith Stadium, but advocates say the city’s honoring has never matched the team’s legacy. Disagreements over how to measure the Grays’ Washington stake have turned into a sharper debate about what Washing
Grays games used to draw crowds big enough to outpace the home team. In Washington. the franchise was even folded into everyday baseball life through the gate—Senators owner Clark Griffith brought the Homestead Grays in—and the players wore a “W” on their sleeves as they built a winning rhythm that spanned cities.
Then the ballpark was torn down, and the question shifted from what the Grays did here to what Washington chose to remember.
The Homestead Grays were a Negro Leagues dynasty, and the way they’re honored today runs through Juneteenth. Major League Baseball now gathers at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, where baseball honors Juneteenth at the historic park. But the Grays’ last Negro League World Series was played in October 1948 at Rickwood Field. the same stadium where Willie Mays got his start—months before he lost the last Negro League World Series ever played. The team that beat him split its home schedule between Pittsburgh and a ballpark right here in Washington on Georgia Avenue.
For people who know the Grays’ story best, the stakes are personal—and the disagreement starts immediately.
Sean Gibson. the great-grandson of Grays Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson and president of the Gibson Foundation. describes Washington as “a second home.” He calls Pittsburgh the “home. ” where Cumberland Posey built the franchise into a juggernaut and Josh Gibson compiled a .372 career batting average. which Major League Baseball lists as the all-time best as of 2024. Gibson said Washington “never really had their own team. ” explaining that Washington had a Pittsburgh club playing half its games down here.
Thom Loverro, a longtime Washington Times columnist and author of “The Encyclopedia of Negro League Baseball,” puts the claim differently. He says the Grays were “a little bit more than a second home.” When asked whether they belonged to Washington. Loverro didn’t hedge: “I really do think it does.” He compares the franchise to the New York Yankees of the Negro Leagues. calling them “the dominant franchise. ” and says when they came to Washington. the dynasty “even outdoes what the Yankees did.”.
Underneath the debate about language is a sharper concern: a city that, in both men’s telling, has done too little to honor the home it effectively shared with the Grays.
Gibson framed it plainly through his own routine. He’s in Washington two or three times a year working with the Nationals, and he said, “I consider D.C. a home.” Loverro, by contrast, focuses on what that second house should have become in public memory—something grander than the record suggests.
One figure both men circle is Josh Gibson. The team’s Hall of Fame hitters anchor the legend, but Gibson’s place in Washington is what gets under their skin.
By the time the Grays made Griffith Stadium their Washington home in 1940. they were already a defending champion and part of a longer run: nine straight Negro National League pennants from 1937 to 1945. and 10 pennants overall in that span. along with three Negro World Series titles. Gibson and first baseman Buck Leonard—both Hall of Famers—anchored the order. The franchise wasn’t hiding its Washington footprint, either. The Grays wore a “W” on the sleeve.
Still. Gibson said. some people believe the Washington club and the Pittsburgh club were “two different teams. ” when it was “the same team.” Loverro said he’s had to fight local sports-town amnesia for years. repeatedly pushing to make sure Josh Gibson is included when fans talk about Washington’s greatest athletes. Loverro called Gibson “the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. ” based on integrated record books. and said Gibson played here for nine years—yet remains an afterthought in Washington conversations.
In the middle of that tension, the Nationals’ efforts stand out. There’s a bronze Josh Gibson statue greeting visitors at the home-plate gate, alongside Walter Johnson and Frank Howard. Six Grays Hall of Famers sit in the park’s Ring of Honor. Tuesday marked the franchise’s second-annual Negro Leagues night. And this spring, nearly 1,000 D.C. public-school eighth-graders completed a monthslong unit on the Grays. Gibson’s foundation helped the District build that curriculum, which the team and the schools have pledged to run again.
The ballclub remembers. The city, both men argue, has not done enough.
Loverro points to omissions elsewhere to show how fragile memory can be. He said most Yankees fans have no idea the New York Black Yankees played in old Yankee Stadium. and that Philadelphia. murals and all. lets its Stars fade. Even then. he argued there’s “probably more recognition” of the Negro Leagues in Washington than almost any other city in America.
Yet the fracture remains. Gibson said there’s no street named for the Grays. The grandest civic marker he could point to is a mural in the back alley behind Ben’s Chili Bowl. one he helped put up. Loverro’s verdict is sharper: “the city has dropped the ball. ” and his explanation isn’t a conspiracy so much as neglect—he said he isn’t sure there’s been anyone to “rattle their cage” about honoring the Grays.
And for a team whose Washington life was tied to Griffith Stadium. the loss of the site is part of the wound. Griffith Stadium, where the Grays won the 1943 and 1944 Negro World Series, was torn down in 1965. Howard University Hospital now stands on the site. The spot of home plate is marked inside the entrance and a small plaque is on Georgia Avenue. but the ballpark itself is gone.
Loverro added that the Grays weren’t brought here out of civic embrace. He said Senators owner Clark Griffith brought the Grays “for the gate. ” and that Grays games often outdrew his own team. By Loverro’s account. Griffith staged “phony workouts” for Grays players—workouts that were never with the intention of signing them to the majors.
In Birmingham, Kansas City, and other places, the Grays’ legacy was treated differently. Loverro said Birmingham preserved Rickwood Field, poured money into restoring it, and made it the place baseball returns every Juneteenth. He said Kansas City built a museum for the Negro Leagues at 18th and Vine.
The heart of his point is that Washington’s roots are just as deep. “Washington has as deep roots as any,” Loverro said, contrasting two cities that staged the final World Series of an era in 1948—one enshrined its Black baseball ground, the other paved it.
Even with that critique, the name hasn’t disappeared from Washington’s day-to-day sports life. Loverro is part of a nonprofit called DC Grays. The organization fields a college summer team and runs a youth program in Wards 7 and 8. providing uniforms. equipment and coaches for more than 250 kids. dedicated to the memory of the Homestead Grays.
The discussion turns again to Juneteenth, and to a warning that both men kept circling. Gibson lobbied Major League Baseball to move its Negro Leagues legends game. the East-West Classic. to Rickwood. and he pushed hard that it not be “a one and done type thing.” That argument worked: the Classic returns there this Juneteenth.
But Gibson’s bigger concern was how the calendar frames Black history. He said the calendar is a trap: Black history gets crammed into 28 days and now risks getting crammed into a single one. It deserves to be “told 365 days a year, not just 28 days or one day.”
Loverro. who spent years doing research that put those numbers into the record book. said he won’t pretend that statistics can fix forgetting. “I don’t think anything can fix the forgetting,” he said. He pointed to records as symbols—like murals or street signs—that can send a 15-year-old online to find out who Josh Gibson was. He described it as more than symbolism. too: records represent “a sliver of justice. ” even if “you can never get full justice for a full segment of the population being denied the same opportunity.”.
Gibson never lived to see that kind of justice fully land. He died in January 1947, months before Jackie Robinson took the field in Brooklyn and a lifetime before the record book admitted what Robinson had done.
A Washington team recorded the final out of the Negro Leagues’ last championship on the ground the sport now treats as holy. The greatest hitter who ever lived spent nine years playing in Washington. And the man who knows that history best says the only thing still missing is someone willing to press the city about it.
Consider this the first knock.
Homestead Grays Josh Gibson Buck Leonard Griffith Stadium Juneteenth East-West Classic Rickwood Field Nationals D.C. Grays Negro Leagues Clark Griffith Willie Mays