An African American baseball phenom grew up in Omaha, went away, then came back, stayed working, and died young. Almost entirely forgotten in the city today, he did great things that are being heralded today. This is a biography of early Omaha Black baseball great Vasco Graham (1875-1913).

Early Years

Born in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1875, Vasco Graham’s parents were Henry (1839-1888) and Lucy (1849-1900), and they were likely born enslaved. In 1892, when he was 17 years old, the Evening World-Herald announced that Vasco was one of 16 students from Cass School who would start at Omaha High School in the fall. This was an era when every student was not allowed to attend high school, and going was seen as a major accomplishment.

During the 1891 and 1892 seasons, Vasco played for an amateur mixed team in Omaha called the Labyrinth Clippers. On that team he played catcher and was regarded for his hitting.

Vasco became a semi-pro player in 1893, and in 1894 he played for the semi-pro Dubuque Whites as one of their only Black players. While playing on that team, Vasco and another Black player were referred to in a local newspaper as the “watermelon battery,” a racist trope commonly repeated then.

Three years later in 1895, Vasco was a cited in the paper as a member of a low level minor team in Omaha called the Wilson & Draper Shoe House baseball team. A segregated team of Black players only, Vasco was the catcher. The paper referred to them as “the strongest team of colored players ever organized in the west.”

Pro Baseball Career

During this era, Vasco became the star catcher of the Page Fence Giants, a professional Black-American baseball team that barnstormed southern Michigan from the city of Adrian. The team was acknowledged as one of the nation’s top teams in the Negro leagues. A historian wrote, “One of the premier professional colored teams in the 1890s, and the first to appear in the Midwest, the Page Fence Giants demonstrated that early Black baseball could succeed outside of the East Coast…”

He was likely recruited to the team by the Black baseball phenom Bud Fowler (1858-1913), who is noted as “the earliest known African American player in organized professional baseball.” However, after Fowler left the team mid-season, Vasco was sent to play for the integrated Adrian Demons of the Michigan State League, which was a low level minor team.

It was 1896 when Vasco got married to Mary, with the newspaper referring to him as 21 years old at the time (that would mean he was born in 1875). In 1898, Vasco was in a group of African American men who were arrested for “maintaining gambling devices in the form of policy equipment.” The raid happened in a pool hall he ran at 120 North 12th Street, which was in the heart of the a Black neighborhood by Dodge Street.

In 1909, Vasco was back in Omaha as an umpire. Cited in several games, his umpiring was noted while he was working a series of games between a white team and the all-Black team in Omaha called The Midways.

The Omaha Giants

The next year in 1910, Graham organized a new all-Black semi-pro team called the Omaha Giants. The Giants operated through 1911, with Vasco as the team president and W.J. Ford as the manager. At the same time he ran a boarding house at 1310 Jackson Street, a site now in Omaha’s Old Market. In a short piece from a Black newspaper called Omaha Daily News, the paper said “Look out for the Omaha Giants, those colored warriors, for according to Director Vasco Graham they intend to carry a funnel cloud and sweep up all games.”

Apparently, the team warmed up at Rourke Park, a large stadium that once stood at South 15th and Vinton Street.

Looking for warmup competition the next season, in 1911 the paper said “Our colored call-tossers, the Omaha Giants, are looking for a few preliminary arguments with local herds before starting on the road.” The next week the paper said they “would especially like to meet a few of the local congregations in order to get some preliminary work before hitting the high places.” Bringing in players from Sioux City and Chicago, the team had strong prospects that season. Scheduled to play “in the northwestern part of Nebraska, along the waters in Iowa and all of Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota,” the team had 11 players.

There were other baseball teams called the Giants in Omaha. In 1894, there was a team alternately called “The Midways” and the “Midway Giants.” In the 1918 a team was organized and played through 1921, and another team existed then called the “South Omaha Giants.” All of these were teams with Black players only.

Vasco divorced Mary in 1911, claiming she left him two years before that. Two years later, in July 1913, he died at home at the age of 36.

Memorials

Today, there is no memorial to Vasco Graham in Omaha, and no recollection of the team he shepherded for two years in the city. There is also no tribute to the long history of Black baseball in Omaha. Maybe that will change someday in the future.

Special thanks to Doug Doughty for inspiring this article!

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MY ARTICLES RELATED TO SPORTS IN NORTH OMAHA
Main: Black Sports in Omaha
People: Dorcas Thornton | Will Calhoun | Vasco Graham
Teams: Omaha Rockets | Omaha Eagles
Organizations: Red Dot Athletic Club | Near North YMCA | Gene Eppley Boys Club | Midwest Athletic Club | Omaha Colored Baseball League
Places: Kountze Place Golf Club | YMCA Athletic Park | Fontenelle Park | Omaha Driving Park | Lakeside Raceway | Omaha Speedway

Elsewhere Online

• Vasco Graham on Findagrave.com

Sources

• Black Ball 10: New Research in African American Baseball History by Leslie A. Heaphy (ed) in 2021 for McFarland Inc, Publishers.
• Honus: The Life and Times of a Baseball Hero by W. Hageman in 1996 for Sagamore Pub.
• The African American Baseball Experience in Nebraska: Essays and Memories by Angelo J. Louisa (ed) in 2021 for  McFarland, Inc., Publishers.
• Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, with Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886-1936 by S. White in 1996 for University of Nebraska Press.
• The Minors by N.J. Sullivan in 1999 for St. Martin’s Press.
• The Omaha Bee archives on newspapers.com.
• The Omaha World-Herald archives on newspapers.com.
• The Omaha Daily News archives on newspapers.com.
• “The Page Fence Giants: Nineteenth century champions” by Leslie A. Heaphy in Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 in Spring 2012 for McFarland, Inc, Publishers.

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