Cum Posey was an, manager, and team owner and league executive in the Negro Leagues, as well as a professional being a profebasketball player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Despite his commanding wealth, his father Cap Posey still had to deal with racial discrimination, according to historical accounts.
Cumberland Willis "Cum" Posey Jr. was an American baseball player, manager, and team owner in the Negro Leagues, as well as a professional basketball player and NBA team owner.
Cum Posey Jr. was born into Western Pennsylvania's black elite, the son of Cumberland Willis Posey Sr. and Angelina "Anna" Stevens Posey of Homestead, adjacent to Pittsburgh.
Posey Sr. worked on riverboats and, in 1877, became the first licensed African American engineer in the United States, earning a chief engineer license and the title of, "Captain."
"Cap" Posey was a riverboat builder, general manager of the Dexter Coal Company, owner of the Diamond Coke and Coal Company, and an industrial partner of Henry Clay Frick.
Cap was also president of the Loendi Social and Literary Club for three years and president of the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper for its 14 years, ending in 1924.
The Posey family lived comfortably in a palatial Italianate mansion in a safe and rather wealthy district of Pittsburgh upper class., and even despite his commanding wealth, Captain Posey still dealt with racial discrimination, according to historian William Serrin. In that crucible of race relations, his first and only son began to excel in sports as a young athlete.
Prior to 1910, Cumberland Jr. was a star player football player, and played Quarterback for various semi-professional teams while playing professionally in the Negro Leagues. Cum also had a knack for basketball where he excelled as he had in every sport.
Posey eventually lent his focus to baseball, sandlot barnstorming with teams in the Pittsburgh area, including the Delaney Rifles and the Collins Tigers.
That same year a group of African American steelworkers organized Homestead Grays into one of greatest ball clubs in baseball history. The Grays, played in many locations throughout the history of the franchise including Forbes Field and Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C.
In professional baseball, Cum Posey jr. played, managed and eventually owned the Homestead Grays beginning in 1911.
By 1916, Posey had become Homestead's manager and later became team owner in the early 1920s.
During his quarter-century of running the Homestead Grays, he built the team into one of the powerhouse franchises of black baseball. Cumberland claimed numerous pennants victories, including 9 consecutive Negro National League Pennants spanning from 1937–1945.
The team won 8/9 Negro National League (NNL) titles.
After assuming role as principal owner of the team Posey spent 35 years with the Homestead Grays playing and contributing to the organization in various capacities. He played baseball as a player, separately managing, and owning the club later in his career.
He went on to build one of the strongest Negro League barnstorming teams in the Negro National League, making the Grays of Homestead a perennially powerful and, more importantly a profitable team. It is widely considered by many baseball historians to have been the most well run franchise in the history of the league.
When Posey began his playing career in the semi-pros with the Grays in 1911, he soon ended his playing career to become a full-time business manager.
He then went on to assume total and complete control over the Homestead Grays in 1920, quickly turning them into a highly successful regional enterprise now as an independent team.
The Grays' organization strongly identified with the area surrounding Pennsylvania, affording them a loyal and dedicated fanbase that enabled them to survive even the depths of harshest parts of the Great Depression.
Cum was an aggressive talented scout for the Homestead Ballclub.
At one point he had over a dozen Negro League Hall of Famers playing for his teams, and he, like Gus Greenlee, was often accused of raiding other clubs' rosters, enticing other organizations best players to join his team through the use of financial persuasion.
In the early 1930, Posey’s Homestead Grays took a big step back, losing several Negro League stars to the well-financed Pittsburgh Crawfords.
Homestead rebounded quickly, joining the second iteration of the Negro National League (NNL), the Negro National League II (NNLII) in 1935. In Grays fashion they would soon dominate that circuit as well. Posey's teams reeled off 9 consecutive pennants from 1937–1945
Things were good for Posey and the Homestead Grays until, Cumberland made and unwise attempted to get involved in the creation of the East-West League in 1932. This was in the midst of the Great Depression and was a very ambitious venture that did look promising.
However, the league failed to survive it's inaugural season.
Later in his career, Posey became an officer for the Negro National League II, wielding significant power at the leagues major yearly meetings.
Cum was remembered as a somewhat cynical and, frequent critic of the league and certain organizations within it, both before and after joining league executive. He used his weekly sports columns written in the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black weekly newspaper, to issue praise or dismay for the league and its players.
Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith once wrote of Posey: "Some may say he crushed the weak as well as the strong on the way to the top of the ladder. But no matter what his critics say, they cannot deny that he was the smartest man in Negro baseball and certainly the most successful."
On March 28 of 1946, Posey died of cancer in Pittsburgh at the age of 55. His hometown of Homestead declared a school holiday the day of his funeral.
Cumberland Posey jr. was elected to the MLB Hall of Fame in 2006.
He was posthumously honored with the Washington Nationals Ring of Honor for his "significant contribution to the game of baseball in Washington, D.C" and for his role in creation the Homestead Grays in August of 2010.
In Cumberland’s basketball life, he was consider to be the best African American basketball player of his time, playing from the early 1900s through the mid-1920s. His peers and the majority of the sporting press praised him as an "all-time immortal" of the game.
"The mystic wand of Cum Posey ruled basketball with as much eclat as 'Rasputin' dominated the Queen of all the Russias", observed the Harlem Interstate Tattler in 1929.
In Basketball, Posey led Homestead High School to the 1908 city championship. He then went on to play basketball at Penn State, staying there for two years before moving to the University of Pittsburgh where he earned his academic degree in pharmaceuticals in 1915.
That same year he formed the famous Monticello Athletic Association team that won the Colored Basketball World's Championship of 1912. {1]
He later joined the varsity basketball for Duquesne University, under the name "Charles Cumbert", and led the Dukes in scoring for three seasons from 1916-1919.
Today he is enshrined in the Duquesne Sports Hall of Fame under his real name Cumberland Posey Jr.
During the mid-1910s, Posey formed, operated, and played for the Loendi Big Five, which became the most dominant basketball team of the Black Fives Era through the 1920s, winning four straight Colored Basketball World Championship titles.
Posey retired from basketball in the late 1920s to focus exclusively on the business of baseball and on his weekly sports column in the Pittsburgh Courier, "The Sportive Realm".
He was most recently elected to the National Basketball Association's (NBA) Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.
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