Chicago American Giants were a professional baseball team that played in the Negro leagues of the United States from 1920 to 1952. The Negro leagues were for Black players, who were barred from playing alongside white players because of racial segregation . The American Giants played their home games at Schorling’s Park (also called South Side Park) in Chicago , Illinois . After fire destroyed the ballpark in late 1940, the American Giants shared Comiskey Park with the Chicago White Sox of Major League Baseball (MLB).
The American Giants began as an independent Black team in 1911. In 1920, Rube Foster , a former pitcher and the team’s owner and manager, organized the Negro National League (NNL), the first of the official professional baseball Negro leagues. Foster’s American Giants, one of eight teams in the league, won the first three NNL pennants. The American Giants won the NNL crown again in 1926 and 1927. Stars of those championship teams included the pitcher Bill Foster (brother of Rube Foster) and the Cuban outfielder Cristóbal Torriente. Torriente and the Foster brothers were all later elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame .
The NNL folded after the 1931 season, and the American Giants won a championship in the Black Southern League in 1932. The team returned to the newly recreated NNL in 1933 and won the league title. Among that team’s stars were the Hall of Fame outfielder Turkey Stearnes and the third baseman Alex Radcliffe. In 1937, the American Giants switched to the newly formed Negro American League, a rival to the NNL.
After the integration of Major League Baseball in 1947, MLB teams signed star players from the Negro leagues, sending many Black teams into decline. After several poor seasons, the American Giants played their final games as a team in 1952.
