Toni Stone- Black is Beautiful 13

Toni Stone was born in Saint Paul Minnesota in 1921. She was the first woman to play professional baseball in the National Negro Leagues. She started playing baseball with a local church group and when she was old enough she moved to San Francisco to play baseball for the short lived negro team the “Sea Lions”. From there she went to the New Orleans “Creole’s”,  the Indianapolis Clowns, then the Kansas City Monarchs. Toni faced racism from whites at the time and sexism from some of the men in the negro league, but she continued to play until her 30’s. A lifelong athlete Stone played many sports and excelled at baseball, once batting 364 during a season. She spent the majority of the rest of her life after baseball in San Francisco and Oakland. In 1985 she was inducted into the Womens Sports Foundation’s hall of fame, and in 1990 she was inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Womens studies professor Martha Ackmann wrote a book about her called “Curveball”! 

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