At the start of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass enlisted his youngest son, Charles, to fight for the Union in an all-black regiment. After the war, the retired abolitionist saw his son wearing a different uniform, that of the Washington Mutuals baseball club in Washington, D.C. The senior Douglass even presided over games as team commissioner, making for a great “draw,” according to newspaper accounts.

Such was the promising beginning, during the 1860s and 1870s, of African American baseball in the nation’s capital, where city residents such as Frederick and Charles Douglass formed dozens of baseball clubs, scheduled games, hired officials and packed the stands with cheering crowds. Now, the images, artifacts and stories of “blackball” have been brought forth in an exhibition by the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum titled “Separate and Unequaled: Black Baseball in the District of Columbia.”

From its beginning in the 1860s to well into the 1880s, black and white baseball players competed on the same teams and black and white teams played against each other, Anacostia Museum Curator Anthony Gualtieri says. “The color line of that time was so permeable. Only after Jim Crow [laws] were passed did black and white baseball players stop playing together.”

Some early black teams even dubbed themselves “Puerto Ricans” or the more popular “Cubans” to attract white fans, Gualtieri says.

One of the first professional African American teams was the Cuban Giants, of New York, whose success led to the creation of the National Colored Base Ball League in 1887. This was the same year that Chicago White Stockings manager Ted Anson demanded that the Newark Giants remove two black players (Fleet Walker and George Stovey) from its roster, launching a longstanding segregationist policy in both the American and National leagues.

African American communities continued to embrace the game, however, and the era of “negro leagues” was well under way. The Anacostia Museum’s special focus on Washington’s community sent Gualtieri to comb the city’s archives to find clues about the earliest preprofessional teams in Washington. He turned up names such as the Oriental Tigers, the Anacostia Alerts, the Mutuals and the Potomacs.

“I’ve been able to identify only a handful,” he says. “It’s very difficult going back that far; and different teams would take the same names.”

For places to play, African American neighborhood and organized teams had to rely on the generosity of white clubs that owned ballparks and open fields. One popular spot to see baseball in Washington was the space between the White House and the Washington Monument, now known as the Ellipse but known then as the White Lot. In 1874, this lot was closed to all clubs except the white Creighton Club, in part, as the Weekly National Intelligencer newspaper reported, to keep off “the gangs of lazy negroes and other vagrants infesting the grounds.”

From 1891 to 1965, the privately owned Griffith Stadium—at 7th Street and Florida Avenue N.W. in one of Washington’s most vibrant black neighborhoods—hosted the games of both black and white amateur and professional ball clubs. Spectators regularly dressed up for games, and hundreds of young black and white boys from the surrounding neighborhoods worked at stadium events handling concessions.

Indisputably, the glory days of African American baseball in Washington, D.C., were dominated by the Homestead Grays. Established in Pittsburgh, the Grays lived a migratory existence—traveling in a battered bus around an Eastern circuit—before settling in Washington in 1940. The Homestead Grays were among the top professional U.S. teams, black or white. They were supported by a growing, baseball-hungry, black middle-class in Washington, according to Anacostia Museum Historian Gail Lowe.

“The caliber of play by the Homestead Grays would draw black and white people to one spot in the city for an entire afternoon or evening,” Lowe says. “All those folks were rooting for a hometown team that was exclusively black. There was segregation; there was injustice. But if the sun was shining, it was a good day for a game.”

“Separate and Unequaled” includes a Grays jersey, signed balls and bats, gloves, news clippings, correspondence and even Grays press passes.

A pivotal role in early black baseball, Gualtieri points out in the exhibition, was played by black journalists, notably Sam Lacy, of the Washington Tribune and the Baltimore Afro-American, and Art Carter, of the Washington Afro-American newspaper. Gualtieri combed through files of Carter’s letters, news clippings, and photos in the Art Carter Papers at Howard University.

“Carter would write to all of the black teams every day, saying ‘What are your scores? Let me know.’”Gualtieri says. “He was friendly with all of the players, and later became a spokesperson for the Negro National League.”

Black news writers, notably Lacy, repeatedly tried to get Clark Griffith, owner of the all-white Washington’s Senators team, to recruit from the Grays starting lineup, according to Gualtieri and Lowe. Griffith might have done well to listen. Between 1937 and 1945, the Senators carried a dismal record, while the Grays took eight league championships. Yet Griffith was insistent about keeping blacks off the Senators’ roster, even after Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color barrier in 1947 in his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Griffith’s motivation may have been less grounded in racism than in pragmatism. “The Grays brought Griffith a great financial opportunity,” Lowe explains. “It was to his advantage to keep baseball segregated, because the black players were a real draw [particularly for the middle-class black community living around Griffith Stadium].”

Fans of black baseball got their money’s worth, especially when the Grays went up against the fan-pleasing Kansas City Monarchs. A memorable Griffith Stadium game of 1942 drew a mostly black audience of more than 28,000 who came to see such Grays stars as first baseman Buck Leonard, strongman hitter Josh Gibson, and record-breaking base-stealer James “Cool Papa” Bell going up against the Monarchs and their star pitcher, Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

Soon after the National and American leagues became integrated in 1947, fans stopped coming to the Negro League games, Gualtieri says, and the league folded. Washington, D.C.’s baseball fans turned their attention to the major leagues.

“It may be the nation’s capital,” says Lowe, a baseball fan herself. “But people still go to the games. Washington is a great baseball town and always has been.”

“Separate and Unequaled: Black Baseball in the District of Columbia” is on view at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., located at 801 K Street N.W., through Oct. 5.