Smithsonian.com

“A lot of people don’t know that women used to play professional baseball,” said Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, looking appalled.

If you didn’t know this either, prepared to be schooled.

Mamie is one of three women who played in the Negro Leagues, all-black baseball teams where giants like Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige got their start in the years when baseball, like almost everything else in America, was segregated. The Leagues drew thousands of fans, had their own World Series and All-Star Game, and for many years were one of the nation’s biggest black-owned and –operated businesses.

Mamie, who was invited by the Anacostia Community Museum yesterday to speak as part of an exhibit about the Negro Leagues, said her path to the pitcher’s mound was far from smooth.

She started playing ball as a kid. When times were hard, she made her own baseballs out of twine, masking tape and rocks. In 1953 she signed with the Indianapolis Clowns (who, through some strange trick of geography, were actually based in New York). For the next two years, she was the only female pitcher amid a sea of male sluggers.

“Some guy told me I couldn’t strike him out because I was no bigger than a peanut,” said Mamie. The way she tells it, she nodded at the guy. And then she struck him out. That’s when she got the nickname “Peanut.”

Robert Hall, Assistant Director for Education at the Anacostia Community Museum, said it was important for museum-goers to hear from one of the few women who played the game.“If you looked around, you saw there were a lot of girls,” he said, referring to the audience at the lecture. “She’s told the girls a part of their history they didn’t know about.”

Did you know women once played pro baseball? Could that ever happen again? Tell us what you think in the comments area below.

It’s all about baseball on Sunday, June 1 from 2 to 5 p.m., at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 801 K Street, NW, at Mount Vernon Square. Take some swings in a baseball batting cage, get some pitching in at the dunking tank or grab some hugs from the Washington Nationals mascot, “Screech.” And check this out: the Nats are providing a grand prize to the winner of a scavenger hunt. Post-season tickets, perhaps?

The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which recently opened the exhibition, “Separate and Unequaled: Black Baseball in the District of Columbia,” is bringing in some players from the legendary Homestead Grays, one of the Negro Leagues’ top teams. Grays outfielders Frank Evans and James Tillman will be on hand to recall the era before Jackie Robinson integrated the Brooklyn Dodgers, when exceptional black baseball players (above:Homestead Grays catcher Josh Gibson at bat. Gibson was such a mighty hitter that he was often called the “Black Babe Ruth.”) were setting records and drawing capacity crowds here in Washington, D.C. at the long-gone Griffith Stadium.

The exhibition, on view at the Historical Society through October 15, chronicles the history of African Americans and baseball in the nation’s capital with 55 photographs, paintings, signed bats and balls, gloves, news clippings and other memorabilia illustrating the various amateur, collegiate (Howard University) and semi-pro black baseball teams.