There are men whose names ring louder than the game they played, and who carried history on their backs as if it were stitched into the uniform. Joe Black was one such man.
A boy from Plainfield, New Jersey, who became the first Black pitcher to win a World Series game, Black walked onto the mound in Dodger blue with the eyes of the country fixed upon him, and later worked his way into classrooms, corporate suites, and pulpits with the same quiet force.
Bill Cosby remembers him not as a figure in the record books, but as the brother he never had.
“Joe Black pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the time Jackie Robinson was on the team and so was Roy Campanella,” Cosby recalled. “His daughter asked me to write a preface about him; I wrote it, and then all these accusers came up and, I was told, they no longer wanted to use my preface in the story.”
That daughter is Martha Jo Black, who wrote “Joe Black: More Than a Dodger.”
“I wanted to keep my dad’s legacy [going]—I loved my father so much, I wanted to share his story with the world,” the daughter said in an interview with Deborah Kalb’s Book Q&A’s. “He went through so much—he fought for his daughter [in a custody battle that he won] in the 1970s.”
While he was no longer included in the book, Cosby explained how his bond with the celebrated athlete began.
“He came on the Dodgers and became known as a relief pitcher; but [I was] entertaining the Black baseball players in Las Vegas during a convention and he made himself known to me,” Cosby stated. “I found him to be a strong guy with a great sense of humor. I took him on as a big brother. When Rachel Robinson asked me to be the emcee for the Jackie Robinson Foundation, Joe was then working for Greyhound, and he made sure that he had a table.”
Cosby spoke of their brotherhood in the language of fraternity and blood.
“Joe also is a Que (a member of Omega Psi Phi). In terms of fraternity, he’s my brother, but in my soul also,” he explained. “Nobody else had the humor and my feeling is that if I ever had a big brother, Joe Black was.”
The bond deepened near the end of the athlete’s life, when his daughter reached out to Cosby.
“We talked on the phone. He had a house, and his daughter was taking care of him because he had problems with his prostate,” the comedian recalled. “She called me one day and she said ‘Daddy was on the ladder, and he fell.’… She said, ‘I’m in the hospital with Daddy and it doesn’t look good for him. You want to talk to him?’ My heart dropped. I knew he was going, but when you get the notification certain things happen.”
Cosby remembered that even then the late Black carried humor like a shield.
“Joe had a great sense of humor and had control of it. Meaning he didn’t throw things out just to see if he was funny,” Cosby reminisced. “So she says, ‘Daddy it’s Bill on the phone, he wants to say something to you.’ He said, in a very faint voice, ‘Hey.’ I said, ‘How are you doing? I know it’s a stupid question, but how are you doing?’ He said, ‘They’re trying to make it easier for me to go wherever I’m going.’
After a bit of back and forth and the athlete talking more about his impending mortality, Cosby sat in silence before Black asked: “I want you to do me a favor.’”
Cosby tried to answer the call with laughter.
“I said, ‘Before I do you a favor I’m out at your house and I got the map you gave me… and I walked it in the backyard and I found the tree you’re talking about and I started to dig, and I dig and I dig and I dig and my back hurts. The money is not there,’” Cosby told the player in jest to make him laugh. “And he said, ‘wrong house!’”
The faint laughter in that hospital room turned into a covenant between two men.
“He said, ‘I want you to do me a favor.’ I said ‘OK,’” Cosby recalled. “He said, ‘I’m on the mound, I want you on the hot corner.’ And I said, ‘Now before you put me on the hot corner, I’m going to go, but I want you to know I played sandlot baseball and I played second base and I want you to know that I was always afraid of a hot ground ball coming to me and as I bend over to catch it, it hits something and jumped up and hit me in the face. I never wanted that, I always turned my head.’”
After humoring him more, he made a promise to Black.
“I said, ‘Joe, for you I’m on the hot base and if anything comes to me, I don’t care who hits it, I’m going to look it in.’ He said, ‘Let’s go!’ that was the last words from him,” Cosby remembered. “Joe passed that same day,” Cosby sadly recounted.
Using Black’s Words as Inspiration
Since Black’s death in May 2002, the comedian has carried Black’s words with him and even into his own storm.
“Sitting through the trial, the hatred, sitting through all of that and when that judge read all of ‘Dante’s Inferno,’ and I’m listening, and he says, ‘You have any regrets?’ I shook my head, because Joe’s voice said, ‘Let’s Go,’” Cosby explained.
There was more to Black than statistics and the World Series victory that newspapers still cite.
He had been an officer in the Army, a teacher in Plainfield, a Greyhound executive who opened doors for Black workers and students, a columnist who urged young people to value education, a man who carried his daughter through childhood with devotion when courts seldom granted fathers custody.
Black was also the man who told Jackie Robinson’s story in ways the white press did not record. He spoke of teammates holding Robinson back from fights, of players forming a wall to keep him from stepping into violence, of the toll carried by those chosen to be symbols.
Black was determined that history must be guarded, a lesson Cosby has carried with him to this day.
Considering the history behind Negro League player Josh Gibson and Washington, D.C.’s Dunbar High School, Cosby insisted that these stories must be kept with a clenched fist, placed in the hands of the next generation, and stored in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where young people could know the truth of who they were.
At 88, Cosby holds fast to Black’s last words. Not a farewell, not resignation, but a call to action: “Let’s go.”
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