Chicago Unions

The Chicago Unions were the city's established Black club through the 1890s, founded in 1886 and playing largely against white semi-professional teams. The archive records four seasons at 22-20, which is a fragment: almost none of what the club played reached a standings table.

It competed with the Columbia Giants for Chicago after that club arrived in 1899, and in 1901 the two merged as the Union Giants. From that merger the line runs to the Leland Giants and then to Rube Foster's Chicago American Giants, which anchored the Negro National League in 1920.

Nobody on the club's recorded rosters reached the Hall of Fame. Its ground was Union Park. What the club amounts to is a starting point: the organized Black leagues of the 1920s were built by people who had been running clubs like this one for twenty years without a league to put them in.