Texas Black Spiders

Like many barnstorming teams they were known by different names: The Mineola Black Spiders, The Ft. Worth Black Spiders, the Mason City Black Bats. In the golden age of black baseball, hitting the road and picking up games paid the bills and was often more important than a regular league schedule. The Black Spiders were seemingly everywhere between the 1920s and 1940s: Texas, Iowa, Mexico...Then they vanished into the mists of history, like so many traveling teams of the era.