1934 Colored Monarchs: America's First All-Black Professional Hockey Team

 by George Fosty,

 

Boxscore: NEW YORK One of the least known and most intriguing chapters in the history of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, an all-black hockey league that existed in Canada from 1895 to 1930 and the rise of black hockey across North America, is the story of Russel Voelz, an American sports promoter who attempted to create the first all-black professional hockey team during the mid-1930s.

 

Russell Voelz was born in 1904 to Swedish parent. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, he gained prominence in the 1920s when he organized the Independent Feed Dealers of the Northwest Association in an attempt to establish uniformed feed prices and to eliminate market manipulations. It was a move that made him popular among local farmers but not well received in business corporate circles.

 

In 1933, at the age of 29, he organized the Northern Baseball League becoming its first President. He also owned the Grand Forks baseball franchise. The league was an immediate success. However, within a year of organizing and heading the league he was forced out by other owners who wanted to gain control of both his franchise and the league. Volez sued for $20,000 and tried to organize a rival league.

 

Blacklisted by regional baseball owners and their allies, he took a job in the Negro baseball leagues as the manager of the Bloomington, Indiana Colored Monarchs.

 

Undaunted, and inspired by his time with the Colored Monarchs, Voelz turned his attention to the creation of an all-black touring professional ice hockey team, establishing the Colored Monarchs Hockey Team, headquartered in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. The fact that the hockey team possessed the same name as the Indiana baseball team is quite fascinating and implies that there was at the very least some organizational ties between the two groups.

 

Robbinsdale, a small working class community nine miles northwest of Minneapolis, seems in retrospect to have been an unlikely location for such a sporting endeavor. A predominantly white community, the town was the home of Fawcett Publishing, known for its salacious pulp fiction publications including the very popular True Confessions Magazine.

 

Why Voelz chose Robbinsdale is anyone's guess. At the time however, the hockey-hotbed city of Minneapolis was in the midst of the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934, one of the most infamous episodes in American Labor history.

 

The General Strike of 1934 was a strike by Teamsters against a number of trucking companies operating within the city of Minneapolis. The strike had pitted the very powerful local merchants and their political allies against poorly paid local truck drivers and their families. The strike reached a boiling point on July 20, 1934 when a large group of Minneapolis police officers, armed with rifles and pistols walked calmly down the area between 3rd St. North and 6th Avenue North shooting at random striking truck drivers who had gathered for a demonstration. Two strikers were killed, including one man sitting in the cab of his delivery truck. Sixty-seven other strikers were injured, included forty men who were all shot in the back while trying to flee the area.

 

 

 Minneapolis Police, July 22, 1934  

 

 

Striking Teamsters, July 22, 1934

 

At the time, organized labor strikes were engulfing over 100 American communities across the nation, and the actions of the Minneapolis Police Department appears to have been meant as a message to all workers of the price one would pay when they tried to unionize.

 

The Minneapolis strike would last for another month, before ending on August 22nd.

  

In the midst of all this chaos, on August 6, 1934, Voelz's Colored Monarchs of Hockey issued a press release challenging any and all American and Canadian amateur and professional teams willing to play them in exhibition.

 

 

The challenge was in the form of an 8” by 11” poster and letter. The poster read: 

 

RUSSELL VOELZ’S COLORED MONARCHS OF HOCKEY

Members of this club picked from the U.S. and Canada. Each player is a star by reputation and playing ability.

High Lights of the Club

The only colored hockey team in the world.

The only colored professional hockey team in the world.

Will play any team any place on one weeks notice if not booked on date desired.

Has Taken Two Years to Assemble a Good Colored Hockey Team.

 

MANAGEMENTS PLEDGE TO PUBLIC

Whether your club be the Chicago Black Hawks or America’s weakest Club, we still guarantee to give you the greatest hockey show on earth. 

 

The poster accompanied by an letter written by R.L. Voelz on The Colored Monarchs of Hockey official letter stationary from the Booking Office in Robbinsdale.

 

 

 The letter read: 

 

Attention Sport Editor:

You know doubt have heard of the great colored base-ball club the Kansas City Monarchs and the colored basketball club the Globe Trotters. Now Comes one of the most outstanding sensations in the sport world, the colored Monarchs of hockey. We have the greatest array of colored hockey talent and many of these boys would be playing major league hockey if white.

Most of these lads are Canadian born, but are recruited from New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Quebec and Nova Scotia. I have spent a great deal of time promoting sports, but I have never seen a finer bunch of athletes (colored) on one team. It was my pleasure to organize the Northern league of Professional Baseball and served as its President during the 1933 season.

I am making arrangements to come to your city next winter for a four Game series. Two on our way to the coast and two on our return. We have seventy games up to date.

Thanking you for publicity you may give I am,

Yours very truly,

R.L. Voelz

The letter and mini-poster was sent to clubs across Western Canada. Apparently, Voelz envisioning a multi-game exhibition swing from Minneapolis to Vancouver, British Columbia and back. Among the teams responding to his letter was the Quakers Hockey Club of Saskatoon.

 

  

In a letter dated August 20, 1934 the club’s Secretary-Treasurer wrote Voelz:

 

Dear Sir:

We have been informed by the Rink Manager and the Sporting Editor of this city that you would be making a tour of Canada with the Colored Hockey Club called the “Monarchs”. We would be very much interested in making arrangements to play you a series of four games this winter.

We might mention that in 1932-33 we were Western Canada Champions and in 1933-34 World’s Amateur Champions at Milan, Italy.

Of course, we would have to get sanction of the president of the C.A.H.A., Mr. Hewitt of Toronto.

We would advise you, if you are going to play in Canada, to get a permit to play Amateur Clubs during your tour as there are very few Professional Clubs in Western Canada.

Trusting to hear from you at an early date, we are

Yours very truly,

The QUAKER HOCKEY CLUB

PER: (name blank)

SECRETARY-TREASURER

 

 

There is no record of further correspondence between the Quakers and Monarchs, nor is it known if Voelz sent a letter to CAHA President William Hewitt.

 

There is no record of the Colored Monarchs touring Canada in the winter of 1934-35. Even so, one thing is certain, by the summer of 1934, the small suburb community of Robbinsdale, Minneapolis was home to the first professional all-black hockey team ever assembled.

 

By the summer of 1935, Voelz was again unemployed. With no funds to support himself nor his family, he settled his lawsuit with the Northern Baseball League for $120.

 

Moving his family to Nebraska, Voelz began work as a promoter of black boxers including Oscar and Aaron Knowles, two light and heavyweight fighters from Lincoln, in 1937.

 

A decade later, he had moved north to Iowa turning his attention to basketball establishing the Southwestern Iowa Independent Basketball Tournament.

 

By 1948, Voelz, attempted to enter the realm of politics, running under the Republican banner as a District Court Clerk in Iowa. His first in what was to be a series of failed efforts to gain public office. In later years, he worked as a grocery and produce store owner, raising two daughters and a son with his wife Marian.

 

Voelz died in 1975 at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, a forgotten figure in the history of professional Black hockey. At the time of his death, there was no mention in his euology of his efforts to organize the world's first professional all-black hockey team.

 

It would not be until 2004, and the release of my brother Darril's and my book, "Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League, 1895 to 1925", that the story of Russell Voelz and the Colored Monarchs would again be told and expanded upon in our 2014 book "Tribes: An International Hockey History."

 

Today, there is no record of Russell Voelz and the Colored Monarchs of Hockey in the official histories of Robbinsdale, Minnesota or in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.

 

Like much of the early histories of black hockey, the stories remain largely forgotten or await official recognition. 

_________________ 

George Fosty is the author and co-author of nine books including: Splendid Is The Sun: The 5,000 Year History of Hockey, Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes 1895-1925, Footie's Black Book: A Guide To International Association Football (World Cup Soccer 2010 Edition), Where Brave Men Fall: The Battle of Dieppe and the Espionage War Against Hitler, 1939-1942, and Tribes: An International Hockey History.