Mamie “Peanut” Johnson

Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, a player for the Indianapolis-Clowns professional baseball team, was the first and only woman to pitch in the Negro Leagues. Johnson joined the Clowns in 1953, after the club had become a barnstorming outfit based (despite the retention of the Indianapolis name) in Buffalo, New York. She compiled a 33–8 win-loss record over three seasons. By signing Johnson and two other female players, the Clowns franchise became one of the few professional baseball organizations ever to field women as regular players. By confronting barriers to participation in the sport’s mainstream based on both race and sex, Johnson became a singular figure in baseball history.

Johnson was born Mamie Belton on September 27, 1935, in Ridgeway, South Carolina, to Gentry Harrison and Della Belton Havelow, and she was raised largely by her maternal grandmother after her parents separated shortly following her birth. When her grandmother died in 1943, she moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, to live with an aunt and uncle. There, she joined the Police Athletic League and competed against boys in organized baseball. She graduated from Long Branch High School in 1949 and spent time at New York University, studying medicine and engineering, before settling in Washington, DC, where she played for local semipro baseball clubs.

In Washington, DC, Johnson played for a local all-Black semipro club sponsored by St. Cyprian Catholic Church. In 1952, she traveled to Alexandria, Virginia to try out for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the all-white women’s circuit that had operated since World War II, but she and another Black female player were not permitted to try out because of their race. Johnson later said that this rejection had redirected her toward a far greater opportunity.

Johnson tried out for the Indianapolis Clowns—then a member of the Negro American League—and subsequently signed a player’s contract with the team, when the Clowns came through Washington, DC on a barnstorming tour in 1953. She joined the club alongside infielder Connie Morgan, making the two among only three women ever to appear in a Negro Leagues game. The third was second baseman Toni Stone, whom the Clowns had signed the previous year.

Standing five feet three inches tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds, Johnson acquired the nickname “Peanut” in one of her first Clowns appearances. After she threw a hard strike past Kansas City Monarchs hitter Hank Bayliss, he stepped from the batter’s box and remarked that she was no bigger than a peanut. Johnson struck him out, and the name followed her throughout her career.

On the mound, Johnson possessed a deceptively powerful arsenal of pitches. A right-handed pitcher, she threw a fastball, slider, circle changeup, curveball, screwball, and knuckleball. From 1953 through 1955, Johnson pitched for the Indianapolis Clowns, compiling a 33–8 record. Johnson’s tenure with the Clowns coincided with a period of declining attendance across the Negro Leagues, which had been losing fans and players to the newly integrated major leagues since Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Clowns, known for their entertainment-driven approach to the game, promoted Johnson and Morgan partly as a gate attraction. Manager Buster Haywood made sure Johnson pitched at least once on every stop the team made because it helped ticket sales, though contemporaries and historians have been clear that both women’s abilities were genuine.

After retiring at the end of the 1955 season, Johnson pursued a second career in medicine. She earned a nursing degree from North Carolina A&T State University and subsequently worked as a registered nurse for thirty years at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC. She also coached youth baseball in her spare time.

Though slow to come, recognition for Johnson’s career eventually burgeoned. She was honored at the White House in 1999. In 2008, she became the only woman drafted by a Major League Baseball team when the Washington Nationals selected her in a ceremonial Negro Leagues Draft honoring players denied entry to the major leagues because of race. The Mamie Johnson Little League, part of Washington, DC’s Little League Urban Initiative, was organized in 2015 and a year later the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City included a bronze bust of Johnson as part of its permanent exhibit celebrating female Negro players. A trio of greenspaces in Northeast Washington, DC was posthumously named in her honor in 2025. Thrice married and with one son, Johnson died on December 18, 2017.

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