The winter of 1920 brought great changes to Black baseball in the Midwest. Under the leadership of Rube Foster, owner and manager of the Chicago American Giants, the first Negro National League was formed in Kansas City after a three-day meeting of team owners at the Paseo YMCA.
Robert Gilkerson did not attend in person, however according to a February 21st article in the Freeman, he and his team were represented at the meeting by Attorney Elisha Scott of Topeka, Kansas. When it was all said and done, the new league consisted of eight clubs but Gilkerson’s was not one of them. Instead, the new league would mean that some of Gilkerson’s best players would be leaving for a chance to play in the new league.
In an article in the Chicago Defender on May 1st, Gilkerson addressed the issue saying, “After losing Boyd, Jack Marshall, Rube Currie, Cunningham, Harris and McNear in the new circuit, we still will be able to put out a team that will not suffer in comparison with the teams in the new circuit, who are as yet only great on paper.”
New additions to the Union Giants included William "Happy" Evans (cf), William "Peewee" Lowe (3b), H. Williams (ss), ? Poole (2b), John Fields (of), and ? Ellison (rf). New pitchers for 1920 included H. Smith, ? Harris, and ? Hoskins. Returning from the previous season was catcher and team captain Clarence "Pops" Coleman, Edgar Burch (p), George Harney (p), Jess Turner (1b), and B.R. Jones (2b, of).
Gilkerson’s team spent two weeks “spring training” in Spring Valley at Hicks Park before getting on the road. This ritual would be repeated nearly every year of the team’s existence.
An early game scheduled for May 16th in Dixon, Illinois promoted Gilkerson’s team, once again, as the Chicago Union Giants. Before the game could happen, W.S. Peters wrote a letter to the Dixon Telegraph objecting to the use of the name, just as he had done in Omaha the year before.
“Manager W.S. Peters of the Chicago Union Giants states that his team will play in Chicago Sunday and the organization coming to Dixon is made up of players from Spring Valley, who are traveling under the same name as the Windy City organization which has been playing baseball for 36 years.”
By June, Gilkerson's club would fully embrace the use of the name Gilkerson’s Union Giants. Although, “of Chicago” or "from Chicago" was often added erroneously by newspapers when mentioning the team.
For the 1920 season the club was based in Lake View, Iowa with regular games scheduled there on Sundays. During the week, like the year before, they would travel around the state playing local town and company teams. On a few occasions they played other African American barnstorming teams such as the Tennessee Rats and Swift's Colored Giants from St. Joseph, Missouri. On at least one occasion they crossed the state line and into Omaha, NE for a series against their recent rivals, the Armours. The Union Giants swept them in a three game series.
In fact, the Union Giants dominated most teams in the Hawkeye state. Based on a letter that Gilkerson had written to the Dubuque team at the close of the season, Gilkerson’s Union Giants finished the year with 91 wins, 20 loses and 4 ties. According to an article in the Dubuque Times Journal in April 1921, Gilkerson’s team outscored their opponents 846-398 in 1920 with 14 shutouts.
This would be the last year that the Union Giants would spend the majority of their season in Iowa however. By 1921 and with each subsequent year, Gilkerson would push farther north and west eventually reaching Canada and the West Coast by the end of the decade.
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After the team had returned from their tour of Iowa, Gilkerson booked one final game in nearby Dixon, Illinois on October 10, 1920. Several of his players however had already split off from the team and were headed home. As a result, Gilkerson recruited three white players from his hometown of Spring Valley, two of which had played for him on the Spring Valley Giants in 1918.
The Ternetti brothers (listed as Ternetter in the box score), John and Pete, along with ? Quinn intergrated the Union Giants for one afternoon. Gilkerson's team defeated the Dixon Browns by a score of 6-1 in front of more than 1,100 fans, reportedly the biggest crowd for a baseball game in Dixon that year. Peter Ternetti would eventually become the mayor of Spring Valley, Illinois.
