(AUDIO OF DURHAM BULLS BASEBALL GAME)
Anisa Khalifa: Spring is in full swing. Which means America’s favorite pastime — baseball — is back. If you go to a Durham Bulls minor league ball game here in North Carolina, you can soak up all of the sights and sounds.
But baseball is also a game steeped in history…and right outside the main entrance of the stadium, one of the very first things you’ll notice is a collection of jerseys the team has retired. It includes the iconic number 42 worn by Jackie Robinson.
(SOUNDBITE FROM ARCHIVAL AUDIO)
Unidentified Announcer: In the last half of the second inning, Robinson gets the first hit off Ford. It’s a homer into the left field stands!
Anisa Khalifa: A little more than 75 years ago, Robinson changed the world after breaking the color barrier in baseball. But integration in the South was slow going. And that’s had long-term ramifications. Today, the number of Black ballplayers is at an all time low.
Unidentified Speaker: Before you can be seen, you also have to be afforded the things that are necessary to compete.
Anisa Khalifa: I’m Anisa Khalifa. This week on the Broadside, what it took to integrate Southern baseball — and how one group in rural North Carolina is carrying the torch for the next generation.
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Anisa Khalifa: Buck Leonard is a hall-of-fame first baseman. He grew up in Rocky Mount in eastern North Carolina. And recently, producer Charlie Shelton-Ormond got to watch him play.
Unidentified Announcer: Two on, one out….Back there, that one is absolutely belted! Back there…
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Wow, that’s great. I love it.
Anisa Khalifa: But here’s the twist: Buck Leonard has been dead for more than 25 years.
Unidentified Announcer: Buck Leonard blasts off for the Grays!
Anisa Khalifa: Okay, well… it wasn’t really him playing. It’s his character in a new video game called MLB The Show 24.
Brian Patterson: So we are so ecstatic and excited about MLB The Show 24 featuring a Negro League storylines and having Buck Leonard as part of this.
Anisa Khalifa: This is Brian Patterson. Brian is the COO of the Buck Leonard Association. It’s a nonprofit based in rural Rocky Mount.
Brian Patterson: And so, we will have kids come in here and actually play with Buck Leonard and other members in the Negro League. It's so cool cause I love it because they get the opportunity to actually say how great of a baseball player he was.
Anisa Khalifa: Brian also has a special connection to the hall-of-famer.
Brian Patterson: He married my grandmother and so Buck Leonard is my grandfather, step grandfather. For me, Buck Leonard, of course, was a great role model and a family member.
Anisa Khalifa: He says the nonprofit is meant to carry on Buck Leonard’s legacy, and give kids a chance to do three things:
Brian Patterson: Play, explore, preserve… of course we're going to play the beautiful game of baseball. We're going to explore educational opportunities, field trips…. And we're gonna preserve the legacy and history of the Negro Leagues. They learn while having fun.
Anisa Khalifa: Let’s talk about the "play" part. Every summer, Brian helps run a baseball league for kids in the area. There are three divisions for young players ages 6 to 18.
Brian Patterson: We were the first affiliate with MLB with the RBI program in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: The RBI Program stands for Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities.
Brian Patterson: So we enroll, traditionally, somewhere around 150 kids every year.
Anisa Khalifa: It’s meant to help kids from underserved communities find — and sustain — a passion for the sport. A sport Brian admits can be really pricey for a lot of families.
Brian Patterson: It's not something like soccer where the only thing you have to have is a ball or a basketball where you can go out to many courts. You have to have equipment, and it's the price of this equipment. And also because baseball is such a skill driven sport, there has to be special training instruction as well. And so a lot of our kids, especially in these under-resourced communities, just can't afford to get that type of help. So hopefully we can fill that gap.
Anisa Khalifa: Filling that gap is crucial. Not only for kids in Rocky Mount, but for diversity in Major League Baseball as a whole. On Opening Day last year, African American players only represented about 6 percent of major league rosters. That’s the lowest number recorded since the league started keeping track in the early ‘90s when 18 percent of players were Black. And it follows an ongoing decline in the number of professional Black ballplayers in the last few years.
Brian Patterson: We're developing a portal so that we can have these kids that have talent, that they have a way to be seen on the national level as well. Before you can be seen, you also have to be afforded the things that are necessary to compete.
Anisa Khalifa: This mirrors other programs the MLB is touting to help build up the number of professional Black American ballplayers. Brian told Charlie that for his team at Buck Leonard, it doesn’t matter if you’re in Atlanta or Rocky Mount, getting a chance at bat can go a long way.
Brian Patterson: You have to remember, even though this is not a metropolitan area, um, it's a rural area. So there are a lot of small towns... So it's important to have an organization like this that kids otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to participate in. and play on a regional and national level.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So, why is baseball unique as a sport as this pathway to, you know, mentor kids and build them up?
Brian Patterson: One thing we can attest to is that with baseball, you're going to fail more often than not, right. And so given that factor is that you constantly have to pick yourself up. You have 10 at bats and you're able to get a base hit three times, you're a good baseball player. You're going to strike out or get out seven times out of ten. So how do you handle that? All right, so it teaches us resilience, right? Perseverance.For a lot of our kids, and I've seen this firsthand many times, getting that chance at bat can be, uh, can be a disheartening experience – to take that failure and be able to cope with that, but love the game. Understand that even when there's an out, there's also an opportunity to succeed.
Anisa Khalifa: Coming up after the break, how groups like the Buck Leonard Association fit into a rich southern legacy of the sport.(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Holaday: So this card is maybe a little earlier, this is 59…
Anisa Khalifa: And these cards were only issued for major league players, right?
Chris Holaday: Yeah, usually.
Anisa Khalifa: Chris Holaday is a writer and historian based in Durham, North Carolina. His new book “Cracks In The Outfield Wall” is about integration in baseball throughout the Carolinas. He’s got a ton of stories about Black ballplayers during that era. And he’s even got some of their old baseball cards.
Chris Holaday: So, another one's R. C. Stevens, who was one of the first guys. He was part of the Pirates organization. He played in Burlington and Kinston both.
Anisa Khalifa: I will say, I did not grow up with any kind of baseball cards or any sports cards, but I love that there's a little cartoon on the back here. It's got him, uh, catching.
Chris Holaday: Yeah, I love these old cards. It’s graphic designs.
Anisa Khalifa: He's got his hand out and the ball is coming into his glove and he's like, come to papa. It's like a little speech bubble.
Chris Holaday: Yeah, so this next one is Bubba Morton. He's the one of the ones who played in Durham.
Anisa Khalifa: Since Major League Baseball didn’t come to the South until well into the 1960s, Chris’s book focuses primarily on the minor league teams.
Chris Holaday: Minor league teams were so important for small towns. It was a source of, you know, community. People came together just to go to the game. That's where they met their neighbors and chatted. And it was a big social event to go to a baseball game.
Anisa Khalifa: Small towns saw their minor league teams as a life force for the community, but just like every other aspect of life in the Jim Crow South, there was a lot of resistance to making space for Black people in baseball.
Chris Holaday: There were some teams in the South that would not integrate. It gets complicated because it was a major league system. So the major leagues controlled the minor leagues, and they would send players to get experience. A lot of southern teams in the Deep South would not accept Black players.Part of history that's sort of forgotten about what these guys went through. They were part of the Civil Rights struggle, just like, you know, people who boycotted or protested in different places. But a lot of these guys, they had a role in the Civil Rights struggle too, just by playing the game, just by going out and showing up at the ballpark every night and just by not being afraid to go there and put up with heckling and so forth. And that's kind of forgotten about. You think about all the famous Civil Rights leaders, you don't really think about some guy who played minor league baseball in High Point, North Carolina. But those guys were important too.
Anisa Khalifa: One of those guys was first baseman Aaron Pointer. Originally from Oakland, Pointer signed with a major league team out of Houston in the early ‘60s. And they sent him to play for a minor league affiliate in segregated Salisbury, North Carolina.
Chris Holaday: And all of a sudden he was thrown into a situation where, if you're from California, it's very different coming to the South and Jim Crow laws. He talked about the struggles of that and being just unaware and how unsure how to even deal with that, where he could go, where he couldn't go, where he could eat. Being in Salisbury, he said he found some sort of solace in Livingston College, a Black college there, and he got to know students there. So he said on his off days, he would just go hang out at the college because he at least had a group he could associate with.
Because he could not associate with his white teammates. He said he got along with him fine on the field, but that's where the relationship ended. But the main problem that faced pretty much all Black players in this area was the loneliness of it. You know, that they were not allowed to hang out with their teammates. That they were just alone. They had to stay in a separate house, a boarding house, usually in the Black section of towns. Um, there was just no interaction. So, uh, the loneliness was the common issue that they all faced. It was just, uh, a psychological isolation they had to face, which was difficult for a lot of them.
Anisa Khalifa: It struck me when I was reading your book about how a lot of people who didn't live in the Jim Crow South really had no idea what life was like, and it was pretty shocking. Whether they were black or white, when they came here, they were really, seemingly taken off guard by it.
Chris Holaday: Yeah, there was one story, this guy Bill White, he played for Danville, Virginia, but Danville was always in a league with North Carolina towns. He was from Ohio and he was sent to play in Danville. So he was not used to the South either, but in one game in Burlington, and he was like 18 years old, he, the fans were heckling him in Burlington. Away fans are kind of brutal. And he walked down the line. And the fans are yelling at me. He just raised his middle finger at them. And I mean, that was something you would not do as a Black man in the South at that time. This was like 1953. And so, um, after the game, you know, he'd insulted basically all these angry white fans. And he, um, they were in the locker room and someone told him there was an angry mob outside waiting for him to come out. So he wasn't really sure how it would be dealt with. But he said all of his teammates came together and picked up their bats and had him stand in the middle and they walked out with their bats and protected him. So he said that was the first time he really felt a part of the team there. And so that was a really interesting story. And that was in his autobiography. He's still alive even though he's in his 90s, I think. But I did not speak with him personally.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, what a story, though… and as you said, this is happening at the same time as the Civil Rights Movement.
Chris Holaday: Mm-hmm.
Anisa Khalifa: But what was it that sparked integration in baseball in particular?
Chris Holaday: There were a couple of things. In the early fifties, the minor leagues were struggling. There was a big boom in professional baseball after World War II. There were teams popping up everywhere and lots of small towns had teams and that didn't last but maybe five or six years. And then, you know, Americans came up with other things they were interested in. You know, they had, television became popular. People stayed home, watched TV. So minor league baseball started dying out, especially in the really small towns. Here in North Carolina, 1951 was the first instance of a Black player on a previously all white team.
And it was really because these teams were struggling, they needed people, and they saw the talent pool of black players that were available. So the first team to integrate was a team in Granite Falls, North Carolina. It's near Hickory. It's a very small town. They had a terrible team. Really like the worst team in baseball history. I think they were 14 and 96 was their record. They were horrible. So they were struggling to make ends meet, struggling to find players at the end of the season. So the last two weeks, they needed some players and they hired five Black guys who were local players, who were really, you know, talented local players to finish out the season. So that was the first instance that was really out of necessity. But the next year, in '52, several teams in eastern North Carolina really made an effort to give Black players a trial, you know, talented guys.
Anisa Khalifa: So did this end up working to bring in more fans and help with their financial situation?Chris Holaday: It did temporarily, I think, in the early fifties, but there were so many struggles of the minor leagues to make ends meet, and it was, it was beyond fixing by a few Black fans attending. The Carolina Times, you know, a black owned newspaper in Durham said something like, you know, “Black fans could save minor league baseball.” But you know, a lot of places where there were minor league teams where there were no Black fans faced the same problems, like, I think I mentioned Iowa and places like that. They, you know, it wouldn't, there were not enough Black fans to really solve the problems that minor league baseball had in the early fifties.
Anisa Khalifa: So let's talk about Little League. Integrating Little League really encapsulated a lot of the racism and cultural tension happening within baseball during this time, right? Can you tell us more about the resistance to integrating Little League?
Chris Holaday: I mean, it goes kind of, you know, with the whole, this was the time of like Brown versus Board of Education, you know, integration of school, especially kids, that kind of thing was always a delicate situation. People were very opposed to that. So the big issue was, or the big instance, was in Charleston, South Carolina. So in Charleston, South Carolina, there were a lot of teams and they were all white, but there was a Black YMCA there and the guy who ran that YMCA decided he wanted to enter his own team in the local, uh, And so his team would have all been Black because all the people who went to his YMCA were in this segregated situation. So people in other little leagues protested. The thing was nobody would play them. So eventually they were named champions of South Carolina because they had no competition. Every just dropped out. There was a big discussion of that. Some other states protested it. And officially, Little League Baseball, which was very against segregation, and they spoke out against it. But they could not do much about it because the rules said you had to advance by competition and not forfeit. So, unfortunately, Little League's hands were tied and they had to, they could not play anymore. However, what the result was, all of the white teams starting in South Carolina left the whole little league system and they started. It was called, um, it had to be called Dixie youth baseball. They even had a confederate flag as part of their logo and everything.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh my goodness.
Chris Holaday: hey just all quit the little league organization in the fifties.So they started this rival organization and there was no Little League really for Black players, not in most places. So that really limited the options for young Black players to get involved in really an organized system of baseball. I mean, their original charter said it was really only for white players. They eventually got rid of that, that, from their charter and they do allow black players. Even Michael Jordan played in Dixie Youth Baseball when he was a kid in Wilmington. Anisa Khalifa: Really? Chris Holaday: Yeah, in the 70s. So it's not exactly the same and they got rid of the confederate flag on their arm patches and everything. Okay, okay. But it, um, it still exists and it's not nearly as big as Little League Baseball, but Little League Baseball did come back eventually to the South. But all the southern states joined Dixie Youth, for a while there, all the youth organizations for baseball, so.
Anisa Khalifa: Did this cause, you know, Black children, Black youth to sort of lose interest in baseball and turn to other sports?
Chris Holaday: My thought would be yes, because, at least to some degree, because, I mean, a lot of kids play baseball just, you know, in a field or, you know, just casually, but to actually play an organized system where you have leagues and you have a system for tournaments and things like that, that was pretty uncommon. And that was what Little League Baseball offered them. It offered them a chance to, you know, have matching uniforms and, you know, advance to a state championship and advance to a national championship. So it was very structured. So you take that away, we're talking from the 50s up until really the 70s, early 70s, that there was really no option for young Black players to pursue baseball as much.
Anisa Khalifa: So, bringing this to the present day, what do you see as the legacy of integration in baseball?
Chris Holaday: I mean, I think it, one of the things is these guys were kind of forgotten. What they went through is forgotten. So that's really why I wanted to do this, was just to sort of give attention to these players who are often forgotten. There's a few guys who went on to major league stardom. Most of them did not, most of them were just guys trying to make a living in baseball. Some made it to the major league, some never did. Some just were sent home. They just did not have the skill it took to advance. But they have a story and they played a role in integration and civil rights. So I just want to tell that story and, you know, what happened in different towns and how different towns reacted to it.
Anisa Khalifa: Historians like Chris Holaday are preserving those forgotten stories for future generations. Meanwhile, groups like the Buck Leonard Association in Rocky Mount are connecting young Black kids to that legacy.
Rose Hunter: Hey guys, alright we have a visitor…
Unidentified Children: Hiii!!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Hey, how’s it going?
Anisa Khalifa: Baseball season at Buck Leonard won’t start for a couple more weeks. So in the meantime, kids are busy with other things. Like… planting a garden.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: What you got over here?
Unidentified Children: These are tomatoes, these are uh hot peppers. No, these are banana peppers...
Anisa Khalifa: The garden is in the backyard of Buck Leonard’s old home, which is also a museum dedicated to the legendary baseball player.
Rose Hunter: If you cross that threshold you can’t talk about nothing but baseball.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: (laughs) Alright just baseball
Anisa Khalifa: That’s Rose Hunter, co-founder of the nonprofit, giving Charlie a quick tour around the house.
Rose Hunter: This is the furniture Buck used when he was traveling with the Homestate Grays. So we just got to put everything back in place as it was.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So this is all his baseballs and trophies in here.
Anisa Khalifa: Out in the garden, it was clear that as the kids planted their vegetable seeds, their love of baseball was also taking root.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So what are some of y’alls favorite activities you like to do?
Unidentified Child 1: To play baseball!
Unidentified Child 2: I want to play right now!
Anisa Khalifa: Be on the lookout for Chris Holaday's new book, Cracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas, available this spring.
This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond. Our editor is Jerad Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. Special thanks to the Durham Bulls for allowing us to record audio at their stadium last week.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.