I sat in the back of a large 35 seat luxury bus. 3 days into a school trip I had been taking with my 25 other classmates, we were now stopped as a tall burly man at the front of the bus explained something about the steal history of the relatively modern city of Birmingham. I craned my neck, peering out the right side windows of the stationary bus, there much like several others seen scattered through the metro area of this city lay a small run down concrete building, overgrown with greenery and really appearing as not a great place to live or really do anything near. Turing my gaze away from the brick building I looked out the window immediately to my left, all the while listening yet not hearing a few minutes of the guides words. What caused this distraction you may ask? One word, baseball.
Situated in a city literally born from the ashes of the Civil War, the establishment of Birmingham Alabama lies chock full of a kind of brutal history one finds hard to even comprehend. Nonetheless, with just that simple glance at the captivating facade of this ballpark whose name is still didn't even know, I had no clue that even while they shared the same soil, the city of Birmingham and this simple ball field were livid with interconnections and underling shared stories and backgrounds, the most prominent of which being the bloody struggle for civil rights of the late early to late 1950's and 60's.
First and foremost, to understand the purpose of this ball parks the name of which I later learned to be Rickwood Field, one must understand the purpose and history of the unappreciated stories of "Negro Leagues" and in turn the hopelessly unjust laws of segregation or as known by the whites of that time, the "Jim Crow Laws". Named for a late 1800's southern comic caricature portraying a slew of inaccuracies and stereo types of black people, the New York based Jim Crow Jubilee quickly grew into a symbol of white america's unfair hatred of those with dark skin and as time went on even became the semi official name of the south's segregation laws, basically prohibiting African Americans from partaking in the same activities as their white countrymen.
For 98 years, everything was segregated: restaurants, drinking fountains, bathrooms, hotels, swimming pools, movie theaters, trains, buses, real estate rights, employment rights, voting, and yes even professional sports was as segregated as the rest. While it may be hard to believe, even in sports like basketball where the majority of athletes are now black it wasn't always that way, not even close. . In 1946 the first black player to hit the turf for an NFL team was announced to be Cleveland Browns D man Bill Willis yet it took til 1950 for the NBA's color barrier to be broken then broken by Pittsburgh native Chuck Cooper. Finally, 7 years after Willis, Bruins winger Willie O' Ree knocked down hockey's string of prejudice finally integrating the last of the nations big four professional sports. Yet one name is missing from that list, a name that even though he broke baseball's racial segregation a year after football became the first to involve integration, it was Jackie Robinson who stole the show, Jackie Robinson who endured more screams of "n****r" form his own fans, more bricks thrown at his skull, even bombs planted with the intention of taking his life, it was Jackie Robinson who became one of the greatest ball players of all time, and it was Jackie Robinson who played some of his first games on that very field I was first staring at from my seat on that bus and later standing on.
Yet even there, the story doesn't end. You see I took this trip over a week ago, but right as I was preparing to release this post a kind of news story we really haven't seen in decades was released. On Monday the 29th of April a 7 foot tall California free agent center named Jason Collins revived our belief in athletic bravery drawing himself into the same conversations with the names of Jackie Robinson himself. On Monday April 29th, Jason Collins told the world "I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay."
For over a hundrud years now, Rickwood field has been a symbol of both discrimination and acceptance in the wide world of sports and while over 60 years ago, Jackie Robinson took to the field as the first Black athlete in Major League Baseball, Jason Collins now sits as the one and only Gay man to ever play a North American big four sport.
The world is changing, and weather it be the commissioning of one of the first major stadiums intended only for black baseball or the long awaited integration of the MLB or the fact that for the first time in history, the United States of America will see a gay man in their big four sports leagues, sports is truly part of this planets culture, and while it's games have been played for thousands of years, for the first time in that grand (and sometimes discriminatory) history professional athletics can finally be a dream for literally EVERYONE.
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