Amongst them is Charles Willis, 92, who nonetheless lives in his childhood residence, a modest brick home within the Birmingham suburb of Fairfield, just a few blocks from the place Mays, his childhood buddy, lived. They performed collectively in highschool, Willis in middle discipline then and Mays at shortstop. Willis performed at Rickwood, too, however only one season. The opposite day he confirmed a customer his baseball card, with a crisp scouting report on the again: “velocity with an ideal arm.”
“That was the Black man’s sport, again within the day, baseball,” he mentioned, and Black Barons video games have been all the time massive occasions. “In the event that they have been on the town on Sunday and church service was held, the pastor needed to get by means of the sermon early as a result of if not, the people are going to depart and go to the ballgame.”
Reaf Blue, who performed for the Black Barons and Atlanta Black Crackers within the late Nineteen Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, grew up within the neighborhood surrounding Rickwood and nonetheless lives there. As a young person, he received a job on the ballpark as a groundskeeper and cleaner, and labored his method as much as middle discipline.
Generally, when he labored there as a young person, on recreation days, “I needed to put up a rope within the stands, with the Blacks on this facet and the whites on that facet. I actually hated to place that rope up, however I needed to put that rope up.”
Rickwood touches historical past past baseball. A plaque outdoors the principle entrance memorializes a girls’s suffrage rally held there in 1915, though nowhere is there a point out of the Ku Klux Klan gathering held on the ballpark in 1924, or something in regards to the profession of Bull Connor, who known as white Barons video games on the radio earlier than he turned the violent enforcer of Jim Crow segregation in Birmingham because the commissioner of public security.
