Let Them Play

The Cannon Street All-Stars and 1955 Little League World Series Keynote Speech to Twentieth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 16, 2013 When Wendell Smith was seventeen years old, he pitched his Detroit American Legion team to a 1-o victory in championship game. Baseball scouts were at game. They signed Smith's catcher but ignored him. When Smith asked why he wasn't signed, he was told it was because of his skin color. Smith said he used this as motivation to attack color line while working as a sportswriter for Pittsburgh Courier. When Sam Lacy was growing up in Washington DC, he went to a lot of Senators games with his father. His father would cheer team on--until one of pitchers, Nick Altrock, spit in his face. Lacy's father never went to another game, but Lacy did. As a teenager, he worked at Griffith Park, seeing major leaguers play some days and Negro leaguers other days. He saw black players who were clearly good enough to play in major leagues. Lacy later attacked color line as a sportswriter for Washington Afro-American, Chicago Defender, and Baltimore Afro-American We write a lot about color line in baseball and how it created a parallel world of black baseball, where ballplayers played in shadows of white America, never realizing their potential, never knowing how well they could have done in major leagues. We don't write as much about teenagers and children in campaign for racial equality in baseball--when they came face to face with inexorable reality that, for some reason beyond their comprehension, they would never be good enough--even though they could see for themselves they were good enough. Baseball tells us a lot about Civil Rights Movement. The campaign for racial equality in baseball tells us a lot about campaign for racial equality in American society. They are part and parcel of one another. One cannot really know story of Civil Rights Movement without knowing about integration of baseball. One cannot understand integration of baseball without knowing what was happening in American society. We know something about involvement of children in Civil Rights Movement--from Brown v. Board of Education. We know about Emmett Till, fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, who on a visit to Mississippi, had temerity to speak to--or maybe whistle at--a white woman and was then taken from his uncle's barn, beaten, one of his eyes was cut out, and then shot through head and his body weighted down by a 70-pound cotton gin and barbed wire before being dumped into Tallahatchie River. We know about nine students who in 1957 integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, who needed protection of US Army's 101 Airborne. And hundreds of children, some as young as eight years old, who marched in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 to demonstrate against segregation. The Birmingham police arrested them. Police Chief Bull Connor ordered fire hoses turned on them and unleashed dogs to attack them. During summer of 1955--between 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and murder of Emmett Till--the Cannon Street all-stars tried to integrate annual Little League baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina. They had hoped to play in Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. They did not get to play in Williamsport--not because of their ability, but because of color of their skin. Even though they didn't play, they became what Little League CEO Creighton Hale called the most significant amateur team in baseball history. The Cannon Street all-stars played a few miles away from Charleston Harbor, where Civil War began in April 1861. They lived and played in Charleston, which is adjacent to Clarendon County, where school segregation was challenged in Briggs v. …

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