Road to Rickwood: The Holy Grail of Baseball

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This message comes from NPR sponsor Sony Pictures classics with Daddio, a new film starring Dakota Johnson as a young woman who hails a cab and Sean Penn as a seasoned cabbie taking a journey of discovery on a trip from JFK to NYC. Daddeo is now playing only in theaters. I'm Ramtin Arablouei. I'm the co host of throughline from NPR. And I'm rund Abdelfatah.

Rund Abdelfatah
And I'm the other co host of throughline from NPR. And Roy, can you introduce yourself? My name is Roy Wood Junior. I am a comedian and television writer. Am I a television.

Ramtin Arablouei
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm from Birmingham, Alabama. I'm also the host of Road to Rickwood, a four part NPR series about the story of America's oldest ballpark, Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, and the ties that this park has not only to civil rights, but also to baseball, Major League Baseball as a whole. I gotta tell you, I, on the one hand, growing up, found baseball incredibly boring. My dad was an immigrant, and he would always put it on.

Rund Abdelfatah
He'd have the Yankees games on. Yeah. I'm currently a Mets fan. Oh, well, y'all are doing okay right now. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.

It's actually a good year. Yeah. The Mets, you know, like, almost do just good enough. And it's just good enough to give. You hope, just to break your heart.

But, you know, I gotta say, though, I think that sort of nostalgia that, for me is there when it comes to baseball is, like, partly what drew me into this episode of your series. And I guess I'm curious for you. Like, what relationship do you have to baseball? What's one of your earliest memories with the sport? I don't know.

Ramtin Arablouei
My first memories were just playing baseball. I didn't grow up watching it. It was just something to do in the neighborhood. My mom put me into, you know, a little league or whatever situation, and I don't know, I just liked it. You know, baseball is exactly how I want to spend life, where you get to be around your buddies a little bit in the dugout, and then you get to go out there and be alone.

Get the hell away from me. Like, I want a little bit of space. It's like being alone together, you know, someone to be alone with. You know, I think that that's probably the. The beauty of it to me.

And so, you know, I just fell in love with it. My relationship to Rickwood Field as a whole is that I played my high school games there, so I understood the history of that park, I understood the fact that it is a living museum that you're able to sit inside of, you know, and I think that's the beautiful thing, you know, about this podcast, is that it was just an opportunity, because it's not a story about baseball. The podcast is about american history as told through the occurrences and happenings at a singular place in a very divisive city, which was Birmingham in the sixties. You talked a little bit about the potential of sports to tell historical stories. Why do you think this history of Rick Wood Field and what happened in Birmingham matters today?

Because if everything that went down in that place could have went down, and that place is still standing, then I think there's hope for the human condition and human spirit. We're talking about a baseball field that had a Klan rally, that had a women's suffrage rally that was a linchpin for segregation, and how baseball is part of the reason that segregation was so tough in the state of Alabama to begin with. Because Bull Connor, who was like, I don't know, the Michael Jordan of segregation, I don't even know if that analogy makes sense. Can you use a black guy to make an analogy about our racist? Bull Connor, earned public trust because he was a baseball announcer and he announced games at Rickwood.

Wow. I mean, you're kind of getting at this, but, you know, I think for, let's say someone is listening to us talking about baseball right now, and they're like, eh, baseball's not for me. You know, so maybe this isn't for me, I guess. What would you say to that person who thinks that they have no interest in baseball? What would you say to them?

Rund Abdelfatah
Without obviously giving away any spoilers, but that's in the episode that could be for them. It's tied to so many different things that led to the evolution of who we are as a people, who we are as a nation. You know, if you enjoy history, it's worth listening to. You know, it's just a very interesting story. It's not all about baseball.

Ramtin Arablouei
And this player came and hit this home run, and then this player came and struck out. Thank you for the podcast. This podcast was produced in conjunction with NPR. No, this is a very thorough series. We spoke with innumerable retired negro leaguers.

We spoke with people who run a nonprofit that fund the park. We spoke with the descendants of the original architects of the park. Wow. So I just. It's a story told by the people who lived it, and I'm just there to give a little bit of context along the way.

But it's a wonderful, wonderful journey into a yemenite, into a bright spot that was always illuminated during America's darkest past. Wow. Roy, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for sharing this series and making it. Yeah, thank you so much. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Thank you all.

Rund Abdelfatah
Roy Wood Junior takes us to Birmingham in the first episode of Road to Rickwood from WWNO and NPR.

Ramtin Arablouei
Every morning when I open the gate, I get chills on my arms. For real. Jabril Weir is the head groundskeeper at Rick Wood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. He's taking care of this place for six and a half years, keeping the field ready for more than 100 games, a mix of high school, college, and minor league matchups. And that's just baseball.

But since September, there's been only one game to prepare for, a major league game. So Rickwood is getting some major league upgrades. Yeah, that's a million and one things at one time. The gravel is the first step of the foundation of a baseball field. Then comes your sand and then comes grass.

The fence that they're putting up, that'll have soft padding on it. That way, if somebody runs into it, they won't get hurt or get cut up. The file post, different. We'll actually have netting foul pole to foul pole. That'll be something totally different.

Got new gutters. We got brand new, more expensive dugouts. And the field will be MLB regulation. Okay. So you might be thinking cleaning up a ballpark, getting it ready for a major league game, is probably a lot of work, but it's got to be pretty straightforward, right?

Not if you're working on Rick Wood field. Most of the tools and materials are more modern, and you can't use too much modern stuff on something that's 113 years old. 113 years old. Rickwood Field is the oldest professional ballpark in the country. Older than Fenway, older than Wrigley.

The work on Wrigwood, that's being done. It's like taking care of an old house with the most complicated backyard you've ever seen. A backyard where the most famous names in baseball played. Like Babe Ruth stood over here somewhere, like Mickey Mantle stood here, Ted Williams stood somewhere, like Jackie Robinson stood somewhere out here. Like, it's just amazing, the feeling, knowing, like I'm walking on the holy grail of baseball.

So I grew up in Birmingham. I played baseball in Birmingham. I even played at Rickwood. But I didn't know all of its history. I mean, we never learned about the negro leagues in Birmingham public schools.

Sure, we studied Alabama's 13 most famous ghosts, but not our baseball history. And Rick Woodfield has seen a lot. Segregated baseball, women marching for the right to vote, a rally for the KKK, and eventually the first integrated sports team in all of Alabama, with black fans and white fans sitting in the stands side by side. Every Sunday that we were there to play, that ballpark was full, and it wasn't the Devils. We didn't look out for ourselves.

You had to leave church to get a seat in Rick Wood when black Barons played. A lot of people in Birmingham have connections to Rickwood. Others don't even know it exists. But for those people, that's about to change. Major League Baseball hosted a real game at Rickwood on June 20, and it actually counted.

The San Francisco Giants played the St. Louis Cardinals as part of an event to honor the history of black baseball in America.

Leading up to that game, we took a hard look at Birmingham from the beginning and how what was happening on the city streets played out on the dirt and grass at Rickwood. Four parts each featuring historians, civic leaders, and most importantly, the players who took the field at Rickwood before and after baseball's color line was crossed.

I'm Roy Wood junior, and this is road to Rickwood.

Birmingham, Alabama, my hometown. It's not like other southern cities. It never had slavery because it couldn't. Birmingham isn't established as a city until 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War. And before it was Birmingham.

Jefferson county was not a major area for plantations, so I guess you could say slavery wasn't as bad in that particular region. So without the plantation economy as a foundation, Birmingham is built on something else. Iron. Alabama was once almost entirely agricultural, but heavy deposits of coal, iron ore, and associated minerals in the so called Birmingham district have changed the picture from them. Now is produced one third of the wealth of the entire state.

The town was born in a cornfield, but by early in the new century, it was a thriving industrial center.

Artblack, the author of three books about Rick Woodfield, says this new city's growth is completely dependent on its natural resources. The hills are rich in mineral resources needed to make iron and steel. Those minerals are iron ore, coal, and limestone. Birmingham isn't your typical southern city built on cotton or tobacco. It's something new.

Looking ahead, not in the past, at least when it comes to the economy. But just because the region didn't have slavery didn't mean that it had equality. Birmingham, Alabama, was not a segregated city in its inception legally, but it was a de facto segregated city. Barry McNeely, is the historical content expert at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. To be in a segregated society meant that you were untouchable from the time you left your house in the morning to the time you made it back there.

And when I mean untouchable, I mean that you don't walk in and out of a door at the same time with somebody of a different race. You could be punished for looking a white person in the eye and not averting your glance. So while Birmingham is segregated, the iron furnaces and steel mills serve as sort of an equalizer where workers of all kinds are needed to power the city's growth. You've got people moving here from places like Greece, Syria, people relocating here because of the industry. That's Joseph Stewart, better known as Jeb, a member of the Society of American Baseball Research, and the Friends of Rick Woodfield, the nonprofit that manages the ballpark.

Jeb says these companies want to give workers something to do on their day off, something that gives them structure, promotes teamwork, and keeps them happy. The idea they come up with baseball.

Joseph Stewart
We probably had the most number of industrial baseball teams and leagues in this city, probably in the United States, but. Keep it in line with the rest of Birmingham society. These baseball teams are also segregated. In 1885, the best white players from those industrial teams come together to form a professional team. They went by a few names, the coal Barons, the Iron Barons.

Ramtin Arablouei
But most people just called them the Birmingham Barons. The Birmingham Barons play at a ballpark affectionately named the slag pile, a rundown grandstand where fans literally sit in the outfield on piles of slag waste metal from the smelting of iron. But as baseball gains popularity in Birmingham, it becomes very clear that the Barons need a better place to play than the slag pile, a brand new ballpark. We're at Grandpa's baseball park. Your grandpa's baseball park?

Yeah. I talked to Bob Woodward and Rick Woodward Iiihdeme, their grandfather, the original Rick Woodward, created this place in Birmingham where people still play baseball today. And as his grandkids tell it, Grandpa loved baseball. According to his father, his grades suffered because of baseball. And so he pulled him out and put him to work in the plant for a year and then sent him to MIT.

Rick's father had a plan, throw him into the family business, the Woodward iron company, and sent him off to college. And then Rick would forget all about baseball. It doesn't work. It's my understanding that he played baseball on the MIT team. Rick Woodward stays in love with baseball.

And you would think he would just play it casually on the side after MIT? No. He comes back to Alabama and buys the Birmingham Barons. Gerald Watkins is the president of the friends of Rick Woodfield. Baseball was a hobby for him, and he bought the team, and he wanted to have a great place for them to play.

And if Rick Woodward is going to build a stadium, it was going to be built out of what he knew best.

So it was the first iron and steel ballpark built in the minor leagues. And at the time it was built, it was a really big park. Like, really big. You can see the distances are enormous. Center field in today's ballparks would be 395 or 400.

This one is, like, in the something, feet to center field. Bigger fields meant fewer home runs, but the game was faster back then. Fans wanted to see doubles, base stealing, and bunting. They would get a lot of inside the park home runs. All stadiums were like that.

And for a minor league ballpark, the stands are huge, too. It held about 10,000 people. It was a masterpiece. Rick Woodward builds a new stadium for the Birmingham Baronsh, but it needs a name. The name Rick Woodward comes up with Rick Woodfield.

Yeah, he just combined his first and last name for that, but he built it to last. When you look and see those bolts, those were put in by hand. I mean, there was no cranes or anything like that. In 1910, Randy Ferguson, tour guide at Rickwood, showed us around the ballpark where most of the ballparks were built out of wood, and they blew away or burned down. That's why years later, Rick Woodward's ballpark is still here.

It was like a holiday. Gerald Watkins again. And when the first game was held on August 18, 1910, businesses in Birmingham closed. Many of these businesses buy blocks of tickets for their employees to attend. The Woodward Iron Company sends all of its employees even running a special train from nearby Bessemer.

Ladies and gentlemen would come out in their finest attire. Even though it was August in Alabama, which you know is 100 degrees on its best day, 57 extra street cars are put into service. Destination Rickwood. People would come to the game who were not really baseball fans. But if you were in Birmingham at that time, that's where you wanted to be on that day.

As the crowd files in, they can hear hammers still going underneath the grandstand. Construction isn't quite finished. And looking at the crowd itself, there are a lot more women than usually attended baseball games at this time. In the north, Major League baseball is seen as vulgar. Drinking, gambling, that type of thing.

But the South's minor league environment is perceived as a more refined, genteel experience. Now, that being said, two players on the Barrens, including that day's starting pitcher, get into a fistfight before the game. But trust me, the fistfight was refined and Genteel. In the pre game ceremony, Birmingham mayor Harry Jones smashes a champagne bottle against the grandstand. I christen you Rickwood, he declares.

That's how I think people talked back then. And also in a moment that seems wild today, Rick Woodward himself throws out the first pitch, and it keeps counts as part of the game. He missed his own, though. First pitch was a ball. The game between the Barons and the Montgomery climbers is close, with Montgomery up two one in the bottom of the 9th and Birmingham coming up to bat.

The Barons first batter gets hit with the pitch. He goes to first base. Then something you would never see today. Barron's batters lay down four bunts in a row. Everybody reaches base safely, and the game is tied.

Finally, third baseman Lou Emery comes up to bat and smacks a ball right up the middle. And the Barons win. And like that, Rick Wood Field is open for business. The Birmingham Barons establish themselves in the community. But in the following years, Rickwood plays home to much more than Barron's baseball.

And that's because of geography. Again, here's Gerald Watkins. Those teams would do their spring training in Florida, and on their way north, they would stop at ballparks and play games and then travel during the night. And then they'd get to another ballpark the next day. So Birmingham serves as a natural place to stop and play on the way back north before opening day.

That's a big reason why so many hall of Famers ended up playing at Rickwood. In total, over the years, we've had 182 hall of Famers who played at Rickwood Field managed or coached teams that were playing at Rickwood Field. That's 30% of the hall of Fame in this era. Ty Cobb comes through, as does Christie Mathewson, considered the best pitcher of his generation. He beats the Barons three times, and these were big ticket events.

We didn't have television. We didn't have transcontinental flights. It's really hard for us to understand now because of all the things we've experienced in the 20th and 21st century. But back then, it was something else. Speaking of imagining a different time, there's a lot of differences, but one of them, women don't have the right to vote.

They can go to Rick Wood and watch the Barons, but they can't go to the ballot box. And at least in Alabama, Rickwood Field is a part of that story, too.

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Ramtin Arablouei
It'S August 18, 1915, five years to the day that Rick Woodfield opened today's event, suffrage day.

Alex Colvin
Not everyone is going to pick up a pamphlet. Not everyone's going to want to attend a lecture. We talked to doctor Alex Colvin, public programs curator at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. So how do you become more palatable to the larger community? A day at the ballpark.

So as you're walking into Rickwood on that day, there are these large yellow banners that say things like equality and justice, women's suffrage. And there are women dressed head to toe in yellow. And yellow is the color for suffrage. Even the players get in on the theme. They're wearing yellow sashes and ribbons tied in a, quote, cute bow around their waist.

And there was a lot of men who were fighting against this idea of suffrage. And so it's very important for people to look at someone they may look up to, kind of, especially this epitome of masculinity, you know, a player who is coming out there on the baseball field, they look up to them. For them to be wearing those colors and to be wearing a vote for women's sashes, that was making a huge political stance. The Barons players may not know just how big a stance they were taking. The right to vote for women is still highly controversial.

Ramtin Arablouei
And before those Barons play, the women take the field. Two teams facing off, one from Birmingham. And one from Bessemer. This is also the first time women are allowed in the Rick Whitfield press box. Reporter Edith Sparrow writes, they showed that.

Alex Colvin
Women can play the game as the men do. And I feel like that was the most important example that they were trying to get across to. People. Look at what these female teams can do now. Think about what women can do in politics.

We can do the same things that you can do if you just give us the chance. Just give us the field. After the Barons start their game, the suffragists fill the inning breaks with their own program, which includes skits, dancing, and singing.

It was actually one of the most well attended games of the season. The stands were full. People were energetic. People were happy to be there. There was, I think, this energy there that was really positive.

It's been a long, long way to. Women'S suffrage, but it's almost here. Five years to that day after suffrage day, the 19th amendment is ratified, securing the right to vote for women across America, at least on paper. Because throughout the south, there would still be laws in place preventing black people, both men and women, from voting. Even the suffrage movement itself wasn't inclusive.

Ramtin Arablouei
Was Rickwood Suffrage day for all women? That's a hard no. The Alabama equals Suffrage association, who put on the event, actively distanced itself from black suffrage organizations. It is about white women getting that right to vote, and they very explicitly state that. So while they are looking for gender equality, they're not looking for racial equality.

So even in the women's suffrage movement in Alabama, you found segregation. It was the thinking that shaped the entire state. But in Birmingham, that didn't stop the black community from thriving in a lot of other ways. This area was very vibrant, very robust. Reverend Arthur Price, junior pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, there was a big boom during that time where everything African Americans need was pretty much in this particular area.

Today, that area is called the Fourth Avenue Historic District. For many decades, it's the center of black life in Birmingham. Restaurants, theaters, doctor's offices, grocery stores. Fourth Avenue has it all. Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, they all perform here.

And Ellington even wrote a song inspired by the city Birmingham breakdown.

When it comes to Rick, black fans go to a lot of Barron's games. But Barry McNeely says, like all of Birmingham, there was segregated seating for black people. They had a covering for white people where they sat, but there wasn't a covering for where the black people sat. And how should we think about segregation at this time, Barry? Like, I'm just thinking about Rick Wood and the image of white people sitting up against black people, and just why.

It's counterintuitive. But segregation never intended to keep white people and people of color away from one another. When we think of the white water fountain and the black border fountain and the back of the bus, we think separation. However, it wasn't about being separate. It was about being intimately close, just as long as one group of people understood who was superior and another group understood who was inferior.

And that understanding went through everything you did. Charles Willis, who goes by Coote and later played in the negro leagues, remembers what it was like growing up in the area. Going to Barron's games. You had to ride the bus. It get crowded.

You got to go in the back door. I remember all these little crazy things when I was a kid. So you had to have a section out there where you could go sit. Today you can go to the games, you push you a ticket, you sit in the way you want. Willis says that he even did odd jobs at Rickwood, like painting and cleaning up.

If you go over there, that you do a little work round over there before the game, and you go back over there and it's, you ain't free. Rev. Blue, another Alabama native who would later play in the negro leagues, tells us a very similar story. I know every inch of that ground and not on the ground. I know we used to fix the seats, everything on top.

We had to do everything, do the roof of Italy, selling peanuts, popcorn, and stuff. And then I moved up, and they gave me a job with the groundkeepers, and I was working there and going to school. But working at Rickwood and being treated equally at Rickwood are entirely separate things. Bob Woodward doesn't shy away from the segregated seating that his grandfather had put in place. Grandpa had a dog that went with him everywhere.

He had a driver, and the dog sat in the front seat with the driver. The driver would sit in the negro bleachers with the dog, and everybody was sitting at some distance away from them. Cause they were afraid of that dog. And it was like looking out there was like a target, and they were the bullseye. So going to Rickwood to see the barrens, black fans would experience the same kind of segregation and tension they find throughout Birmingham.

But they continue to go, and soon the black community is ready to field its own team at Rickwood. Black baseball and Birmingham had been around almost as long as white baseball. But these teams did not have an organized league. And based on laws that passed in Alabama in 1901, that organized league would have to be segregated, an all black league. There were black industrial teams and black professional teams traveling across the country to play anyone they could arrange a game against.

That's called barnstorming. When those black teams came to Birmingham, Rick Woodward was more than happy to host them at his ballpark. Money talks, and anyone who paid Woodward would rent to. For example, on Labor Day 1919, barnstorming. Black teams from Birmingham and Montgomery play at Rickwood Field.

It is still one of the largest crowds to ever see a game at Rickwood. The Birmingham News had the number of more than 12,000 fans. Black baseball had proven itself to be extremely popular throughout the whole country, and it was time for the next step. Now, that wouldn't happen in Birmingham.

It would happen about 600 miles northwest. The negro leagues were established here in Kansas City. As a matter of fact, right around the corner from where the negro league spaceball museum currently operates. Bob Kendrick is the president of the negro league's baseball museum. We are in the process of restoring that historic landmark where Rube Foster led a group of eight independent black baseball team owners into a meeting held at the Paseo YMCA.

The story's well known in baseball history. Rube Foster, who owned and managed the barnstorming Chicago American Giants, convinces a bunch of other black owners to create a league with contracts, salaries, a schedule. It's all going to be official. Out of that meeting came the birth of the Negro National League, the first successful organized black baseball league. Okay, so, like, in one way, I get it.

This is hopeful, right? You know, black businessmen getting together, building something on a national scale. But this is also kind of depressing in a way, too, right, that this was even needed at all. So, yes, it is propped against the ugliness of american segregation, but the story here is what emerged out of segregation. It's based on one small, simple principle.

You won't let me play with you in the major leagues. Okay, I'll create a league of my own. The Birmingham Black Barons are established the same year, 1920. Technically, they're named the all Stars, but in cities that had a white and black team, fans just took the white team's name and put black in front of it. For the black team, New York had the Yankees, so they had the black Yankees.

Chattanooga had the lookouts, so you got the black lookouts. Atlanta had the crackers, so you had the Atlanta Black Crackers. Look, anyway, the black Barons are put together from the best players in the area. A lot of the black Barons played originally for the Ossipco team, which was the american cast iron and pipe company that was considered the best industrial league team. And most of those players migrated from Ocipco to the Black Barons.

Joseph Stewart
In 1920.

Ramtin Arablouei
Once the Birmingham Barons start rolling, fans started to come out to Rick Wood in force. Black and white. Yeah. Remember how Rickwood was segregated for white games? Well, the same thing happens when black teams play.

The sections just flip. That's right. White fans had to sit in the, quote, negro bleachers. Faye Davis grows up on the black side of those stands, watching her father, Piper Davis, a player and later manager of the black Baronsh. How did they separate white and black people?

The white folks had to find a seat. There was one little section, right field, where a few whites sat. Rickwood was jam packed with black people. Barry McNeely again, the Birmingham black Barons were a beacon for people in the city of Birmingham. It was a big deal to have somebody that went to your church or worked at your plant or lived in your neighborhood, this kind of talent.

And they could travel around and they had stories to tell, and they were in these crisp uniforms, and they represented something. And so it wasn't unusual for people to leave church and all kinds of things to just be there at those games. You had to leave church to get a seat in Rickwood when black Barons played, because if you wanted a seat in Rickwood, you couldn't stand the whole circle. So you got a crowd full of black folks dressed in their Sundays. Best say it.

Come on. What's the atmosphere? Is it jovial between? It's electric for just a regular season game? We not talking play out.

We not talking play out. We talking Sunday. Rickwood. Oh, God, the guys have come in, and they still got on the straw hat from the church and the suits and everything, and the lady still dressed. That park was packed with african american folk.

When you think of the temple that was Rickwood field, it had an oasis connotation to it that was really important to have that outlet going to a black Barons game, because you could see people that looked like you, and they were being respected. And not only were black people watching them play and being fans of their athletic ability, but there were white people there watching as well.

But that doesn't mean Rick Woodfill was a completely welcoming environment.

Rick Woodward won't let the black Barons use the white players locker rooms. Black Barons had to change in the tunnels underneath the stadium. At one point in the early years of the black Barons, 75 Birmingham women, all white, signed a petition asking for a ban on black baseball at Rickwood. They claim when a game is going on, that, quote, the Negroes are boisterous and disrespectful and monopolize the entire street that petition doesn't go anywhere, but it shows that there is real discontent, that a black baseball team is allowed to play, play at Rickwood at all. And soon would come the biggest reminder in Rickwood's history that racism is alive and well in Birmingham, Alabama.

And they frankly, just used the same tactics as any terrorist organization would use in terms of violence, intimidation, fear. And then they get smarter over time.

Rick Whitefield. October 15, 1924. The ballpark opens at 03:00 in the afternoon. They had a really huge barbecue for a couple hours before the real program begins. That's Keith Aber, associate professor of southern history at Auburn University.

They say thousands of people from Birmingham, white people. Let's be clear. White people come to this event. Why just white people? Because this event is a rally put on by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan is very smart. How do you get them there? You offer them some free food? Yes. Rick Woodward rented out the ballpark to the KKK.

Things really get going. At 07:00, when the women of the Ku Klux Klan march into the outfield, the crowd of 23,000 sing, America, you know my country. Tis of thee. The Klansmen take a group photo, and a thousand new members are sworn in, naturalized as Klan members. Think about it.

They're american citizens to begin with. But what are they naturalizing? That they're basically proclaiming that they're true white Americans is what they're doing. The main event is a mock funeral of Alabama senator Oscar Underwood, who had run for the democratic nomination for president on an anti Klan platform. Aver says that because this was the Klan, this fake funeral felt more like a threat.

These are people that are still murdering people across America, but especially in Alabama. So they have this casket. They have a corpse, an effigy. They take this corpse on a loop around the baseball diamond. It culminates in a mock burial, lowering Underwood's effigy underneath the stage.

After that, the crowd gets to enjoy a fireworks display with, according to the newspaper, several special clan pieces. Rick Woodward would seemingly rent the field to anyone who paid. And in the 1920s, the Klan was on the rise. This is a part of their strategy, put on some community events, like a barbecue, to make the cross burning and effigy burying a little more tolerable to the general population. But at this time, the Klan isn't some fringe element in society.

By 1925, the Ku Klux Klan was big business. Almost 6 million Americans now belonged to the Klan, and the organization was grossing $75 million a year. It was really a national organization that was quite ubiquitous. It was about as ubiquitous as the Boy scouts of America during the 1920s. They had chapters in Indiana, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, California had Klan chapters.

Okay? There's rarely a place in America where in the twenties the Klan didn't have some presence, right? And in Alabama, that presence is felt even more among its ranks. You had some really high profile people. The attorney generals for the state of Alabama were in the Klan.

Practically, I would say almost every sheriff in the state of Alabama. Think about how much power a sheriff has locally. Right. Almost every sheriff is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan is a powerful force in Alabama.

And while it's often not seen on this day at Rickwood, they aren't afraid to show off that power. The rally shows the polar ends of Alabama society. An ethno nationalist movement to dehumanize those who weren't and true Americans, and an all black baseball game that humanizes an entire community happening in the same space. Now, we don't know what Rick Woodward thought about the Klan. It was possibly just a financial decision.

A paying customer is a paying customer. Negro league team or the KKK. Two days after the rally at Rickwood, there was a local high school football game. The next day it was a football game between Auburn and LSU, soon back to baseball. And with spring training starting up again, major league teams returned to their annual tradition of coming to Rickwood.

The bigger the star, the better the ticket sales for Rick Woodward. And there was no bigger star in the country than Babe Ruth. In 1925, Babe Ruth's Yankees played the Brooklyn Dodgers in an exhibition at Rickwood. It's a sold out crowd. The local papers really jumped on the babe.

The Birmingham Post Herald calls him, quote, fat and that he's carrying more weight than he had in several springs. But Babe Ruf loved playing at Rickwood and would continue to return for years to come. He said, I always look forward to playing at Rickwood. The outfield is as smooth as a billiards table. Ball players always refer to Rick Wood as the classy in the minus strong praise from the babe.

Joseph Stewart
You know, there's a legend about Babe Ruth hitting a home run that landed in a train car that supposedly happened at Rickwood. In that 1925 game, Ruth allegedly hits a ball so far that it landed onto a distant train headed towards Atlanta. And if you bend the rules a little, it's technically the furthest ball ever hit. Jeb Stewart disagrees. I don't believe it would have been possible, based on where the railroad tracks are, for him to have hit a ball that far.

Ramtin Arablouei
It's a nice story, though. And speaking of legends, the Birmingham Black Barons are about to get one of their own.

Well, he became, in my own estimation, the greatest pitcher of all time. Bob Kendrick is talking about someone you may have heard of if you're a baseball fan. Satchel Page. He pitched in over 2600 games, some 55 no hitters, only God knows how many strikeouts. And then you add an element that he brought that I'm not sure anybody in baseball has ever matched.

Charisma. He brought a level of charisma to this game that it really had not seen, and he could sell it. The black Barons, by Paige's contract from the Chattanooga White Sox, paying him 275 $75 a month, that's about average for the negro leagues at this time. He isn't a star yet. He didn't initially have the kind of control that made him so special.

I think initially he was more of a thrower. You know, you got this good arm. You just rear back and you fire it in there. He had speed behind that blazing fastball. From his first game at Rickwood, Page takes the city by storm.

He tells the other team, guarantees them that he'd strike out the first six batters. Word spreads throughout the ballpark, and sure enough, 123455 strikeouts. And then a white flag from the opposing dugout to signal their surrender. Well, it's a white tile tied to a bag. But Page listened and gets the 6th out on a pop up.

There are a lot of guys today in the major leagues who throw hard. Now, they don't always know where it's going, but Satchel could put it exactly where he wanted to put it. Paige's four seasons on the black Barons are pivotal. By 1930, the baron's gameplay is slipping in quality, but people still come out just to see him. Even his warm up is legendary.

Satchel would use a stick of foil chewing gum wrapper. The catcher would sit the chewing gum wrapper on top of home plate. And wherever the catcher moved, the chewing gum wrapper, Satchel right over the top of that chewing gum wrapper. One of the best pitchers at that time, Dizzy Dean, says this about Paige. If Satchel was on our team, we win the pennanthouse by all star breaking.

He and I would go fishing the second half of the season. He meant that, but they can't pitch together, at least not then, because baseball is still segregated. And Dizzy Dean is white. Dean faces off against the white Birmingham Barons many times, but most famously in 1931. This is the Dixie Series, a huge event in a time before pro football or Major League baseball teams based in the southeast, the winner of the Southern association, the Barons, faces the winner of the Texas League, the Houston Buffaloes, which is Dizzy Dean's team.

And like Paige, Dean knows how to build up the hype around himself. Well, he was a braggadocio, you know, he boasted about his feats. That's the way he was. According to Art Black. It's hard to overstate the excitement for this Dixie series.

It was like the major League World Series. Keep in mind, that was during the Great Depression. People were out of work. Times were hard. Still, thousands of people spent precious dollars to watch the Dixie series, and many more were turned away.

An estimated 20,000 people make their way out to Rickwood. So many people, they stood on the field of play, along the foul lines and in front of the fence in the outfield. There were and still are a railroad track tracks beyond the outfield wall. Many people sat upon idle boxcars on those tracks to watch. For those who can't watch in person, if you want to tune into the radio, you're out of luck.

A lot of ballparks in the south don't have that technology yet. So instead, telegraph lines transmit the play by play. Western Union has to build new lines just for this series, connecting Rickwood to cities across across the south. And that Morse code goes straight to what were called baseball matinees. These matinees were held in public spaces like stores, hotel ballrooms, movie theaters, where an audience would be able to watch a live baseball game on a hand operated mechanical board.

He would place the figure of a ballplayer on this replica board, and then he might say, I'm the ballplayer. Still second base. And then he could move the ballplayer to second base. You would go in, pay a few cents, sit down, and the game could be played in New York, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, wherever. That's Jim Baggott, historian and archivist for the city of Birmingham.

And then an announcer would announce what was happening in the game. So you could sit and almost follow a game in real time. And at one of those baseball matinees in Texas, a man in the audience gets an opportunity through sheer luck.

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Ramtin Arablouei
They announced that the operator was sick and asked, could anybody read a telegraph? Historian Jim Baggott is described describing a scene at a baseball matinee in Texas. And yes, someone in the audience could read a telegraph. Theophilus Eugene Connor so Connor went up, called the game. Connor was kind of a clown.

He liked to tell jokes. He was very loud. He was, as one person who knew him told me, he thought he was funny. Apparently Connor is good enough that he starts working baseball matinees full time. When he and his wife moved to Birmingham, he opened his own baseball matinee here.

And then that led to a job on the radio, calling games on the radio. It's also around this time that he starts going by his nickname Bull. And on the radio he was still doing the same thing. He was in a radio studio. The plays were coming off the telegraph and he would announce them.

He was very loud and he was very good at just making up the scene with the crack of a bat. He might hit a pencil on the desk. Recorded crowd noise could also be piped in. At one point he had a gong in the studio. So if the runner hit a triple, he would say he got a.

He would hit the gong three times. Conor had this very fast, very rapid delivery style. His catchphrase was, he's out. You know, he would drag it out. He was as much an entertainer as he was a radio announcer.

And he was very popular all over the south. But that popularity is also driven by Conor's racism. Shelley Stewart was a radio personality, an occasional black baron's pitcher, and a civil rights icon. He was also born in Birmingham. So he was able to tell us exactly what Conor's broadcast sounded like.

Here comes Dropo coming to the back. Here he comes. Oh, what comes? He's standing there. There's fried two.

And there he takes a stand there as a pitch. Here comes that ball. And that ball that goes, that goes goes, goes, goes, goes. It's over in the coal bend. That was Bull Connor again, Barry McNeely.

Bull Connor was known to say, they popped that one into the coal bin. And, of course, the cold being referred to where black people were sitting. And when you had members of the Black Barons playing, they would be insulted during these games. They'd be called monkeys and different things of that nature. And so the entirety of the broadcast was sprinkled in with a racist flavor.

McNeely also said that may have helped him find an audience. If you wanted to hear that, you wanted to hear that. And there was a decided group of people who followed behind that. And Connor was able to take that and parlay it into a political career. In 1934, Bull Connor is elected as an Alabama state representative, then in 36, commissioner of public safety for the city of Birmingham, a position he would hold on and off for almost 30 years.

The 1930s aren't that great for baseball in Birmingham, black or white. While fans turn out for big events like the Dixie series or when babe Ruf comes to town, overall attendance drops. Mostly due to the Great Depression. That's going to be a kind of a universal baseball problem. In the 1930s, people were out of work.

Joseph Stewart
Going to baseball games was luxury. In 1935, Birmingham is reported to have the highest illiteracy rate and lowest per capita income of any city in the entire country. Rick Woodward is forced to sell the Birmingham Barons and Rick Woodfield itself for a fraction of what they were once worth. The Black Barons also struggle kind of. Went from league to league between the Negro National League and the Negro Southern League during that era.

There were other years when they didn't even field a team, such as 1935. But soon the Black Barons go back to their roots and lean into barnstorming, traveling around the country to play local teams for cash. Life on the road is brutal. We spoke to Reverend Bill Greason, a former pitcher on the Birmingham Black barons and current pastor of the Bethel Baptist church on Pearson Avenue in Birmingham. What was it like being on the road with the black barons?

Ramtin Arablouei
Well, we stayed in some terrible hotel. Couldn't stay. And I remember a couple of places we spent the night outside because of the critters on the inside, you know, on the sheet and things. So we talking bed bugs, roaches, rats. Oh, Mandy.

So it was cleaner to just sleep on the bus. Former black baron Rev. Blue. We get on the bus and we go to different southern teams. And, you know, during that time, there was no McDonald's and all these fast food places, so we had to carry your food in the shoebox.

Some of the guys on the bus get hungry. They steal your box. It was just a mess. You're lucky somebody got to take you in from the community. We were blessed that they did.

They had to love baseball to do that. Maybe some people didn't like baseball, but they saw the need, Reverend Greason says it was all worth it. We didn't pay that much. The man, when you play a baseball and you want to be part of something that's great, you go along with whatever, and it didn't bother us. It didn't bother me.

This is how the black Baron survived a combination of barnstarming and league play, really, for the rest of the team's existence. Reverend Bill Grieson, who would go on to become the first black pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, only starts for the Black Barons after coming home from serving in World War Two. When you served in the Marines, did it strike you that you had to serve in a segregated unit? We knew that when I went in, I knew that we went down to Fort Benning.

It was about four or 500 of us blacks there. And a Marine sergeant came by and pointed out, nine of us out of that whole crowd was called to be in the Marines bought it, made my chest take out, you know, to be a Marine, and it didn't bother me.

Greason, like many black soldiers, returns as a decorated veteran. But the medals didn't equate to respect. When these people were fighting in World War two, in Europe and in the Pacific and in Africa, they came back here after having been in France and different places where they could sit down and have a beer or just be human. And they came back here and they wanted the life that they had fought for, that they'd seen their brethren harmed and killed for. There are 900,000 black veterans who come home from the war, and they come home empowered in a way that hasn't been seen before in american history.

There was a black newspaper. The Pittsburgh courier started something known as the Double V campaign. This double V meant that they couldn't settle for one victory. They had to have a double victory. They had to have a victory over Adolf Hitler, but they also had to come back here and gain a victory over Jim Crow.

In cities across the country, black veterans demonstrate. While very intentionally wearing their military uniforms, the Double V campaign was an encouragement for black people to use the notoriety that they gained by putting on the uniform. Historically, putting on that uniform was always associated with citizenship and humanity.

Humanity won't be easy to find in buses across Alabama, segregated seating is determined by two movable barriers, one for each side of the aisle. The bus drivers move the barriers up and down the rows, depending on how many people of each race were on board to avoid overcrowding. In February 1946, Timothy Hood, a black marine who had served in an anti aircraft group, is riding one of these buses. This is in Bessemer, a city less than 15 miles outside of Birmingham. When the back of the bus, the colored section, reaches standing room only, Hood takes it on himself to move the barriers.

The bus driver tells him to put them back. Hood refuses. It ends with the driver shooting Hood three times and leaving him on the street. When the police arrive, they put Hood in handcuffs and shoot him again, dead. No one is ever charged with his murder.

In Birmingham itself, that same time period saw the same kind of violence. When we think of Birmingham, Alabama, in a very tragic sense, the first two months of 1946, bull Countess Police department killed six uniformed veterans, and their crime was trying to urge people to register to vote. This violence would come to define Bull Connor's time as commissioner of public safety in Birmingham. And looking at his rhetoric as a baseball announcer, maybe it's not a surprise how he would come to treat Birmingham's black population from play by play announcer to one of the most notorious racists in the country's history. It's probable that the world would have never heard of Bull Connor if it would have been for Rick Woodfield.

By the late 1940s. Thanks to people like Bull Connor, segregation gains momentum in Birmingham. But Rickwood remains unchanged. The white Barons and black Barons continue to occupy the same space relatively peacefully. There's even some optimism, at least when it comes to baseball.

Way up north from Brooklyn in 1947, Jackie Robinson debuts for the Dodgers, breaking baseball's color line, and immediately raises all kinds of possibilities for black baseball players in America. But for the negro league leagues, in many ways, it comes to mean the opposite. With a potential pathway to the major leagues now on the table, soon there may not be a need for a separate black league. But for now, the Black Barons is still the focus of the african american community in Birmingham. And a young outfielder still in high school is about to take Rick Woodfield by storm and be a part of the best black Barons team ever.

When you're coming up with a little boy, his pants were too big for him. The bat was too heavy. He was just as great playing football as he was playing basketball. So he told him, he said, well, if you want to play ball, you need to play for the Birmingham Blackburns. At Rickwood I envision him standing in right field or left field or center field or wherever he's playing that day and dreaming about being in the big leagues.

A young man with a name nobody had heard yet, Willie Mays. Next up on the road to Rickwood. Once they seen and play, that was it. That was it. There ain't nothing else to be said.

Nothing else to be said. You've been listening to the road to Rickwood. I'm Roy Wood, Junior.

This episode was written and produced by Ben Dickstein. Our executive producer is Alana Schreiber, and our senior producer is Ben Dixteen. Our producers are Jonah Buchanan and ao.com. quote S. Cody D.

Short mixing and sound design by Joaquin Kotler and story editing by Ryan Vasquez. Artwork by Xavier Murillo, original music composition by Squeak E. Clean Studios. Voice tracking by Alt Mix Studio. Special thanks to Paul Masson, the Friends of Rick Whitefield, Birmingham Public Library Archives, AL.com, comma, WBHM, and Major League Baseball.

This podcast is produced by WWNO and WRKF, distributed by the NPR network in partnership with Major League Baseball.

Rund Abdelfatah
If you'd like to hear more of this four part series, you can find road to Rickwood wherever you get your podcasts. This message is brought to you by NPR. Sponsor Progressive Insurance. You call the shots on whats in your podcast queue. Now you can call them on your auto insurance too, with the name your price tool from Progressive.

Ramtin Arablouei
Tell progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and theyll show you coverage options within your budget. Get your quote today@progressive.com. comma Progressive Casualty Insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state. Law support for NPR and the following message come from Betterment, an automated investing and savings app. CEO Sarah Levy shares why accessibility is central to Betterment's mission.

The real innovation for betterment was taking a set of tools that were used by the ultra wealthy and making them accessible to the average investor. And that includes tax strategies. That includes dollar cost averaging. These are all sort of tricks of the trade. Learn more about automated investing technology@betterment.com.

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Road to Rickwood: The Holy Grail of Baseball

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Episode Chapters

1. Introduction: Rickwood's Legacy

2. The Beginnings of Rickwood

3. Social and Political Events

4. The Negro Leagues at Rickwood

5. Legacy and Reflections

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