'Man's inhumanity to kids': How Little League failed a team of young Black players

The Little League World Series – unlike the one played in Major League Baseball – really is a world series.

Millions of boys and girls play Little League Baseball in more than 80 countries and six continents. This year's World Series will conclude Sunday with its championship game at Howard J. Lamade Stadium in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

The organization promotes itself with this inclusive message, “No place for racism and hate in Little League.” These words are not a gimmick.

Little League Baseball was part of the civil rights movement before the movement had a name. The struggle for racial equality in the United States included Little League Baseball’s civil war in 1955, when hundreds of Southern teams seceded from the organization after they were told they had to play Black teams.

Little League barred discrimination at its founding

Little League Baseball was integrated during the first Little League World Series in 1947, the same year Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier.

The organization barred racial discrimination when it was founded in 1939, before most of white America gave racial equality any consideration, and before Blacks and whites played in professional sports, attended the same schools, swam in the same pools and ate at the same lunch counters.

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Little League baseball was even integrated in parts of the South. But that ended, ironically, in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in public schools.

White Southern politicians urged citizens to resist the Brown decision.

When the 11- and 12-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA team in Charleston, South Carolina, registered for a tournament in July 1955, the team found itself on a collision course with Jim Crowism. The presence of a Black team in a tournament was enough to scare white adults who were afraid their sons would lose.

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The adult Southerners’ argument for white supremacy was so fragile it could be defeated by 11- and 12-year-old Black boys with baseball gloves and bats. The white teams refused to play the Cannon Street team.

“Who wants to be the first white team to lose to a Black team in the all-American sport of baseball?” asked historian Gus Holt, who revived the team’s story in the 1990s.

When Little League Baseball ordered the white teams to play the Cannon Street team in the state tournament, the adults left Little League Baseball and created their own segregated youth baseball league, Dixie Youth Baseball. The organization still plays in the states of the former Confederacy. Little League Baseball nearly disappeared from the South.

A white team, the Orlando Kiwanis, agreed to play a Black team, the Pensacola Jaycees, in Florida's tournament. Orlando’s manager quit in protest because the boys on his team rejected his objection to play the game.

The Cannon Street team won South Carolina's tournament on forfeit and advanced to the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia.

It was then, however, that Little League Baseball lost its nerve.

Black team was ruled ineligible

The organization abandoned the Cannon Street team by declaring it ineligible because its rules said a team had to advance by winning on the field. The organization’s president admitted he was concerned by what might happen if the Cannon Street team went to rural Georgia.

“Man’s inhumanity to man has been a constant through history,” Holt said. “This is about man’s inhumanity to kids.”

The Cannon Street story faded and disappeared as Americans read of other civil rights stories, including the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.

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Decades after they were denied the chance to play in the national pastime, the former Cannon Street players, who were subjected to the humiliation of bigotry in 1955, were finally recognized.

In 2002, Little League Baseball invited the team to Williamsport for the Little League World Series opening ceremonies and apologized to the former players. Dixie Youth Baseball has never acknowledged that its organization was founded, as Holt put it, “on the tears of the Cannon Street players.”

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A 2018 documentary, "Long Time Coming," tells the story of the 1955 Florida state tournament game between the Pensacola Jaycees and the Orlando Kiwanis. In March, a bronze statue was unveiled commemorating the field where the game was played.

On June 12, the Charleston RiverDogs, the single-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays, honored the Cannon Street YMCA all-stars before a game at Joseph P. Riley ballpark as it does every year. Three of the former ballplayers received a standing ovation. They tipped their hats appreciatively.

This comes as many white Americans don’t want the history of racism taught in schools because they say it makes their children uncomfortable. This argument, of course, drips of white supremacy. What about the centuries of Blacks and other people of color who were brutalized and denied basic rights?

We should teach the history of racism in the United States in schools because it made life so uncomfortable for millions of people of color.

Chris Lamb is chair of the Journalism and Public Relations Department at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is the author of "Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball's Civil War."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Little League led on civil rights, then it failed young Black players