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Reggie Jackson reminds us that an MLB game at Rickwood Field is not a kumbaya moment

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Clinton Yates takes readers on a journey through the primary MLB game in Birmingham, Alabama, at Rickwood Field, the oldest skilled ballpark within the United States.


BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — When the game finally got here, it gave the look of baseball was the final thing on anyone’s mind. An intensely competitive week within the county seat of Jefferson County, Alabama, ended with a fairly average match when it comes to balls, hits, hits and runs, but there is little doubt that every player who was qualified for this matchup – together with every one who got here through through the partitions of Rickwood Field – a different person left this park than the one who arrived.

The proverbial food at the baseball feast provided the celebratory comfort they needed, considering.

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Team St. Louis Cardinals, playing as St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League defeated the San Francisco Giants, playing because the San Francisco Sea Lions of the West Coast Negro Baseball League, by a rating of 6-5 in a game that nearly resulted within the Cards losing their third straight goal. That didn’t occur, however the end result of the game paled compared to the gravity of all the things we needed to reckon with: the death of Giants legend Willie Mays.

“Obviously devastating news. “This record-breaking event was truly designed with Willie in mind,” MLB director of baseball development Tony Reagins said during Thursday’s game. “I feel this event changed into a celebration of Willie’s life. I feel we’ll attempt to honor him in a way that hopefully his family can be pleased with. And Willie, , was 17 when he was here. To have that background, to have current top league players playing at Rickwood is exciting, but after all it’s bittersweet not having him here.

Was this event and week somewhat of a spiritual ending to Mays’ life, when it comes to things starting and ending in Birmingham? Sure, but for essentially the most part it wasn’t a kumbaya moment. Yes, it’s great to acknowledge the efforts of players who paved the best way for others, but the reality is that for a lot of them, this event opened the injuries of essentially the most traumatic experiences of their lives.

“Coming back here is not easy. The racism after I played here, the issue of traveling through different places we traveled,” Reggie Jackson said live to tell the tale FOX when asked by Alex Rodriguez about his feelings about returning to Rickwood Field. Jackson played for the Birmingham A’s in 1967, the AA affiliate of the Kansas City/Oakland Athletics. “Luckily I had a manager and players within the team who helped me through it, but I would not wish it on anyone.

“I said, , I never need to do that again. I’d walk into a restaurant and so they’d point at me and say, “That nigga can’t eat here.” I’d go to the hotel and so they’d say, “That nigga can’t stay here.” We went to Charlie Finley’s (then owner of Athletics and Ensley in Alabama) country club for a home-cooked welcome dinner. And they pointed at me with the N word. – He cannot come here. Finley led all the team.

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Negro League legend Bill Greason (second from right) throws out the ceremonial first pitch with the assistance of San Francisco Giants first baseman Lamont Wade Jr. (third from the left) and assistant coach St. Louis Cardinals Willie McGee (right) as Baseball Hall of Famers Derek Jeter (left) and Reggie Jackson (second from left) look at Rickwood Field on June 20 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Photos by Daniel Shirey/MLB via Getty Images

Let’s stop and remind ourselves of something: racism is and has been a problem. The white supremacist system built into the law, not to say the collective consciousness, has robbed us not only of the very best entertainment we could have inside an integrated game, but additionally of the humanity of the individuals involved.

The truth is that I saw Jackson by accident when he got here to town. We were at the identical hotel and I used to be having a drink within the lobby when the Hall of Famer rolled in. I’d say we all know one another, but I assumed back to the time he called me at batting practice during a World Series game once in Houston to discuss then-Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, black man to black man. Honestly, it was an honor I’ll always remember.

But that night he seemed a bit nervous, which I simply chalked as much as travel fatigue, as many Americans know well. But after his appearance Thursday at the Southern Negro League Museum and his moment during his Fox Sports pregame show, it is easy to know that he mainly ended up back in hell, which created the personality many know now.

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He made this confession at a luncheon held Thursday morning honoring the families of former Negro League players. He was asked a query about one among his best Alabama memories and told a story about legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, who, in an apparent moment of sympathy, told him that the Crimson Tide needed more N-words like him in running back competing with the very best. Think about it. Apparently it was a memory.

The story of this football team’s “journey” to integration has its own complicated history, but mainly Bryant, the houndstoothed man, needed to take several brutal beatings from teams with all-black players before he realized you could not win the SEC with 22 Forrest Gumps running around in your pitch.

“Luckily I had a manager, Johnny McNamara, who said if I couldn’t eat where no one would eat. We would get food for the journey,” Jackson said. “If it weren’t for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudy… I slept on their couch three or 4 nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they threatened to burn down our apartment constructing if I didn’t get out. I would not wish this on anyone.

“The year I came here. The year before, Bull Connor had been sheriff and they had banned minor league baseball from here because the Klan had murdered four black girls in a local church in 1963 and was never charged. …the magazine wrote about them (the Klan) as if they were being honored. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

Jackson did not play within the Negro Leagues. But he played at Alabama. And he knocked it out of the park for the last time.

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Oakland Athletics outfielder Reggie Jackson in 1969.

AP photo

You simply cannot separate the visceral sense of racism within the American South when a black person walks there daily. Does this mean that people in hoods at the moment are burning crosses on our porches? No, but it surely’s not prefer it’s ancient history. A Hall of Famer on live TV throwing out a hard “R” and referencing a lynching on the printed? Welcome to Birmingham.

“If it weren’t for my white friends, or the white manager, Rudy, Fingers, Duncan and Lee Meyers? I’d never do that,” Jackson said. “I used to be too physically aggressive. I used to be able to physically fight someone. I can be killed here because I’d beat someone… And you’d see me somewhere within the oak tree. Jackson concluded with the form of laughter that only black men of a certain age, with a certain experience and a certain courage can unleash.

At night all the things looked wonderful on the surface. Mays’ son Michael returned to the park to open proceedings, the teams continued playing, etc. The game went well, and the throwback to Nineteen Fifties-style black and white footage was very cool from a visual standpoint, reminding us of the primary American sports attraction , Mays with a catch to center field. But that didn’t occur in Alabama. Not by many miles. It was in New York that Michael Mays calls home.

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“Get back on your feet,” he told the group in his authoritative Harlem accent. “Let him hear you, he listens.”

He was referring to the ghost of his father upstairs, a touching moment for a man who had endured a week of mental toll that nobody else could imagine.

Barry Bonds (left), baseball legend and godson of late Hall of Famer Willie Mays, comforts Mays’ son Michael (right) before a game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama on June 20.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

There are more players and other people than I care to confess who attended these ceremonies and smiled because the popularity gave them the sensation of satisfaction they deserved. However, it does not change their lives, the stories they heard as children, or the violence they experienced each physically and mentally.

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MLB learned a lesson this week that I’m not sure anyone was prepared for. This game was never intended to repair anything and it still doesn’t. There were only two black players on the sector last night. What if you wish to talk concerning the reality of the world in and across the game each then and now?

On a hot June night, Mr. October reminded us: watch out what you want for. Maybe you may just get it.

Clinton Yates is a tastemaker at Andscape. He likes rap, rock, reggae, R&B and remixes – in that order.


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Jalen Milroe can follow the Jalen path in NFL

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Star Black playmakers aren’t any longer an exception – they’re the rule. Throughout the entire football season, this series will discover the importance and influence of black QB from bottom -up to NFL.


Indianapolis-keep me, should you heard it earlier: playmaker Alabama born in Texas, who’s a stronger runner than a passerby, will probably be called outside the first round of the NFL Draft.

The playmaker was undefeated in Sec as a primary -year starter.

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The playmaker never played for the same offensive coordinator.

The name of the playmaker is even Jalen.

But it isn’t clear that Jalen hurts. This winter he was busy winning the Super Bowl MVP, and he didn’t play Iron Bowl or against Michigan.

Instead, it’s a former playmaker of Crimson Tide Jalen Milroewho last week Combine Combine tried to convey the case to the trainers and evaluators that he – like his namesake – is price being their playmaker franchise in the future despite questions on his ability.

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“I went through adversity. I saw everything as a quarterback, “Milroe said on Friday. “I played at the most difficult conference in the country. It would be easier to play at other conferences, but what I could see in Sec catapulted me that I was ready to play NFL. “

Alabama, Jalen Milroe, talks to the media during the NFL mix at the Lucas Oil stadium on February 28 at Indianapolis.

Justin Casterline/Getty Images

Departing from Katy in Texas, she originally got involved in Texas in 2019, but a 12 months later she fell to Alabama. After he was sitting behind the Crimson Tide Starter Bryung for 2 seasons, Milroe took his reins in the 2023 season. He helped Alabama survive Sec (8-0) this 12 months, won by the conference rival and two-time defender Georgia in the SEC championship, which caused Crimson Tide to the play-off collection.

But while Milroe had a big arm (his 10 yards for the test took third place in Sec in 2023), the pass was not his strong suit. For two seasons as a starter Milroe never achieved 3000 yards in one season, the first starter of Alabama, who did it because it … hurts.

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Hurts, from Houston, led Crimson Tide to the National National Championships in 2016–17, but during these two seasons were lower than 5,000 yards. While Hurts was a singular Rusher (1,809 yards and 21 sticks) at the moment, his weakness as a passerby is known for led to the spare Tua Tavailoa during the break of the national championships in 2017.

In the mix, Milroe decided that despite his pedestrian passes, he was still worthy of being a start at NFL.

He is aware of his weaknesses and swore that he worked in the ass to enhance outside being “one dimension.” He could move when his legendary trainer, Nick Saban, retired after the 2023 season, but decided to not fall off. He traveled six miles a day to ensure that that something was left in the fourth quarter in the fourth quarter. He studied progression and reads after I-SNAP to lift his IQ in football.

Unlike the forecast sorts of the first round, Cam Ward and Shedeur Sanders, Milroe threw a mix on Saturday, hoping that he would show the bands that he has mechanics to do that to the playmaker NFL. It turned out to be a mixed bag. Milroe showed strong arm strength and a very good location of sail routes, curls and it while throwing exercises, but fought accuracy on intermediate and on the routes.

“That’s so many things that I can learn more where I am today and where I will be when it comes to day 1, starting with NFL,” said Milroe before Saturday exercises. “Always be a game student, at all times attempt to develop, because it would be so many opportunities in which I can look back and say that it was the moment after I grew up as a playmaker.

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“That’s right now, I’m just trying to grow as much as possible, put my best foot forward and just look for development.”

Jalen Milroe warms up during seniors training at the Hancock Whitney stadium on January 29 at Mobile, Alabama.

Derick E. Hingle/Getty Images

Milroe was asked that he was one other playmaker in Alabama to succeed in the mix, following in the footsteps of the role (who moved to Oklahoma in 2019), Tavailoa, Mac Jones and Bryce Young. Milroe said he appreciates being in the company of others, but he added that it’s difficult to check him with others.

“We had different bands, we had different players around us, we had a different system,” he said.

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But when he specifically asked what he could study the journey of Hurts-from the first manager of the game after the super Bowl-Milroe master said he inspired him his companion Alabam.

“The most important thing I learned from J. Hurts is how he kept his head (I) always continued to work,” said Milroe. “He at all times raised his game, he has never been self -deserved, and all the pieces you see is great progress from him.

“And I have to applaud him as a person, he as a man, because he is definitely inspiring for many playmakers of my image, as well as many playmakers throughout the country. He leads to all of us. “

The couple isn’t completely similar. Hurts had about 20 kilos on Milroe when he was in college. Milroe has a stronger arm, while Hurts played more and not using a mistake of football: Milroe threw 17 interceptions and ate 67 bags for 2 seasons as a starter in comparison with 10 captures Hurts and 43 bags.

But they can each be changing the game when their teams need them. In a highly publicized match against Georgia at the starting of the last season, Milroe finished almost 82% of his passes on 374 yards and two appointments, adding 117 yards to the ground for the next two results.

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Milroe can also match the wounds in the so -called “Jalen-ISMS. “

“Climbing upstairs is not easy, but when you reach the top of this mountain, you will learn so many things when it comes to adversity when it comes to difficulties, things along the way,” said Milroe in a mix.

Martenzie Johnson is an older author for Andcape. His favorite film moment is that Django said: “You all want to see something?”

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Like Tommie Smith and John Carlos from 1968. Black Power Salute inspired me to find my goal

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I’d say that I grew up within the household to be sure that that me and my siblings were aware of the black history. My parents invested in the gathering of black encyclopedias. On the duvet we had a version of the Bible with Black Jesus. Our house was stuffed with books of black novelists and thinkers, and if a black document appeared, we watched it. I watched all movies made on television about Dr. King, each “Roots” and “Alex Haley’s Queen” and I sat for all 14 hours “Eyes on the reward”-as a toddler. Bless my heart.

Having said this, there have been pockets of black history, and more likely that I had no opportunity to delve into once I was a toddler. The college was where all the will for information and understanding of the combined. I attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., One of a very powerful historically black universities within the country. It was there that I met people from around the globe whose knowledge about black history differed (often depending on the colleges and the communities by which we lived), but everyone had hunger to learn more.

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One day, through the first yr, I remember one among my friends in a T -shirt by which I had definitely seen before, but I never paid attention to. There was a black and white screen printing on the shirt (what I do know now) the enduring moment on the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968, where on the rostrum for 200-meter medals, Tommie Smith, John Carlos (races 1. And 3. Place Finaners) Everyone gathered a black fist in gloves while he played “Star Spangled Banner”. Peter Norman, the second place from Australia, wore a human rights badge, like Smith and Carlos.

Not only did they raise the fist of black power (although they each said it was for human rights), they received medals in black socks to represent poverty within the black community, and Smith wore a black scarf for black pride. Carlos showed solidarity with blue-wheeled employees, unpacking the jacket and wore a necklace from the beads for individuals who were lynched. Due to the state of Black America in 1968 and a continuing struggle for equality and civil rights, there have been calls to a boycott of the Games. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was also killed in April this yr – and all three athletes were inspired enough to find a way to do it on the rostrum, which led to one of the crucial durable images of public protest.

I remember how I learned history and realized that on the most important scene these brave men used their moment of triumph and victory to quietly protest against the conditions of underrated communities in America. I felt strengthened; We often discuss standing on the arms of giants, however the more I got into the history of black in America, the more I spotted what number of giants there have been. In college I used to be very bad and for a while ready to burn every part that represented the establishment or any obstacle to black liberation. I felt like all those individuals who even saw their space on the planet in reference to individuals who could never give you the option to speak as heroes whose lives were to be modeled later. Especially since it was also fastidiously that putting people in front of him can often bring an enormous personal loss.

When Smith and Carlos took their position, they were booed on the stadium and ordered to be sent home by the International Olympic Committee. The athletes returned home, but they weren’t welcomed by the hero, but as a substitute of rough sleds, and even in some cases the specter of death. They were also not beloved by athletes. Two men, associated eternally in history, even have a good relationship –Carlos even claims that he let Smith go within the race Because “Tommie Smith would never put his fist in the sky if I won this race,” the claim that Smith denies.

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History ultimately has a way of rights, but it surely took a few years and realizations on the front of social policy, in order that the actions of those persons are perceived as brave and needed, not only selfish and smug.

The lessons that I learned from College and continuous reading and education I gained (my head remained within the book about black history) were one among the best advantages in HBCU. The very variety of books I learned about about which I actually have never heard of – I actually have upheld me all my life.

That is why I remember sooner or later I used to be walking around Washington, the eastern Washington market and a street seller was selling different photos of moments in black history, and he had a 40 -inch photo within the Tommie Smith and John Carlos frame. I paid for it in money and spent it across the capital of the country until I returned home. I do know that it happened in 2005 (I finished Morehouse College in 2001) because I just moved to my first apartment with no roommate and it was the very first thing that I actually have ever suspended on the wall. This picture within the frame still hangs on the wall in my home in 2025 and I used it to teach my children about sacrifice and privilege and how you may have to discuss individuals who cannot.

Teenage students of Stax Music Academy Mark 25th anniversary, black history month with a concert

The query that my youngest children often ask: “How do I know who can’t speak for herself?” Which is an incredible query. For this I answered an easy fact, pointing to the photo:

“These men have made a gesture that gave people whose most of us, including them, would never see or never know them, but on which life negatively affects the alternatives of the wealthy and the federal government. Sometimes you may have to take this chance to say something because you do not know in the event you’ll ever have such a big platform.

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Son, there may be at all times someone who cannot speak for himself, and you may have to use it in a voice, because perhaps the thing you say or a stand that can help someone you understand, live a greater life. ”

I take advantage of words that may understand a little bit higher, but I can inform you that my children have a look at this photo on a regular basis, and once one among my sons said: “These guys are heroes, right?”

I say yes, they’re. They are the heroes of the Black History.

They will live eternally for speaking, and even quietly, in solidarity with those that couldn’t.

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Panama Jackson Thegrio.com

(Tagstranslate) @Ap

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Main Treasury Official Morgan State University, Sterling Steward, died

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Morgan State University, Sterling Steward


Morgan State University announced that his older associate athletics director and tax director, Sterling Steward, died.

No reason for death was disclosed, but the college has confirmed his contribution since he was employed in December 2022.

Steward died on February 26. In Morgan State he was accountable for the event of university programs, supporting partnerships and strengthening the financial and operational success of the Faculty.

“Sterling was more than a colleague-he was a respected leader, mentor and friend,” said in a written statement by Den Freeman-Patton, vice chairman and director of inter-university athletes. “His passion for athletics and commitment to raising Morgan programs were visible in everything he did. He worked tirelessly to ensure that our sports students had resources and the possibilities of distinction, and its impact will be felt for many years. We expand our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones, especially his three sons and sister when we mourn this huge loss. “

While the steward worked in Morgan, strategic growth and cooperation occurred. His work with the institutional development department helped to offer more opportunities and created lasting relationships to support sports programs.

Steward earlier he worked At the University of New Orleans (UNO) as an assistant to the college athletics director for strategic income generation. He also made stays on the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Savannah State University, Mississippi Valley State University, Alabama State University, Kentucky State University, Eastern Oregon University and Xavier University in various roles, including for a senior consultant athletics director and sports director.

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He was from New Orleans, who received the title of bachelor and master’s degree on the University of Southern Mississippi. He won a bachelor’s degree in the sphere of coaching and administration/history of sport and his master’s degree in the sphere of sport management.

(Tagstransate) Morgan State Universiry

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