ATLANTA (AP) - It was a seminal moment in the civil rights movement.
In hindsight, one of the most significant games in American history.
Yet most people have never heard the baseball story.
Not even Hank Aaron, who is all too familiar with this nation’s resistance to racial equality.
“I didn’t know anything about this game,” the Hammer conceded.
Well, it’s about time that everyone learns what happened in Orlando, Florida on Aug. 9, 1955.
For the first time, an integrated Little League Baseball game - a group of white kids playing a team of African-American youngsters -was held in the Jim Crow South.
“We knew it was different. But when it came right down to it, we were just competing against that other team,” said Willie Preyer, who played center field for the all-black Pensacola Jaycees. “It hadn’t dawned on us, the significance of it. We just wanted to play baseball. We wanted to go down there and win. We wanted to show our talents.”
The 12-year-olds certainly didn’t see themselves as civil rights pioneers, even in a country that was barely a year removed from the epic “Brown vs. Board of Education” decision from the Supreme Court, a country that would be rocked less than three weeks later by the brutal murder of black teenager Emmett Till for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.
“We just played the game,” said Stewart Hall, first baseman for the all-white Orlando Kiwanis team. “When it was over, there was no more discussion about it. We just went on to our next game. It was almost routine.”
Of course, there was nothing routine about the moment.
That same summer, a group of black Little Leaguers captured the South Carolina state championship by default, simply because no white team would agree to play them. It looked like the same thing would happen to the Pensacola Jaycees, who advanced to their state tournament only because every white team in the Florida Panhandle decided to forfeit.
But when they got to Orlando, the Jaycees finally found a willing opponent.
And, fortunately for us, the new documentary “Long Time Coming: A 1955 Baseball Story” has brought this amazing snippet in the American experience back to life .
The movie debuted in April at the Florida Film Festival. It will be shown again Saturday night at the Carter Center in Atlanta, followed by a Q&A; featuring Aaron, Hall and another member of the Jaycees team, Admiral “Spider” LeRoy. The creators are trying to line up a distributor to release their film to a wider audience.
In a nation torn apart by racial, ethnic and political divisions, the timing couldn’t be better.
Those 12-year-old boys - now in the later innings of life - could be the perfect messengers of hope and reconciliation.
“It’s not about what kind of ballgame it was,” the 75-year-old Hall said....