Robert E. Pierre/The Washington Post via Getty Images
How bigotry crushed the dreams of an all-Black Little League team
Chris Lamb, Indiana University
John Rivers, John Bailey, David Middleton, Leroy Major and Buck Godfrey – all teammates from the 1955 Cannon Street YMCA Little League All-Star team – left Charleston, South Carolina, on a bus on Aug. 18, 2025.
After a stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for a couple days – where their story is included in an exhibit on Black baseball that opened in 2024 – they’ll head to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
There, they’ll be recognized before the Little League World Series championship game on August 24, 2025 – 70 years after the players, then 11 and 12 years old, watched the championship game from the bleachers, wondering why they weren’t on the field living out their own dreams instead of watching other boys live out theirs.
When the Cannon Street team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry and the Southern way of life.
White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team, who represented the first Black Little League in South Carolina. The team won two tournaments by forfeit. They were supposed to then go to a regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where, if they won, they’d advance to the Little League World Series.
But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible for the regional tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, as the rules stipulated.
A 4-team Black league is born
The Civil Rights Movement is often told in terms of court decisions, bus boycotts and racist demagogues. It’s rarely told from the point of view of children, who suffered in ways that left physical and emotional scars.
When I was a journalism professor at the College of Charleston, I learned how the presence of a single Black all-star team was enough to cause one of the biggest crises in Little League history. In 2022, I wrote the book “Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War.”
The team’s story begins in 1953. Robert Morrison, president of the Cannon Street YMCA, petitioned Little League Baseball to create a league for Black teams, and Little League Baseball granted the charter. Dozens of Black 11- and 12-year-old boys were selected for the four-team league before the 1954 season.
They played on a diamond of grass and gravel at Harmon Field in Charleston, a city with a long history of racial strife. In 1861, the Civil War began in Charleston harbor, where hundreds of thousands of slaves had been brought to the U.S. from the 1600s to the 1800s. The field also wasn’t far from Emanuel AME church, where nine Black parishioners were murdered during a prayer meeting in 2015.
Little League Baseball barred first-year leagues from the postseason tournaments. At some point during the 1955 season, the best players were selected for the league’s All-Star team. Cannon Street YMCA officials then registered the team for the Charleston city tournament, which included all-star teams from the city’s all-white leagues.
Little League Baseball officially prohibited racial discrimination. But in South Carolina, racial discrimination was still legal.
Dixie fights back
The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled a year earlier that segregation in schools was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, paving the way for racial integration.
Few states resisted integration as fiercely as South Carolina, and no politician fought harder against racial equality than the state’s junior U.S. senator, Strom Thurmond.
So when the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars registered for Charleston’s citywide tournament in July 1955, all the white teams withdrew. The Cannon Street team won by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament.
Danny Jones, the state’s director of Little League Baseball, petitioned the organization to create a segregated state tournament. Little League Baseball’s president, Peter McGovern, denied Jones’ request. He said that any team that refused to play the Cannon Street team would be banned from the organization.
Thurmond let it be known to Jones that an integrated tournament could not be permitted. In the end, Jones urged all the white teams to withdraw from the state tournament. He then resigned from Little League Baseball, created the Little Boys League and wrote the league’s charter, which prohibited Black players.
Dixie Youth Baseball
The Little Boys League – which was rebranded as Dixie Youth Baseball – soon replaced Little League in other Southern states; within six years, there were 390 such leagues spanning most of the former Confederacy. It would be decades before Little League Baseball returned to South Carolina.
Having won the South Carolina tournament by forfeit, the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars prepared for the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where the state’s governor, Marvin Griffin, objected to integration. If youth baseball could be integrated, so, too, could schools, swimming pools and municipal parks, he said.
Let them play!
Little League rules said that teams could advance only by playing and winning, so the Cannon Street’s state championship was ruled invalid because it had come by forfeit.
McGovern decided against making an exception for the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars.
Most white-owned newspapers, whether in the South or North, had long stayed silent on the topic of racial discrimination. But the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars broke through. Editors and reporters may have wanted to avoid the topic of racism, but boys being denied the opportunity to play in a baseball tournament was too objectionable to ignore.
On July 31, 1955, New York Daily News columnist Dick Young asked Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, who had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier eight years earlier, about the white teams that had quit the tournament rather than play against a Black team.
“How stupid can they be?” Robinson said. “I had to laugh when I read the story.”
Perhaps pressured by criticism, McGovern, Little League’s president, invited the team to be Little League’s guests for the championship game. So the team boarded a bus for Williamsport. They arrived the night before the championship game, which pitted Morrisville, Pennsylvania, against Delaware Township, New Jersey, an integrated team.
The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and their coaches were introduced before the game, and the players recall hearing a loud voice from the bleachers.
“Let them play!” it boomed.
Others in the crowd joined in, the players said.
“Let them play! Let them play!”
John Rivers, who played second base for the team, told me he can still “hear it now.”
After their brief moment on the field, the Cannon Street All-Stars returned to their seats and watched other boys live out their dreams. A photograph of the team in the stands reveals the disappointment on their faces.
1955 Cannon Street All-Stars/Facebook
On the following day – Aug. 28, 1955 – the team boarded its bus to return to Charleston. It was the same date that Emmett Till, not much older than the players on the team, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for reportedly whistling at a white woman.
The boys and girls who play in the 2025 tournament will forever remember the experience. The surviving members of the Cannon Street All-Stars, who are all in their early 80s, never forgot what they were denied.
Rivers, who went on to become a successful architect, says this is the moral of their story.
“It’s a tragedy to take dreams away from a youngster,” Rivers told The Washington Post in 2022. “I knew it then. I know it now, and I’ve seen to it that no one takes dreams away from me again.”
Now there are some on the political right who want to bury America’s ugly racial history.
America has never fully reckoned with slavery or the decades of segregation, Rivers recently told me. “It just decided to move on from that ugly period in its history without any kind of therapy,” he said. “And now they are trying to sweep it all under the rug again.”
Portions of this article first appeared in an article published on Aug. 19, 2016.
Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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