As the Barons’ bus neared the outskirts of Birmingham after the ten-hour ride home following the final game of the season (which they won, 8–5, sparked by another long Reynolds homer), the morning sun danced off the city’s skyline. Beer cans littered the floor and bleary-eyed players stared out the windows. Up front, Sullivan turned to Belcher in the next seat.
“Sorry we couldn’t win it for you,” he said.
“A hell of a year anyway,” replied Belcher.
In the distance, they could see the Vulcan, the iconic statue atop Red Mountain that paid homage to the city’s industrial origins. A mile away, the 16th Street Baptist Church stood quiet but resolute. The one-year anniversary of the dynamite blast that shocked the nation was four days away. “Who knows?” said Sullivan. “Maybe I’ll be back next year.”
“I doubt it,” said Belcher. “Mr. Finley has bigger plans for you.”
They didn’t need to say it, but they both believed that Mr. Finley had cost them the pennant. It didn’t take Casey Stengel to understand that Campy, Sanders, and Blue Moon would’ve been worth a couple more wins.
Still, for Belcher, the millionaire lumber baron, the season had been a success. His team had turned a small profit, but—more important—he had defied the odds, the Big Mules, and the Ku Klux Klan in bringing professional baseball back to his hometown. “Sully, I think I can speak for Birmingham,” said Belcher. “Thanks for a great ride.”
As the bus turned onto 3rd Avenue near Rickwood, Belcher smiled. Sometimes, the course of events can change a person’s heart. For the past week he had watched Tommie Reynolds put on one of the greatest hitting exhibitions in the history of the game, major or minor league. He’d seen his left fielder get knocked down almost every time he stepped to the plate, yet quietly pick himself up, dust off his uniform, and then hit a wicked line drive somewhere. He’d heard the witless insults hurled at the young man, and marveled at how Reynolds, in the manner of a Jackie Robinson, just kept doing his job, eyes straight ahead, carrying himself with dignity and pride when it would’ve been easy to charge into the stands. Having witnessed all that, Belcher’s allegiance to the hard-core tenets of segregation was forever shaken.
He had never thought that returning Baron baseball to Birmingham made him a civil rights activist. But his 1964 Birmingham Barons had given a glimpse of what integration could accomplish. In terms of impact or courage, his efforts paled next to those of Martin Luther King Jr. or the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, two men he regularly disagreed with. Running an integrated baseball team wasn’t on a scale of the significant deeds of the time—it didn’t compare to the “I Have a Dream” speech, the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the registering of black voters, or the confrontation with Bull Connor and his police dogs and fire hoses. Those were acts of courage and conviction. But Belcher’s effort was a stepping-stone on the road to racial equality and, if not a knife to the heart, at least a head butt to the chest of Jim Crow.
The Barons had shown Birmingham what was possible. In the same way that a house needs someone to first lay the foundation and frame the walls, Albert Belcher helped set the groundwork for changes to come… for the city, for the Southern League, for himself.
Nobody had gotten shot or beaten up. Nobody had his house dynamited. Nobody caught a disease while sharing a Rickwood restroom. Instead, night after night at a baseball park older than any in America, players and fans of different shades gathered to enjoy a game as solidly rooted in Southern culture as the segregated schools and lunch counters of the city in which those games were played.
Albert Belcher was already planning for next year.
Belcher had been the one to recruit Charlie Finley, a fellow Birmingham native, and despite Finley’s meddling he and Belcher had set the tone and the design that lured the fans into coming out to Rickwood. And it was those fans in Birmingham—the most maligned city in America—who ignored the hatred and the violence and, for nine innings at least, did their best to root, root, root for the home team… and in their own little way, improve the city’s image.
When the season started, the stench of dynamite still lingered. Five months later, as the Barons’ bus turned into the Rickwood parking lot, Birmingham, at least on the surface, had made little progress: It still did not have a black policeman; the FBI still had not made any arrests in the church bombing; schools had admitted only a handful of black students; blacks could still not eat in most restaurants, stay at the Tutwiler Hotel, or live on the canopied streets of Mountain Brook or Homewood; blacks still made half as much for the same work as whites… if they could even get hired; blacks still drank from separate drinking fountains; and whenever a black committed a crime, the newspapers fanned the flames by always using the word NEGRO in the headline.
But at Rickwood, the blacks had cheered on the Barons just as loudly as the whites. The Checkers Rule had been demolished, and the chicken wire that separated the races had come down. Despite the fears of the hard-liners, there had been no rush on the Jefferson County Courthouse for applications for interracial marriages. The money that blacks had spent at the ticket windows and concession stands turned out to be as green as anybody’s.
Albert Belcher had delivered a message to civic and business leaders that was clear—the old Jim Crow way of doing things had not only been bad for the city’s image but bad for the economy, too, including the business of baseball.
In 1964, the people demanding an end to racial segregation were not focused on the Southern League experiment or the Birmingham Barons. Their primary battlefields were schools, lunch counters, buses, hotels, drinking fountains, and other forms of public accommodation. America’s recreational fields seemed somehow less relevant, especially with cities all across the country erupting in violence.
Although the attendance figures at Rickwood were only slightly higher than they had been back in 1961, when the players were all white and the blacks sat on the other side of the chicken wire, a threatened boycott by white fans never materialized. People wanting to see quality minor-league baseball turned out, sometimes in large numbers, as they had for the Kansas City exhibition game. Across the country, minor-league attendance was falling—largely because of the rise of nationally televised major-league games and more competition for the entertainment dollar—but the Barons had held their own.
It was too soon, and perhaps too much of a reach, to proclaim that the Barons’ experiment was a turning point in the march toward equal rights, but if it could happen at Rickwood, then maybe the same thing could happen at other venues around Birmingham—restaurants, hotels, department stores, schools, businesses. Although the Civil Rights Act had now been passed, nobody in the South, or anywhere else for that matter, believed the law was going to change what was in people’s hearts. That would take years, or decades, if it happened at all. But Belcher’s Barons had provided a living lab for how an integrated community could function successfully.
Discussions had begun in Birmingham to open an Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. There was no shortage of candidates—Hank Aaron, Mel Allen, Johnny Mack Brown, Bear Bryant, Willy Mays, Willie McCovey, Satchel Paige, Bart Starr. It didn’t seem like a stretch to think that Haywood Sullivan and Albert Belcher would be added to that list.