Negro Leagues honored at renovated Rickwood Field

Another View

But the neighborhood around the ballpark has seen better days

It was my second time ever in Birmingham, Alabama as I covered the MLB game at Rickwood Field last Thursday to honor nearly 60 Negro Leagues players still alive. However, little was said about Rising, the neighborhood where Rickwood is located. 

“Nobody wants to hear our story,” said Jeffrey (his last name withheld by request).

Rising-West Princeton, or Rising for short, is located on Birmingham’s West End, a predominantly Black neighborhood sandwiched between white neighborhoods to the north and south in a five-six block radius. Rickwood, America’s oldest ballpark (114 years), is one of several neighborhood landmarks.

Jeffrey was born in Rising nearly 70 years ago. As a youngster growing up, he was Birmingham’s minor league team batboy and ballboy. He and a young Reggie Jackson were the only Blacks on the team. 

“It was hard on him,” Jeffrey recalled of Jackson, a future Hall of Famer who bluntly spoke about life in segregated Birmingham before last Thursday’s game.

“Our neighborhood wasn’t that big,” continued Jeffrey. “Kids worked at the ballpark. That’s how we made our little money in the summer.”

Rising was a middle-class Black neighborhood when Jeffrey grew up there: “We had brick homes. Everybody knew everybody.” However, the neighborhood these days is a shell of its former self. Jeffrey eventually moved north to Michigan, but returned to Birmingham and Rising in 2016 and discovered it had changed.

“The neighborhood is still a family,” said Jeffrey. “We still got some folks still [living there]. Some of the families just didn’t take care of the property.”

After announcing last summer the first regular season MLB game would be played at the old Negro Leagues ballpark, MLB invested $4.5 million in ballpark renovations; reportedly nearly $6 million was spent in total.

“We have been working with Major League Baseball for a very, very long time to make this game possible,” said Chris Mosley, the neighborhood liaison for Birmingham City. Councilwoman Carol Clarke, a Black woman who represents District 8, which includes Rising. “This is a truly beneficial opportunity that we will take advantage of.”

For last week’s game, both MLB and the City of Birmingham made 26% of the approximate 8,300 seat tickets available to community or youth-based organizations in Birmingham at no cost. Also, more than 200 part-time employees were hired from the surrounding neighborhood and throughout Greater Birmingham to work all Rickwood events throughout last week—the game, a celebrity softball game, and a concert held outside the stadium. We spoke to several of them during our time there. 

Yet Jeffrey said that despite this the neighborhood for the most part got the short end of the stick last week. The area was barricaded off, which kept residents from easily moving about. A friend called him and said that he was stopped by three police officers while walking to a local convenience store, questioning what he was doing there—he lived in Rising.  

According to the Birmingham City Council website, Clarke, Mayor Randall Woodfin and other city department heads held town hall meetings leading up to the Rickwood game. But Jeffrey wasn’t satisfied. “They didn’t explain everything,” he told me.  

“That kind of bothered me. All of us are mad because…it wasn’t about us as people.” Instead the focus was on last Thursday’s game.

Mosley said he hopes MLB will make the game an annual event: “We look forward to continuing to grow as a result of what Major League Baseball has done with Rickwood and the impact it will have not only on this neighborhood, but Birmingham overall.”

If this is the case, Jeffrey insists that more must be done. “They don’t have a choice, because me and some of my friends are getting together and raising hell that we didn’t appreciate being left out,” he said.