Major League Baseball laid exhaustive groundwork for the first-ever regular season game between two National League teams at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama to be a success. The former home to the Birmingham Black Barons and the site of the 1948 Negro League World Series proved a remarkable setting for a Thursday game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals.
Read more: Why is MLB Staging a Baseball Game in Birmingham, Alabama?
More than that, it was an opportunity to tell the story of the field and the men who played there while the American and National Leagues erected an artificial “color barrier” against non-white players.
While Fox‘s broadcast did its best to sprinkle important history lessons into a nine-inning game, Reggie Jackson’s response to a simple question from Alex Rodriguez during Fox’s pregame presentation stole the show.
Jackson, 78, hit 563 home runs in a Hall of Fame career with the Oakland A’s, New York Yankees, and California Angels from 1967-87. He spent most of the 1967 season with the Birmingham A’s of the Southern League before making his debut. He remembered the experience well — and not fondly.
Alex Rodriguez asked a question. Reggie Jackson answered it.
(Shouts to the producer and rest of the desk for staying out of Reggie’s way and just letting him talk. I doubt they expected this answer. But it’s a great few minutes of television.)pic.twitter.com/7WqjlppvF8
— Gary Parrish (@GaryParrishCBS) June 21, 2024
“Coming back (to Birmingham) is not easy. The racism that I (faced) here when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places that we traveled … fortunately I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
“People said to me today and I spoke on it: ‘Do you think you’re a better person, do you think you won, when you played here…’ And I said, you know, I would never want to do it again. I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say ‘The n***** can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they would say ‘The n***** can’t stay here.’ We went to [A’s owner] Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner, and they pointed me out with the N-word, ‘He can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. Finally they let me in. He had said ‘We’re gonna go to a diner, and eat hamburgers, we’ll go where we’re wanted.’
“Fortunately, I had a manager, Johnny McNamara, that if I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody…
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