The Northwood team of Taylors, South Carolina, was eliminated from the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA, on Monday by losing to Kentucky, 4-3.
Northwood, however, will return to South Carolina as the first team from the baseball-rich state to qualify for the Little League World Series since 1950.
No team from South Carolina was eligible for much of this time after cities and towns withdrew from the organization in protest after a black team, the Cannon Street YMCA all-stars, qualified for the state tournament in 1955.
It's been sixty years since bigotry prevented the Cannon Street players from living out their dreams of playing in the Little League World Series. Bigotry also denied perhaps dozens of white boys the opportunity of playing in the world series.
In 1954 Robert Morrison, president of the Cannon Street YMCA and a founding member of the NAACP in Charleston, received a charter from Little League Baseball for a black league.
If youth baseball could be integrated, Morrison believed, so could municipal parks, swimming pools, and schools. If there could be equal opportunities for black kids, he thought, there could be equal opportunity for black adults, whether in education, jobs, and housing.
Shortly after the Cannon Street YMCA league began its second season in 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the decision it made a year earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
The Cannon Street boys played against each other on a field of rocks, weeds, and crabgrass at Harmon Field - several blocks from Marion Square, where an 80-foot statue of John Calhoun, the 19th-century defender of slavery and voice of succession, looks over downtown Charleston.
Harmon Field stood a couple miles from Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, where the
Civil War began in 1861, and the Atlantic Ocean, where hundreds of thousands of slaves were brought from the 1600s to the early 1800s.
When Morrison registered the Cannon Street all-stars for the city tournament, all the white teams withdrew from the tournament. The Cannon Street all-stars won the tournament by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament.
This put Morrison and the forces of integration against Danny Jones, the state's director of Little League Baseball; the state's political establishment; and the forces of segregation.
U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, the state's former governor who ran for president in 1948 as a segregationist, led it be known to Jones that an integrated tournament could not be permitted.
If youth baseball could be integrated, Thurmond knew, so could municipal parks, swimming pools, and schools. If there could be equal opportunities for black kids, there could be equal opportunity for black adults, whether in education, jobs, and housing.
Jones wrote Little League Baseball asking for a segregated tournament. Peter McGovern, director
of Little League Baseball, denied Jones' request. He said that any team that refused to play the Cannon Street all-stars would be banned from Little League baseball.
At Jones' urging, all the teams withdrew from the tournament, making the Cannon Street team state champions. Jones then resigned from Little League Baseball and created the segregated Little Boys League. All the other white teams in the state joined the league.
Having segregated boys' baseball in South Carolina, Jones sought to do so in the rest of the South. By the next year, the Little Boys League had hundreds of teams. Within a few years, there would be virtually no Little League Baseball ended in much of the former Confederacy. The Little Boys League eventually changed its name to Dixie Youth Baseball. Uniforms had a Confederate flag insignia.
It would take decades for Little League Baseball to return to South Carolina.
Having won the state tournament, the Cannon Street team qualified for the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia. If they won that tournament, they would've qualified for the Little League World Series.
But the Cannon Street team's state championship was ruled invalid because, according to Little League rules, a team could only advance by playing and winning on the field.
McGovern refused to make an exception to the rule. He did, however, invite the Cannon Street team to be guests of Little League Baseball for the World Series.
What must it be like to sit in bleachers and watch other boys live out your dreams?
Early the next day, the Cannon Street team went back to Charleston. The bus returned to Charleston on August 28 - the same day that Emmett Till, not much older than the all-stars, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman.
The Cannon Street all-stars returned from Williamsport forever changed. Many of them were so angry they quit playing baseball. They eventually grew up and moved on with their lives - just as the Civil Rights Movement swept through the South.
For all they achieved in life, or did not achieve in life, the Cannon Street all-stars continue to wonder what would have happened if bigotry had not denied them the opportunity of playing in the Little League World Series.
"It's a tragedy to take dreams away from youngsters," John Rivers, who played for Cannon Street team said. "I knew it then. I know it now."