Three members of the Cannon Street All-Stars — a Little League team from Charleston, South Carolina, that faced racial discrimination when they were excluded from the Little League World Series in 1955 — are visiting the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this week to tell their story.
The commemoration of the all-Black team’s 70th anniversary began Wednesday, Aug. 20 with a moderated discussion in the museum’s Grandstand Theater with surviving team members John Rivers, Leroy Major and David Middleton.
On Thursday, an author series program is scheduled for the museum’s Bullpen Theater featuring two books, “Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars” and “Little League Baseball’s Civil War and the Team Nobody Would Play,” that tell the All-Stars’ story.
The Cannon Street All-Stars team was made up of players from several teams sponsored by the Cannon Street YMCA in Charleston for the city-wide Little League tournament in the summer of 1955, according to a Hall of Fame news release.
When the 61 other teams, which were all white, withdrew from the tournament rather than play the All-Stars, the Cannon Street team was declared the tournament winner via forfeit. But the All-Stars were not permitted to play in the South Carolina state tournament, with officials citing a rule that stipulated teams must advance on the field rather than by forfeit.
The All-Stars were later invited to attend as guests the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, according to the release. While in Williamsport, the All-Stars team was allowed to warm up on the field with the other teams. The spectators began chanting “let them play.”
“There may have been 5,000 people, but it sounded like 100,000 people,” Rivers said, “and we can still, all of us, can still hear that chant, ‘let them play, let them play.’”
The team’s achievements were finally recognized in 2002, 47 years later, when the team traveled to Williamsport and received not only a standing ovation from a crowd of fans, but also a championship banner recognizing the state title, which had been restored to the official record books.
On Wednesday, the players shared their experiences, including the emotional impact of being denied the chance to play and the long-term effects of racial segregation. The talk highlighted the importance of preserving baseball history and educating people about the history of racial segregation in baseball.
Out of the 14 players on the team, eight are still living today. The team is heavily featured in the museum’s The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball exhibit, which opened last year and honors the contributions of African Americans in baseball. A video interview with Rivers is part of an interactive display.
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum President Josh Rawitch said since opening the exhibit, the museum has stayed in touch with the team.
“As they were getting ready to celebrate the 70th anniversary of this incredible event, we knew they were going to be in Williamsport and gave them a chance to pop over,” Rawitch said. “Thankfully, three of them were able to take us up on it.”
Rawitch said as times have changed, “people recognize what a travesty it was” that the All-Stars were prevented from playing.
“It’s amazing to see (them) be recognized for what they could have been,” he said. “They could have been the Little World Series champions, and they may well have been. From our standpoint, our job is to document the history of the sport. Everything we do here goes back to preserving the history, honoring excellence and connecting generations. And I think that these guys do that incredibly.”
Howie Hodges, co-chair of the Cannon Street All-Star Foundation, said although the team faced segregation and racial tensions, its success in baseball drew attention to civil rights issues of the day.
“You think about these kids at the time,” Hodges said, “they didn’t realize that they were kind of instruments that the civil rights movement, and they didn’t fight it with protests or with marching, but with bats, balls and gloves. They just wanted to play.”
Hodges also said Disney has “committed” to do a feature film about the team.
“You’re going to see almost a recreation of just what those boys went through in 1955,” he said. “That story needed to be part of the larger story of baseball … Baseball is such an American pastime, for everyone.”