ANNUAL NAAMANS CELEBRATES THE NEGRO LEAGUES
MAY 13 – MAY 21, 2016

The second annual “Naamans Celebrates the Negro Leagues” will be held from May 13 through May 21. Materials and press coverage from the inaugural 2015 event can be viewed on the Naamans website.

Naamans does not ultimately coach baseball, but character. The majority of our players will not continue in competitive baseball beyond 12 years of age, but all our players will become teenagers, men, and women. The character skills our players acquire from their Naamans experiences become the League’s most lasting and pervasive contributions to their development. Like all youth sports, baseball imparts the importance of effort, teamwork, perseverance, and preparation. Arguably more than any other sport, baseball also revels in its history, and when our players step on the field, they connect to this continuum. That historic connection offers unique opportunities for Naamans to coach character, and the Negro Leagues presents the most impactful of those opportunities. 

Celebrating, rather than lamenting, the Negro Leagues perpetuates the effusive positivism of the remarkable of Buck O’Neil, the long-time Negro League player and manager who would become the first black coach in Major League Baseball. We celebrate the Negro Leagues’ joyous, aggressive, and improvisational style of play, and the skill, personalities, and legends of those that played it. In The Natural, the protagonist, Roy Hobbs, expresses what in part motivates all great athletes: the dream of walking down the street and having people say “there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game.” If Naamans families react to the names Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Wilmington’s own Judy Johnson the way they react to Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Stan Musial, Naamans Celebrates the Negro Leagues will help create the legacy these players were denied by their contemporaries.

Yet, when you look back, what people didn’t realize, and still don’t today, was that we [baseball] got the ball rolling on integration in the whole society. Remember, this was before Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka. When Branch Rickey signed Jackie [Robinson], Martin Luther King was a student at Morris College.  We showed the way it had to be done, by just keeping on and being the best we could.
--Buck O’Neil

Most importantly, a celebration of the Negro Leagues focuses on its absence. The Negro Leagues’ greatest success was its demise due to integration. In celebrating the Negro Leagues, we introduce Naamans players to the stoic perseverance with which Jackie Robinson suffered injustice in order to end it, and Pee Wee Reese, who, with everything to lose but his sense of justice and humanity, crossed the infield and put his arm around a future lifelong friend.  We also celebrate baseball fans collectively, who did not turn away from the game as it integrated, as Major League owners had feared, but instead embraced MLB all the more for the talent and joy the former Negro League players brought to the game.

The Celebration will feature:

• Our seven Majors Division (ages 10 through 12) teams will wear replica Negro League jerseys for all games played during the week. The jerseys will celebrate seven different Negro League teams, and in the tradition of Major League Baseball (and as inspired by a Pee Wee Reese comment), all jerseys will bear the number “42”.
• Throughout the Celebration, 10 poster-size, museum-style exhibits about the Negro Leagues and its players will hang at the Naamans complex concession stand. These posters are continuously available on our website.
• The Judy Johnson Foundation, commemorating Wilmington’s Hall of Famer Negro League player, will exhibit Negro Leagues memorabilia and sell memorabilia and books to support its continuing educational efforts.
• Naamans will be honored with an appearance by Maime “Peanut” Johnson, a woman that pitched in the Negro Leagues from 1953 to 1955. On May 14, she will appear at complex, speak on her experiences, and sign A Strong Right Arm, a children’s book written about her life.
• A showing of the Jackie Robinson movie 42 at the Siegel JCC the night of Saturday, May 14th.

Buck O’Neil advised: “don’t feel sorry for the black baseball player. Feel sorry for the ones who didn’t get to see them play.” Naamans coaches and players are too young to have seen these players, but, the generous support of our sponsors provides the opportunity for our community to celebrate the players’ legends, and in so doing assimilate some character lessons as well.

To read the press release for this event, click here.