Field of Forgotten Dreams: The Role of Memorial Myopia in Representing Black Baseball History in Birmingham, Alabama

Baseball in Birmingham, Alabama, has a long and troubled past regarding racial tension, although my thesis finds that those tensions do not appear fully interpreted and memorialized in the city’s two major Black baseball heritage sites - historic Rickwood Field and the Negro Southern League Museum. Until recently, the history of the Negro Leagues of Baseball was largely under-valued and written out of contemporary baseball memory and record books. Still, an ongoing effort to carry out a more inclusive and critical discussion of Black baseball and the social inequalities that formed and defined it have allowed sites like Birmingham’s Rickwood Field and the Negro Southern Leagues Museum to move to the forefront of sports-related tourism. My research carries out a critical reading of the depiction of the history of race, racism, and civil rights struggle during the Jim Crow era of segregation, examining the extent to which these themes are apparent, missing, or obscured through the sites’ markers, exhibits, artifacts, and wider spatial arrangement. In analyzing Rickwood and the Negro Leagues Museum of Birmingham as places of sports memory, I examine concepts of spatial narratives, conditional storytelling, and the ongoing racial politics memorialization process. My central argument is that the preserved ballpark and baseball-related museum, while they should be ideal places for understanding how sport and society are often intertwined through politics and racial segregation, perpetuate a “memorial myopia” that blurs our ability to fully see and understand the reality of prejudice and segregation in baseball and Birmingham specifically. Through ethnographic analysis, my research highlights how baseball history in Birmingham, Alabama is curated, remembered, and retold, providing a framework for understanding how sports can both challenge and reinforce societal norms.