The Conversation
How bigotry crushed the dreams of an all-Black Little League team

Chris Lamb, Indiana University
Tue, August 19, 2025 at 9:23 AM EDT
7 min read

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Members of the 1955 Cannon Street All-Star YMCA team chat before a game at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 19, 2011. Robert E. Pierre/The Washington Post via Getty Images

John Rivers, John Bailey, David Middleton, Leroy Major and Buck Godfrey – all teammates from the 1955 Cannon Street YMCA Little League All-Star team – left Charleston, South Carolina, on a bus on Aug. 18, 2025. … After a stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for a couple days – where their story is included in an exhibit on Black baseball that opened in 2024 – they’ll head to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

There, they’ll be recognized before the Little League World Series championship game on August 24, 2025 – 70 years after the players, then 11 and 12 years old, watched the championship game from the bleachers, wondering why they weren’t on the field living out their own dreams instead of watching other boys live out theirs.

When the Cannon Street team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry and the Southern way of life.

White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team, who represented the first Black Little League in South Carolina. The team won two tournaments by forfeit. They were supposed to then go to a regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, where, if they won, they’d advance to the Little League World Series. ..: But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible for the regional tournament because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, as the rules stipulated.

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