The Summer of 69: Little League and Race Relations in Camden, NJ

“Do you want to get out there?"

I didn’t answer. Never expected the question. Just sat still on the second row of rickety, wooden bleachers along the third baseline of Everett Field, staring out. Yearning.

Mr. Williams persisted. No doubt he had noticed my baseball mitt threaded over the handlebars of my purple Huffy; the glove went where I went.

“Let’s see what you can do. C’mon, out to the outfield. A little hustle, now.”

For the next 20 minutes, I took turns shagging fly balls with four other boys, confidently whipping throws to infielders who covered bases and feigned cut-off positions.

Mr. Williams called out, motioning the team to home plate. Practice was over. I trotted toward my bike, expecting to leave.

“Over here, he said. “You can hear this, too.”

I moved closer to the other boys, just outside their circle.

“Good practice today, gentlemen. Season starts in three weeks. Still lots of things to work on."

Then he spoke directly to me. “Do you want to come back? Be part of this?”

“Sure.”

“We are the Camden Colts,” he told me. “Not sure I'll have a uniform that fits you. You’re a little guy.”

At the next practice, I began to learn the names of my new teammates. Cleveland and Lovey. Whiskey and Kimba. Gerald and DeWayne.

And I met a second coach, the head coach: Mr. John.

Where Mr. Williams was lithe and polished and chirpy, Mr. John was older, rounder – a laborer with a lumbered gait and Southern drawl.

He pulled up in a dilapidated Chevy truck with a large, open bed; on the driver’s door, a hand-painted sign seriocomically promoted his small repair business: “Odd Jobs”.

As practice was ending, Mr. Williams approached.

“By any chance, do you pitch? You throw pretty well."

“I do. I mean, I did for my old Little League,” I explained. “For three years.”

Mr. Williams directed Colts catcher Ronnie Johnson to put on gear. I strolled to the mound and tossed 10 pitches or so, most of them close to plate center. I threw quite hard for an 11-year-old who weighed 60 pounds. It was enough to impress a new coach.

“What do you think about pitching for us?” Mr. Williams asked. “That something you want?”

I had always wanted to pitch. By age seven, I was throwing to a catcher two or three days per week, on breezy spring evenings and boiling summer afternoons. Not on a field. Not at a baseball academy. I pitched to a portly neighborhood friend who borrowed his brother’s timeworn catchers mitt, in a dirt alley six feet wide, behind the rowhouse that our family rented in Camden, New Jersey. The narrow throwing lane of the alley, framed on each side by the sunbaked, red brick walls of homes, rewarded control and command.

CITY OF RUIN

From ages eight through ten I had been a member of Ancona Little League, six blocks from where I lived, in a neighborhood known today as Waterfront South. The league had only four teams, sponsored by local businesses. The rosters were filled with familiar faces, most of them kids from the Catholic grade school I attended and the rest from nearby streets.

Ancona Little League disbanded after its 1968 season. Back then, I had little appreciation for the crumbling state of my hometown, other than to know that most folks I knew were sort of poor and struggling. The manufacturing boom that had carried Camden on a run of prosperity from the 1930s through the early 1950s, that had spawned glistening international brands like RCA, Campbell Soup, and the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, came to a ruinous end.

Businesses large and small were shuttered. Manufacturing plants moved south. Jobs became scarce. Much of the city’s white, lower-middle class population fled to suburban tracts. The poor, including many Black residents with little agency to change outlook and outcomes, remained.

Like most of the post-industrial cities in our country back then, unable to offer its citizens employment or hope amidst a disappearing economy, Camden cracked and crumbled completely; crime and a pervasive drug subculture escalated, along with racial tensions.

And so that is how I came to find myself perched on the second row of those rickety bleachers, on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1969, having stopped my bike ride to watch the Camden Colts practice, a team comprised entirely of Black boys, coached by two disparate Black men dedicated to directing their paths.

FENCES

Mr. Williams was true to his word. Once league games began, I took regular turns as a starting pitcher. Whiskey, Lovey, and the rest were above average ballplayers. They were even better at landing verbal jabs non-stop, the way 11- and 12-year-old boys do when bonding.

It was a loose, confident team. We played our home games at Everett Field, two blocks from where I lived in South Camden, but our road games were played on dirt lots equipped with old wooden backstops but no outfield fences, against teams from different sections of North and East Camden, comprised mostly of players who were Black and Hispanic.

By the season’s mid-point I had become the Colts frontline pitcher, asked to take the ball against the better competition. On a few occasions, our victories were rewarded with trips for fast-food burgers.

The Camden Colts, all twelve of us, would climb into Mr. John’s truck bed, standing for the entire two-mile drive through the city streets to and from the restaurant, foolish and carefree in the summer night.

I imagine that to some observers back then – the McDonald’s staffers who served us, the teams we played against, the family members of my teammates, my neighborhood friends – my presence as the only white player on the Colts was a bit of a curiosity, something to mark, something to deride, maybe even something to half smile about.

None of that mattered much to me. Not because I did not feel a little uneasy being in that unusual position; the indescribable joy of playing baseball far outweighed it. The uneasiness I felt much more sharply as a Colts player had a different trigger.

Toward season’s end, Mr. John entered our team into an open tournament. It was played at the recreational center of an adjoining middle-class town, on a diamond immaculate, with food for the asking served from a freshly-painted brick concession stand, with baselines and batter’s boxes chalked perfectly, with sturdy cyclone fences dotted with advertisements promoting insurance agencies and delicatessens, with an announcers booth equipped with a booming loudspeaker.

None of the Colts had seen this version of the world.

I felt uncomfortable there, in that Rockwellian setting; I had already internalized who I was supposed to be, who all the Colts were supposed to be, and understood that none of the socio-economic markers present at that tournament ball field – the pastoral beauty, the serenity, the bounty that made it possible – were going to be part of my Camden experience.

TROPHIES AND TRAGEDY

Several weeks after our season ended, on a Sunday afternoon in August of 1969, there was a knock at my row home door. My mother answered. It was Mr. John, to see me.

“This is for you,” he said, as he stood in our doorway. He reached out to shake my hand before giving me a 6-inch trophy. The base of the trophy had a gold plate that was glued on, slightly loose and slightly crooked. But the inscription contained encouragement and unexpected recognition: Most Valuable Player.

“We enjoyed having you play for the Colts,” he said, and walked back to his truck.

Just weeks after Mr. John’s visit to my house, the social fabric of Camden tore – over race, over inequality. A white police officer had severely beaten a Black child, and 300 angry residents rallied to protest where the child was hospitalized. A sniper shot into the crowd, killing a 15-year-old girl and an officer. Rioting lasted days.

Two years later, in September of 1971, two white police officers beat and killed a Puerto Rican motorist. Large-scale rioting paralyzed the city for one week. Businesses were destroyed and parts of city blocks were consumed by fifteen fires; in the chaos, 87 people were injured, 300 were arrested, and one person died.

My parents moved our family from Camden in 1974 to a suburb 12 miles south, a sprawling bedroom community. It must have been bittersweet; my grandparents on both sides had immigrated to Camden from Italy in 1920, to carve out lives and chase modest dreams. The first homes they purchased were blocks away from some of the sandlots I played ball on with the Colts, fifty years later.

I continued playing baseball, pitching well for my high school team. In 1975, in front of a packed school assembly, I received an MVP trophy, handed to me by the long-time head baseball coach and athletic director.

I suppose he liked me well enough as a player, but I am way more certain of this: he never would have gone to the trouble of delivering a trophy to my house on a Sunday afternoon, nor thanked me earnestly for playing for his team.

KINDNESS FOR KINDNESS

This reflection, this glimpse at a transformative part of my summer of 1969, does not end with saccharine bromides on race relations. I did not become lifelong friends with several players on the Colts, or become a godfather to one of their children. Mr. John and Mr. Williams did not attend my wedding. I did not return to Camden to open a youth center or build a baseball complex.

But it does end with a salient footnote.

In the spring of 1970, the grade school I was attending sponsored a baseball team that would travel from Waterfront South to compete against teams from various Camden neighborhoods. The roster included several very good friends. I was expected to join.

I chose instead to play my last season of Little League with the Camden Colts.

I had already climbed in the truck. I had already taken joyful rides with kids who did not look anything like me, who were exactly like me.

It was an easy decision.