Explore Fields of Change at DABOS Park. Experience a gripping lesson in Alabama’s rich Negro Leagues history and its cultural impact on American society. This exhibit presents the story of Negro Leagues baseball in Alabama and the founding of the Negro Southern League in 1920.
Fields of Change presented by DABOS
At the intersection of the civil rights movement and Negro Leagues baseball, Fields of Change Presented by DABOS is an engaging exhibit explaining baseball’s role in advancing the cause of civil rights in Montgomery, Alabama and across the nation. It tells the stories of how the Negro Leagues and its players ‘led the way’ in experimenting with integration, social change and, eventually, Civil Rights
Located on the corner of Coosa Street and Tallapoosa Street, the current ballpark opened in 2004, as home of the Montgomery Biscuits in minor league baseball’s Southern League. The Montgomery Biscuits franchise is part of Alabama’s rich baseball lineage standing on the shoulders of the team’s ancestral Negro Southern League brethren, Montgomery Grey Sox.
Organized Black Baseball teams and leagues began sprouting up in Alabama at the beginning of the post-reconstruction era, dating as far back as 1870. The Negro Southern League was founded by Tom Wilson in 1920, in the same year that Rube Foster created the Negro National League, with franchises in Birmingham and Montgomery. The Fields of Change exhibit explores Negro Leagues Baseball history and the players that came from Alabama in detail.
From the early years of official Negro Leagues baseball in Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, to the crossover players that transitioned from the Negro Leagues to Major League Baseball, and those who found their way to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown; the stories of players and teams that emerged from Alabama are captured in the Fields of Change exhibit.
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