Elmont Online

The Elmont Memorial Library’s “Opening Pitch” event on Saturday, December 18, 2010 was a huge success, in part, because it demonstrates commitment to expanding and enriching our community.  In attendance were Town Clerk, Mark Bonilla; State Senator Elect, Jack Martins; CCC President, Joyce Stowe; Jamaica Square President, Claudine Hall; Barbara Reynolds; Scott Cushing, Chair of the 3-on-3 Basketball Committee; Sandra Smith, Co-chair of The Elmont Coalition for Sustainable Development; members of the Elmont Online – Highlighting Success Black History Month Committee and many other residents and passers-by.

Library Board President, Tania Lawes, remarked, “The history of African American baseball goes back more than 150 years.  Men like Satchel Paige, and as you will learn from the exhibit here at the Elmont Memorial Library, Jackie Robinson, stood against discrimination and became African American legends.  Library Director Maggie Gough is to be commended for the efforts she her staff put into making this exhibit possible”.

I have never seen much less held the glove, bat or anything from this great man, Jackie Robinson, this is an honor said one community resident as he examined the bat with his daughter.

“I was here to study for an exam, but this lesson in African American History is something I never expected.  I will be up all night studying I guess I can’t let this pass me by,” said another library patron.

Mark Bonilla who brought with him baseball memorabilia he has collected over the years spoke passionately about the contributions to the game not only by African Americans but also by players from his father’s homeland like Roberto Clemente, Mario Ramírez and others.

Allyson Phillips, Chair Person of the 2011 BHM Committee commended the Library for bringing the exhibit to Elmont.  “As chair of the BHM Committee I congratulate the Elmont Memorial Library Board and staff for working to get this exhibit to our community.  It enhances us a people and reminds us of the journey African Americans continue to travel.”

Elmont, known mostly as home to the famed Belmont Park and its' annual hosting of the third leg of the Triple Crown in horseracing, now hosts “Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience.” The program is a national traveling exhibition, which chronicles the remarkable history of baseball’s Negro leagues and the challenges and successes of African-American baseball players.  For the remaining days of December, January through February 6 2011, the Elmont Memorial Library is the exclusive downstate NY location of the exhibit based on the exhibition of the same name on permanent display at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Pride and Passion is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The NEH website is excerpted here as follows “The story of African Americans in baseball is a remarkable and fascinating slice of American history. It parallels the failures of the greater American society in solving the racial problems resulting from slavery, the Civil War, and the confusion of Reconstruction. Baseball was played on Southern plantations as far back as the 1850s, and a quote from the New York Clipper newspaper in 1869 tells of a game between the leading black and white baseball teams in Philadelphia. Although early baseball was segregated for the most part, there are many examples of blacks and whites playing the game together. However, racial prejudice escalated in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and baseball reflected this development in the larger society. The captain of the leading black team in Philadelphia was murdered in riots that occurred on the first day black men were legally allowed to vote in October 1871. Black players on the rare integrated teams, such as the Toledo Blue Stockings, were sometimes threatened by people in the stands and by players on opposing teams. When the National League was founded in 1883, blacks were shut out, and the black players on the Toledo team in the mid-1880s were the last to play on an integrated team until Jackie Robinson in 1947. This early baseball history will be both a revelation and a surprise to most viewers of the traveling exhibition, and it adds a fascinating dimension to late nineteenth-century U.S. history."