In a trip through Birmingham’s new Negro Southern League baseball museum, visitors can see how, over many decades, the sport collided with the civil rights movement to create history.
“We’re telling the story of black baseball in America through the eyes of Birmingham, Alabama,” said Layton Revel, who is housing his collection at the museum. “It shows the depth and breadth of what the black baseball experience has been, from the beginning to today.”
On Thursday afternoon, construction crews, museum staff and city officials worked furiously to prepare for a limited sneak peek on July 4. Mayor William Bell and world heavyweight boxing champion Deontay Wilder will join former baseball players and staff for the event.
The museum, located at 120 16th Street South near Regions Field, will be open to the public within the next few months. The date of the grand opening hasn’t been announced yet.
The 15,750-square-foot museum includes 8,700 square feet of exhibit space and 7,050 square feet for special events, a rooftop restaurant and a gift shop.
The city is spending $3.6 million for the facility, and Bell said in June that all public financing for the project was complete.
Visitors can walk through the museum and view exhibits in the order they happened historically, starting in the 1870s when several Birmingham-based companies formed baseball teams to bolster morale.
Exhibits highlight everything from the legacy of Jackie Robinson and the integration of Major League Baseball to individual players with local ties like Willie C. Young, a one-armed Birmingham native who pitched for the Birmingham Black Barons.
“They took the artifacts we’ve collected over the years and the story we’ve put together and made it come alive,” Revel said. “It’s exceeded my wildest expectations.”
The museum focuses on the Black Barons, but the Birmingham Barons and the Southern League also will be represented. The two teams shared historic Rickwood Field when baseball was a segregated sport.
Some of the most historically important artifacts in the collection include a uniform worn by Satchel Paige, arguably one of the best players in baseball history, and an enormous wooden bat used by Louis Santop, one of black baseball’s first home run sluggers.
Hundreds of baseballs, each signed by a player, line the walls of an entire hallway. Throughout Revel’s research and collecting, he has interviewed more than 1,500 baseball players.
“Meeting the players has been such a rewarding experience, and being able to preserve the legacy of African-American ball players,” he said. “I was afraid we would lose the history, but the museum will be here for generations to come.”
One corner is dedicated to a Revel’s Center for Negro League Baseball Research, where visitors can look up a specific player’s statistics and other historical information.
“They could spend days or weeks sitting at that computer and not read the same thing twice,” Revel said.
The museum will change its exhibits as people continue to come in with more information, pictures and artifacts, he said.
Birmingham’s museum and the well-established Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City will complement each other, and officials are discussing the possibility of sharing items or exhibits.
