Doyel: Youth baseball in Oxford, Miss., was segregated in 1978. Here's what Dad did.

Gregg Doyel | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Gregg Doyel recalls his Little League experience IndyStar's Gregg Doyel learned where the 'better families' played baseball in the 1970s in Mississippi. And how his father helped change that.

Youth baseball can bring a town together, as has happened for two weeks while the Little League World Series played out in Williamsport, Pa. Eight teams from America. Eight international teams. That’s 16 stories of solidarity, all of them great in their own way, and every year when this happens I think of another story, great in its own way.

I think of my childhood, when youth baseball wasn’t bringing my town together. It was keeping us apart.

I think of Robert Doyel, and what he did about it.

And now I think: It’s time to tell that story. About my dad.

* * *

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This happened in 1978. The date is not a typo. You will think, as you read it: That can’t be. Maybe 1968 or 1958. No, 1948.

No. This was 1978.

But it’s Mississippi, which may be all I need to say by way of explanation. And understand: I claim Mississippi. Born in Hawaii, early years in Oklahoma, high school in Georgia, college in Florida – but when people ask where I’m from, I say: Mississippi. I’m not ashamed. Those were great years for me, grades 2-8, and if they weren’t always great for everyone around me, well, here’s my defense: Ignorance is bliss.

Ignorance was our defense in early 1978 when I was 7 and my dad and I looked for a youth baseball league after our family’s move from Norman, Okla., to Oxford, Miss. Dad taught law school at Ole Miss, and his friends were law professors, and one night he asked a friend about a youth baseball league for his son – for me – and my dad was told: The better families go to the Civic League.

Better families? Better? Now we know: That was code for white families. Turns out the Civic League was segregated, no blacks allowed. This was 1978, mind you, way too late for such sanctioned bigotry, and my dad had no idea what we were walking into until we showed up for the league draft and he noticed something missing:

Integration.

“I was so oblivious,” he says now. “It did not register until we got down there on draft day. There was a mass practice and then a draft, and that’s the day. That’s when we learned there were no black kids.”

That’s not all he learned.

The Civic League – four teams, named Rotary, Kiwanis, Jaycees, Civitans – played on land donated years earlier by a local family, apparently one of the better families in town, the land coming with one particularly dreadful string attached. This being Mississippi in (gulp) 1978, folks accepted it.

“There was a restricted covenant on the field,” my dad says. “If it was ever used for anything for black people, the land would revert to whoever gave it to the Civic League. It was a discussion. It was known. There was a man who ran the Civic League who said to me once: ‘I’m not prejudiced against those people. I used to eat at the same table with them in the Army.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

And you, sitting there, you can’t believe what you’re reading. Look, I know what you must be thinking: This can’t be. Not in 1978. But it can, and it was, and two years ago the publisher of the Oxford Eagle wrote his own story about the segregated 1970s Oxford Civic League.

OK, back to the tryout, the draft, the covenant. Back to 1978, when my dad was going to coach and I was going to play in this abomination of a youth baseball league.

He did coach in the Civic League, that season. I did play, that season. And when I ask my dad, 40 years later, how he came to that decision, this is what he says:

“My first thought was: I have committed to all these kids and to my son, and creating a big issue out of this right here and now isn’t in the best interest of the children, basically,” he says. “I decided: I’m going to complete this season, and then I’m going to set out to destroy them.”

* * *

It helps that my dad is charming. Well, it does. For years he coached my teams in soccer and baseball, and kids loved him, and parents angled to get their children on his teams. This doesn’t happen with some coaches, but it always happened with my dad: He made it fun.

During that 1978 season my dad befriended two Civic League parents, Marvin Wilson (his son was Mike) and Bob Cage (Jeff). Mr. Wilson and Mr. Cage were two of the league’s more popular parents, and their sons were two of the better players, and all of that matters when you’re staging a revolution from within.

And my dad was doing that. He’d started a year earlier, when the Civic League handed out candy bars to its teams to sell as a fundraiser. The league needed money to survive, so here’s what Robert Doyel did to make sure it received not a single cent from our team: He put those candy bars in the trunk of his car, where they melted. He never took them out. He must have forgotten.

Oops.

Before the 1979 season, he told Mr. Wilson and Mr. Cage that he was taking me to the city league, run by the Oxford Park Commission – the OPC, as it was known. That wasn’t what the better families of Oxford did in the 1970s, perhaps because the OPC fields were located a short walk from the C.B. Webb housing projects. Those kids played in the OPC.

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“We anticipated I’d be the only white coach and you’d be the only white player,” my dad tells me now. “Once it became apparent you and I were going to do it, Bob Cage was fully on board. So was Mike Wilson’s dad, Marvin. Before the next baseball season began we were all committed to going to the all-black league, so several other white kids came along with us. That was the beginning of the end of the (Civic) League. That was the death knell. It was a done deal that just wasn’t done yet.”

It took two more years – yes, segregated baseball was alive and well in Oxford, Miss., in 1980 – but the Civic League shut down. If you wanted to play baseball, and I don’t care how much better your family thought it was, you played in the OPC. Or you didn’t play.

Guess what? Everyone played. Everyone who was any good, anyway. If any players from the Civic League refused to come over to the OPC, well, they weren’t good enough to register with me. Competition usually is, and always should be, a meritocracy. Doesn’t matter your color, your religion, your economic background. Can you play? That’s all that matters, and by 1981 the kids who could play baseball in Oxford – black and white – played together in the OPC.

My dad, the youngest of 10 children in Shawnee, Okla., so poor that his family spent one Christmas in an old chicken coop, became the first Doyel to go to college, then law school. He became a lawyer, a professor, a judge. He’s running for state senate now in Florida, District 22, and he might just win. But if he ever tops what he did in Oxford, Miss., in the late 1970s, well, what a story that would be.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.