Jackie Robinson Ballpark: The Game That Changed America
Near Daytona, Florida
City Island Ballpark opened in nineteen fourteen on a patch of land in the Halifax River. It is a minor league stadium, home to the Daytona Tortugas, and it is the oldest active ballpark in Minor League Baseball. But the game that defined it happened not in any Tortugas season but on a Sunday afternoon in March of nineteen forty-six, and its significance had nothing to do with the final score.
On March seventeenth, nineteen forty-six, Jackie Robinson took the field here for the Montreal Royals, the Triple-A farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in an integrated spring training game. It was the first time in the modern era that a Black player had appeared in a professional baseball game in the American South. Two years before President Truman desegregated the military. Eight years before the Supreme Court desegregated schools. Eighteen years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
Daytona Beach was not chosen by accident. Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman College and an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, had spent decades cultivating enough goodwill and institutional standing in this city to make it, in the words of one historian, the only place in the South in the spring of nineteen forty-six where an integrated game would actually be allowed to proceed.
Everywhere else the Royals played that spring, Robinson's games were canceled. Jacksonville refused. Savannah refused. Sanford, Florida refused and ran the team out of town. Only here did the game go on.
Black ministers in Daytona Beach asked their congregations that morning to pray for Robinson. Hundreds of Black families walked to the ballpark in their Sunday clothes and filled the segregated bleachers to capacity and beyond. Robinson went five for five with a home run, drove in three runs, and stole two bases. The Royals won fourteen to one.
The ballpark was renamed Jackie Robinson Ballpark in nineteen eighty-nine. A bronze statue of Robinson stands outside the Orange Avenue gate. When you see it, notice that he is not swinging a bat. He is turning, ready to run.
