There is no baseball field at Lake Lorna Doone Park today. But baseball history was made there 67 years ago.
Although this diamond didn't last forever, the legacy of what occurred in 1955 is immortalized by a monument that was unveiled at the park this past spring. It's entitled "The Barrier Breakers" and features a bronze sculpture of two boys in baseball uniforms. One has "Pensacola" across the front of his jersey while the other's reads "Orlando Fla."
"It's just bringing back all of that memory," said Orlando Kiwanis first baseman Stewart Hall, who is white.
"I thought about the memories of what that hallowed ground holds," said Pensacola Jaycees second baseman Freddie Augustine, who is Black.
Both men, now nearing 80, were present at the unveiling on a rainy day in March to laugh, hug and recollect. A little more than a year following the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in schools, and a few months before the Montgomery bus boycott, two teams of 12-year-old boys met on a dusty field in Orlando to play the first integrated Little League game in the Deep South.
