Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508150005
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: COLUMBIA, S. C. LENGTH: Medium
Dixie Youth Baseball began here in 1956 so white youngsters could play night games and double-elimination tournaments - and so they wouldn't have to play them with black youngsters.
Now in its 40th year, the South's defiant answer to Little League and civil rights returns home this week, not just to highlight 11- and 12-year-old players competing for a World Series title, but to showcase an organization that only recently shed the final vestiges of its segregated past.
Dixie Youth has moved from a segregated league to one that boasts about 300,000 players in 11 states from Texas to Virginia. That makes it the country's third largest baseball organization for players 12 and younger behind Little League and Babe Ruth ball, commissioner Gale Montgomery said.
The Dixie Youth World Series, pitting teams from 11 Southern states, begins Monday in nearby Lexington. Color no longer is an issue on the diamond, and the Confederate flag is gone from the organization's emblem.
Co-founder Matt Goyak, Dixie Youth Baseball's first and only national president, doesn't mince words when he talks about why it was founded.
There was dissatisfaction with Little League rules and policies, including a ban on night play.
``Then they tried to force a colored team on us,'' Goyak said. ``We just got out and started our own program.''
He doesn't portray it as out-and-out discrimination but frames it in the climate of the times, saying the league's white founders worried about what would happen if white and black players took the field together.
``In them days, a black would have walked into a white school [and] there would have been a lot of trouble,'' Goyak said. ``It's the same way with the sports.''
Goyak, who lives in Georgetown, says he is glad to see the World Series back in the state where the organization was founded.
``This is only the third one we've ever had in South Carolina in that 40 years and that's a long time,'' he said.
It was 1964 when black players first were allowed on Dixie Youth teams because of Supreme Court-ordered desegregation.
It wasn't until 30 years later that the league's board of directors removed the rebel symbols from its emblem.
Last year, the old background of the stars and bars of the Confederate flag gave way to baseballs. The small Confederate flag that also was part of the emblem was deleted to ``remove any reasonable objections and make the emblem more acceptable to participants throughout the program,'' Dixie Youth officials said at the time.
Elizabeth Screen of Lexington whose son, Arnold, 13, played Dixie Youth ball, said she never heard the issue discussed among parents but was glad to see the flag go.
``I am black and it is very offensive to me,'' she said.
Her son never mentioned anything about playing under the flag, she said, but showed his ambivalence in other ways after his team won a league championship.
``They were given a pin at the end of the season with it [the flag] on there which literally he just threw away because it meant nothing to him,'' Screen said.
Wes Skelton, commissioner-elect, said the league is open to adding teams in other states, but while there have been inquiries, no one has applied.
League spokesman Steve Gunter said officials worked for about 18 months to bring the World Series to Lexington, which beat out sites in Conway; Dothan, Ala.; and Nacogdoches, Texas.
The World Series last was played in South Carolina in 1973. This year, a team from host Lexington and another from Dillon will compete with 10 other teams - including one from South Boston, Va. - in the double-elimination tournament.
This year's championship game also will be shown on the Prime Sports and SportSouth cable TV networks.
by CNB