Major League Baseball recently recognized Negro Leagues players as deserving “Major League” status, giving overdue recognition to 3,400 pro athletes who played from 1920-1948.
Back in 2014, while researching Moore Park near the Santa Fe Trestle Trail as part of a public art project to erect historical signage in city parks created during the years of racial segregation, I found two remarkable photos while going through unmarked and uncategorized archive boxes at City Hall.
One is a beautiful image of a 1940s baseball game in action with folks watching from the bleachers while a full brass band sits in the shade of a park’s enormous pecan trees.
Research that my artist collaborator, Lauren Woods, and I uncovered established that Moore Park, founded in 1938 as Eighth Street Negro Park, was created by sustained advocacy from Black communities who were being excluded from other public city parks.
At its founding, Eighth Street Negro Park became the largest park designated specifically for use by Blacks in Dallas. The early years saw the public green space teeming with ballgames that drew spectators from all over, the most popular being games played by the Dallas Negro Amateur Baseball League.
But not just baseball games activated this historic public green space. Moore Park was also home to the first golf course created for Black golfers in Dallas as a modest six-hole course in the 1940s.
We also uncovered the remarkable history of Will Moore, an important early Dallas civil rights activist who was involved with voter registration efforts and the decades-long poll tax campaign fights. The park was renamed in his honor at the request of the community in 1940.
