The Little Rock chapter of Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities will host a team of special guests today.
The Anderson Monarchs, a youth baseball team from Philadelphia, will stop in Little Rock as part of a 21-stop, three-week tour of civil rights sites that will cover about 4,000 miles in a 1940s-era tour bus.
At a glance
ANDERSON MONARCHS VS. LITTLE ROCK RBI
WHEN 1 p.m. today
WHERE Lamar Porter Field
ADMISSION Free
NOTABLE The Anderson Monarchs, a youth team from Philadelphia, are visiting civil rights sites throughout the South during a three-week tour and are playing local youth baseball teams as part of the trip. The Little Rock RBI program was started in 2000 and consists of two leagues, one for ages 13-15 and one for ages 16-18, with four teams in each age group.
The Monarchs, headlined by 14-year-old Sports Illustrated cover subject Mo'ne Davis, is travelling from Jackson, Miss., in the bus meant to replicate the type of transportation used by the era's Negro League teams. The team will visit Little Rock Central High School and its museum at 10 a.m. today before playing Little Rock's RBI team at 1 p.m. at Lamar Porter Field.
The RBI program was started by Major League Baseball in 1993 to spark baseball among youths in inner cities.
"They're excited about it," said Bob Hamilton, coach of Little Rock's RBI team. "We have hosted some RBI tournaments in the past, so we know how to prepare the kids and get them ready to be hosts. That's what this is about, to have a great game at Lamar Porter. This is the kind of thing we promote in the RBI league."
Little Rock is the Monarchs' 11th stop on a tour that began June 17 in Philadelphia. Since then, they have rolled through Washington D.C., Richmond, Va.; Durham, N.C.; Spartanburg, S.C.; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Montgomery, Ala.; Selma, Ala.; and Jackson, Miss.
The itinerary is the same at each stop. The team visits a landmark civil rights site in the morning and plays a local youth team in the afternoon while documenting its travels in an online blog at Andersonmonarchs.org.
So far, the Monarchs have seen the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four girls were killed in a 1963 bombing, they have walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and they have visited the home of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss.
After leaving Little Rock today, they'll see the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo.
"I want to send the message that young people can effect change and need to effect change," Monarchs Coach Steve Bandura told The New York Times. "Especially with the state of our nation after all of the recent racial incidents."
Little Rock's RBI program was founded in 2000, said Hamilton, who has been its coach since then. A former foster parent, Hamilton said he became involved in the organization while looking for ways to occupy children.
"Boy, I haven't been able to get out of it," he said. "It's too good of a thing going."
Sports on 06/28/2015