The Quiet After the Celebration: Reflections on Rickwood Field and the Stories We're Allowed to Tell

A meditation on Black excellence, institutional silence, and the space between commemoration and conversation

There's something about the quiet that follows a celebration that tells you everything you need to know about who controls the story.

I've been sitting with this feeling since I published my analysis of MLB's decision to delay the East-West Classic broadcast by ten days. The piece was sharp, analytical, necessary—but tonight, in the stillness after the digital storm, I find myself thinking not about corporate strategies or broadcast economics, but about the deeper rhythm that pulses beneath these moments. The pattern that repeats itself across generations, across centuries, like a song we know by heart but are never quite allowed to sing out loud.

They played baseball at Rickwood Field on Juneteenth. Willie Mays' ghost walked those baselines where he first learned to fly. The Birmingham Black Barons' legacy lived again in the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. For a few hours, Black excellence had a stage, Black joy had a voice, Black history had a moment.

And then came the quiet.

Ten days of quiet, to be exact. Ten days for the moment to cool, for the energy to dissipate, for the celebration to become content. Ten days to transform living history into packaged programming, spontaneous joy into scheduled entertainment.

But this quiet, this particular kind of institutional silence that follows Black celebration, is not new. It's as old as America itself, as familiar as breathing, as predictable as sunrise. We've been here before.

The Fights They Wouldn't Show

Jack Johnson knew about this quiet.

In 1910, the same year Rickwood Field opened its gates, Johnson was the heavyweight champion of the world—a Black man who dared to be excellent in public, who refused to bow his head or soften his stance. When he fought Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, on July 4th, the "Fight of the Century" was filmed for posterity, for history, for the world to see.

Until Johnson won.

Then came the quiet. The films were banned in most states. The footage was buried, censored, and hidden away like a dangerous secret. Black excellence, it seemed, was acceptable only in theory, only in private, only when it could be controlled. The moment it became too real, too public, too undeniable—silence.

Johnson's victory was celebrated in Black communities across the nation, but the broader American story pretended it never happened. The films gathered dust in vaults while the narrative moved on, sanitized and safe.

How many times have we watched this dance? How many victories have been celebrated in whispers while the loudspeakers stayed silent?

The Championship They Forgot to Remember

Texas Western knew about this, too.

March 19, 1966. Five Black starters took the court against an all-white Kentucky team in the NCAA championship game. Don Haskins had done something revolutionary—he'd started five Black players in the biggest game in college basketball, in an era when most teams wouldn't start one.

They won. 72-65. Changed the game forever.

But the celebration was muted, the coverage minimal, the significance downplayed. It would take decades for the story to be told properly, for Hollywood to make a movie, for the history books to acknowledge what happened that night in College Park, Maryland. The victory was immediate, but the recognition was delayed—packaged, produced, and delivered when it was safe to celebrate, when the radical edge had been worn smooth by time.

The players went back to their lives, their moment of triumph filed away in the quiet spaces where inconvenient truths go to wait their turn.

The Knee That Broke the Silence

Colin Kaepernick knew about this, quiet, most of all.

August 26, 2016. A simple gesture—taking a knee during the national anthem—that said everything about the space between symbol and substance, between honoring the flag and honoring the people it's supposed to represent. It was quiet resistance, respectful dissent, a question posed in the language of reverence.

The response was deafening. Not celebration, not dialogue, but something else entirely—the kind of noise that drowns out conversation, the type of volume that makes quiet impossible. Kaepernick was exiled, blacklisted, erased from the sport he'd helped define.

But then, years later, after the protests of 2020, after the world had shifted and the conversation had changed, the NFL quietly admitted he'd been right. Quietly. In press releases and policy changes, in diversity initiatives and social justice partnerships. The substance of his message was absorbed, sanitized, and repackaged as institutional progress.

The man himself remained in the quiet, his career sacrificed to the space between what we celebrate and what we're willing to hear.

The City That Disappeared

And Tulsa—Tulsa knew about this quiet better than anyone.

May 31, 1921. Black Wall Street was burning, but the newspapers called it a "race riot," as if the destruction was mutual, as if the violence was shared—thirty-five blocks of Black prosperity, Black excellence, Black self-determination reduced to ash and memory.

For decades, the story lived in the quiet. Textbooks didn't mention it. History classes skipped over it. The survivors carried the truth in whispered conversations and family stories, in the spaces where official history couldn't reach.

It would take eighty years for the story to break the surface, for the mass graves to be acknowledged, for the reparations conversations to begin. Eighty years of quiet before the celebration of Black Wall Street could coexist with the truth of its destruction.

Even now, as we commemorate and remember, as we build museums and hold ceremonies, there is still a quality of quiet around the edges—a sense that we're celebrating the memory while avoiding its implications, honoring the past while sidestepping the present.

The Pattern in the Quiet

This is the rhythm I've been feeling since Rickwood Field. This is the pattern that connects Jack Johnson's censored films to MLB's delayed broadcast, Texas Western's muted championship to Kaepernick's silenced protest, Tulsa's buried history to today's packaged celebrations.

We are allowed to celebrate Black excellence, but only on schedule. We are permitted to honor Black history, but only when it's been properly edited. We are encouraged to commemorate Black achievement, but only after it has been transformed from a living experience into educational content.

The celebration is real—understand me. The joy at Rickwood Field was genuine, the pride in Negro Leagues history was authentic, the connection to Willie Mays' legacy was profound. But the quiet that follows, the delay that distances, the packaging that transforms—this too is real.

And in that space between celebration and silence, between commemoration and conversation, something essential gets lost. The immediacy. The spontaneity. The dangerous possibility that Black joy might be too loud, too present, too uncontrolled for institutional comfort.

What Lives in the Quiet

But here's what I've learned from sitting in this feeling, from wrestling with this pattern, from trying to understand the space between what we celebrate and what we're allowed to say:

The quiet is not empty.

In the quiet, communities continue the conversation that institutions interrupt. In the quiet, stories are passed down that official histories often overlook. In the quiet, resistance takes root and grows in directions that can't be predicted or controlled.

Jack Johnson's legacy lived in the quiet until it couldn't be contained anymore. Texas Western's revolution spread quietly until it transformed the game. Kaepernick's message traveled through the quiet until it became impossible to ignore. Tulsa's truth survived in the quiet until it demanded acknowledgment.

The quiet is where we keep the parts of our stories that don't fit the official narrative. The quiet is where we nurture the seeds of change that institutions aren't ready to water. The quiet is where we practice the songs we'll sing when the microphones are finally turned our way.

The Questions That Live in the Quiet

So I find myself asking different questions now, softer questions, questions that live in the spaces between celebration and silence:

What would it look like if Black excellence didn't have to wait for permission to be seen?

What would it sound like if Black joy didn't have to be scheduled for convenient consumption?

What would it feel like if Black history could be honored in real-time, without delay, without editing, without the institutional comfort that comes from temporal distance?

What would change if we refused to accept the quiet that follows celebration, if we insisted that commemoration include conversation, if we demanded that honoring the past include confronting the present?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They're invitations. Invitations to notice the pattern, to name the quiet, to refuse the distance between what we celebrate and what we're willing to discuss.

The Song That Breaks the Quiet

Because here's what I know, sitting in this reflection, feeling this rhythm, understanding this pattern:

The quiet is not permanent.

Every generation finds its voice. Every era breaks its silence. Every moment of celebration contains within it the seeds of conversation, the possibility of change, the potential for something more than symbolic recognition.

The East-West Classic at Rickwood Field was beautiful. The delayed broadcast was problematic. But the conversation that emerged in the space between—the digital resistance, the community organizing, the refusal to accept institutional timing—that was revolutionary.

We don't have to wait for permission to tell our stories. We don't have to accept the quiet that follows the celebration. We don't have to let our joy be packaged into convenient consumption.

We can be loud in the quiet. We can be present in the delay. We can be uncontrolled in the space between commemoration and conversation.

A Gentle Invitation

So this is my gentle invitation, my quiet call, my soft insistence:

Stay aware of the pattern. Notice when celebration becomes silence, when commemoration becomes distance, when honoring becomes packaging. Feel the rhythm that connects Jack Johnson to Colin Kaepernick, Texas Western to Tulsa, Rickwood Field to every moment when Black excellence is celebrated symbolically but muted practically.

Stay loud in the quiet. Use your voice in the spaces between official recognition and authentic conversation. Refuse to let the delay become permanent, the packaging become final, and the quiet become acceptance.

Help carry the story forward. Not just the sanitized version, not just the convenient narrative, but the whole truth—the celebration and the silence, the commemoration and the conversation, the joy and the resistance that lives in the space between what we're allowed to remember and what we refuse to forget.

Because the quiet is not empty, the pattern is not permanent, and the story is not finished.

The story is never finished.

It just waits in the quiet for the next voice to pick up the song, the next generation to break the silence, the next moment when celebration refuses to become distance and joy insists on being heard.

Right now. In real-time. Without delay.

The way it was always meant to be.