This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

They were brothers. They would all say it.

And it is a thing that teammates say often of one another.

But often it is true. In so many ways it is a kind of brotherhood.

It is love. It is rivalry. It is bullying. It is support and mutual defense. It is resentment. It is belief.

And in Birmingham, Alabama, for the men who played baseball for the Black Barons of the Negro

leagues at the end of the 1940s, it was necessary.

This was when the city they played in was first starting to be called Bombingham.

It was a name that would get used a lot in the 1960s, when the city was one of the epicenters of the struggle for civil rights,

especially after four girls were killed when a box of dynamite exploded beneath the front steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church,

while 27 children were there getting ready for Sunday services. But historians think the name

was first hung on the city in the summer of 1948. After the United States Supreme Court ruled that

certain forms of housing segregation were unconstitutional, and the Ku Klux Klan and just regular white citizens

of Birmingham started blowing up houses of black families who tried to live in what had been

white neighborhoods. People were shot at. People were beaten. Crosses were hammered into the lawns

in front of the homes where black citizens lived and lit on fire.

That was the year that Willie Mays signed his first professional contract.

He was still in high school. He caught hell from his principal and his former coaches.

Getting paid to play baseball for the black barons meant he couldn't play baseball or football or basketball for

Fairfield Industrial High School.

Willie's dad had known it since Willie was little.

He was a prodigy, his kid, his hand-eye coordination, his speed at five years old.

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