This is the Memory Palace.
I'm Nate Dimaio.
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,