Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe

Celebrating Black History Month and Diversity at the Y

In 1946 the addition of players Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe to the Nashua Dodgers, a Class B New England baseball team, broke ground by making it the first integrated affiliated baseball team in the United States. Both veterans of the Negro Leagues, Newcombe and Campanella led Nashua to a championship that year. Stories of how poorly minorities were treated during the early days of baseball integration were most common, but the time that Newcombe and Campanella spent in the small New England town was actually pleasant.  In fact Newcombe’s victory at Pawtucket on the third day of the 1946 season made him the first African-American pitcher to win a game for an integrated professional baseball team. Most of the population of Nashua at the time was white, according to the federal census that year, was roughly 33,000 people, less than 50 of which were black.

Local Author Lafortune Djabea

A display of Campanella and Newcombe will be highlighted in our Nashua lobby on Sunday afternoon as part of an overall celebration of Black History month.  In addition to traditional African music being played, a display of Harriet Wilson, the first African American published who lived in Milford, NH; The Pearl of Portsmouth a book about Martin Luther King Jr’s visit to Portsmouth, NH and the Pearl which was the only black owned church in the state at the time; and local author LaFortune Djabea who will share a reading from her book.

The Y is proud to share the history and celebrations of diversity in our community as part of Black History Month so please join this event at the Nashua Y  on Sunday, February 18 at 4-5p. (Click to Register)

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G Woodson, born in 1875 in Virginia, escaped poverty through his education and noticed that black history was misrepresented or missing from history books.  Woodson was the first to push black history into public consciousness by founding the Association of Study of Negro Life with Jesse Moorland, a prominent minister, to celebrate the achievements of black Americans.  Now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) they sponsored a national Negro History Week in 1926, choosing the second week in February to coincide with the birth dates of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas.  That initial event inspired other organized celebrations nationwide and thanks in part to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s it became Black History Month.

Anthony Bowen

The Y as a nationwide movement plays a large role in advocating for others, in addition to serving diverse communities.  In 1853, ten years before slavery officially ended, Anthony Bowen a freed slave, founded the first YMCA to serve the black community in Washington DC.  Today the Y deeply supports DEI initiatives, as an example Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) have been created nationwide and on association levels to support minority groups that work within the Y, one of which includes the African American Leadership Network (AALN).  Many Y’s across the country, including our own, celebrate Black History Month as way of educating communities and alignment of our mission.  Today and all year we celebrate the contributions of the Black and African Americans in our community, including Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe.  So the next time you catch a Silver Knights game, take a moment to reflect on a time when two young men forged the way for other black athletes to play in the major league and called Nashua home.