At long last, the marker is up!!!

There it is! The Wesley Barrow grave marker is finally in place at New Hope Baptist Church Cemetery in Gretna! And the surrounding stone time just got fresh white paint as well.

I’m sitting in the pressbox at Zephyr Field for the New Orleans Zephyrs’ opening night game against the Omaha StormChasers — the latter is leading 1-0 in the bottom of the second on a cloudy but so far dry night — and it feels quite fitting that Wesley Barrow’s long-overdue honor was completed on the same day that the new local pro baseball season started.

OK, an RBI single up the middle just helped the Zephyrs knot it up with two outs.

This Z’s season I’m going to try to — pun possibly intended — integrate coverage of the Zephyrs with issues of African-Americans in baseball. I want to try to connect the history with the present, and hopefully I’ll be able to pull it off.

As the spring turns into summer, please feel free to comment on whether you like the melding of topics and how the process is going in general.

And don’t worry — I’m still gonna have plenty of Negro Leagues and black baseball history stories as per usual. For example, tomorrow I’ll expound on the Barrow marker finally coming to fruition with an interview and a pretty neat historical angle spring from that interview.

Keep checking back, and many thanks as usual for reading!