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      At Rickwood Field, Willie Mays Is the Star of the Show, One More Time

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      Earlier this week, as Major League Baseball prepared for a tribute game in his hometown Birmingham, Ala., Willie Mays said that age would keep him away but that he would be watching from afar.“Rickwood Field is where I played my first home game, and playing there was it — everything I wanted,” he said in a statement to The San Francisco Chronicle.Mays died the next day, at 93, and as fans walked into the ballpark on Thursday, it felt like he was there in spirit, watching from afar.“I’m sure he’s here,” said his son, Michael Mays, who rushed to California from Alabama to pray over his father’s body and then returned in time for the game. “He figured out a way to be the center of attention like he always did. He’s the star of the show. He’s Willie Mays.”His death added poignancy to M.L.B.’s celebration of the Negro leagues at Rickwood Field — the nation’s oldest professional ballpark, where Mays got his start as a professional — and to the game between the San Francisco Giants, Mays’s old team, and the St. Louis Cardinals.Willie Mays’s death added poignancy to M.L.B.’s celebration of the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field, the nation’s oldest professional ballpark, where Mays got his start as a professional.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Willie Mays, Birmingham and Rickwood Field: Baseball Honors a Legend in His Hometown

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      Major League Baseball is in Birmingham to honor the legacy of the Negro Leagues. With Mays’s death, the celebration at ancient Rickwood Field takes on new meaning.In the late innings of a minor league game on Tuesday night at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., fans throughout the grandstand, suddenly and almost in unison, began staring at the news on their phones: The great Willie Mays had died, at 93, in California.An inning later, a tribute video played on the scoreboard overlooking the outfield where Mays played his first professional game as a teenage phenom for the Birmingham Black Barons, and the loudspeaker blared “Say Hey (the Willie Mays Song),” recorded in 1954 by the R&B group the Treniers.“I was shocked,” said Randy Ferguson, 70, a member of the Friends of Rickwood, the nonprofit organization that oversees the ancient ballpark. He was standing outside a small museum underneath the stands, where the next day fans would line up to see Mays’s flower-draped Hall of Fame plaque, the first time it has left the wall in Cooperstown since it was installed at his induction in 1979. “I have chill bumps. I can’t think of any place to be than here.”At 114 years old, Rickwood Field is the nation’s oldest professional ballpark, the first place Mays played pro ball and the last ballpark still standing that he called home. To honor the legacy of the Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball scheduled a game in Mays’s hometown between the San Francisco Giants, Mays’s old team, and the St. Louis Cardinals, that will be played on Thursday.The Rev. William H. Greason, 99, who was the first Black pitcher for the Cardinals in the 1950s, has been a pastor in Birmingham for more than a half-century since retiring from baseball. He had been hoping to see his old friend this week, at the ballpark where they played together.At 114 years old, Rickwood Field is the nation’s oldest professional ballpark and the first place Mays played professional baseball.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alabama’s I.V.F. Shield Law Now Faces a Constitutional Challenge

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      The challenge, from two of the families who filed the initial lawsuit, raises the possibility that access to I.V.F. could once again be in jeopardy in the state.Two Alabama families at the center of the wrongful-death lawsuit that led to the temporary suspension of in vitro fertilization procedures in the state have asked a judge to overturn a new law that shields clinics and doctors from civil and criminal liability.Their challenge to the law raises the possibility that access to I.V.F. could once again be placed in jeopardy in Alabama. And it could further inflame tensions across the country over whether to enshrine protections for I.V.F., as influential Christian conservatives look to curb the use of the popular reproductive treatment.Alabama lawmakers quickly pushed through the shield law in early March after the State Supreme Court weighed in on the lawsuit and ruled that frozen embryos could legally be considered children. The families had filed the claim over the accidental destruction of their embryos at a Mobile clinic in 2020.Multiple clinics had shuttered to avoid the threat of legal challenges, adding to the emotional, financial and physical toll of infertility for Alabama families suddenly left in medical limbo.The swift passage of the shield law led clinics to reopen and restart embryo transfers. But the law did not explicitly address the legal question of “fetal personhood” raised by the State Supreme Court opinion, and many in the Republican-dominated Legislature acknowledged they would very likely need a more permanent solution.This week, after the clinic asked for the wrongful-death lawsuit to be dismissed, the families argued that the shield law was a violation of their constitutional rights, including equal protection, due process and the Alabama Constitution’s “guarantees of life, the right to bear children and the right to a remedy for wrongful deaths of such children.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How I Met My Father

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      “What took you so long?” he said.Fathers don’t fare well in my fiction. They are white supremacist killers and domestic abusers. They trick their wives into becoming pregnant. They have affairs. They abandon their families.My biological father, Albert Coleman Bryan Jr., was 22 when I was born. He was a dashing air force pilot who flew off into the wide blue yonder, leaving my mother and me grounded.He had red curly hair and freckles and a charming grin. It’s a face I don’t remember, if indeed I ever saw it. My parents split up around the time I was born.I grew up tasting the bitterness of my father’s absence, especially at Christmas, when he sent me expensive presents. My mother would hand them to me without a word, and I would know to go into my closet to open them.By then, she had remarried. In addition to a stepdad, I had a brother and sister. Our stockings were filled with bananas and oranges, little else.In my closet, I would open the presents from my father, with cards signed by his secretary or someone in a store. Among the many gifts over the years, he sent me a pearl necklace, a portable typewriter and a birthstone ring. I’d know to tuck them away in my closet and never to mention them to my brother and sister.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      J. Gary Cooper, Pathbreaking Marine Leader, Is Dead at 87

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      He was the first Black officer to lead a Marine Corps infantry company into combat. He later became an Alabama state lawmaker and an assistant secretary of the Air Force.J. Gary Cooper, a two-star general and the first African American to lead a Marine infantry company in combat, who later became an Alabama state lawmaker, an assistant secretary of the Air Force and an ambassador to Jamaica, died on April 27 at his home in Mobile, Ala. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his daughter Joli Claire Cooper.Growing up in Alabama in the 1930s and ’40s, General Cooper overcame the harsh segregation of the Deep South to attain leadership roles in the military, corporate America and government, a sweeping arc that paralleled the paths of a generation of African Americans that pushed open doors during a time of profound racial change in the United States.General Cooper was raised in Mobile in a rarefied world: the Black upper class of the pre-civil rights era. His family owned an insurance company and a funeral home. But money did not insulate him from the strictures of Jim Crow and its long racist shadow.When his father tried to send him to an all-white Roman Catholic school, the local bishop barred him. When he returned to Mobile to run the family business after 12 years in the Marines, the Junior Chamber of Commerce rejected him as a member. And in 1973, when General Cooper went to the Mobile County Courthouse to obtain a marriage license, he was humiliated to find that Black couples were made to sign a “colored” register, separate from the one for white couples.His initial escape from the segregated city of his youth came in 1954 when he won a scholarship to Notre Dame, where he was one of only a handful of Black freshmen in a class of 1,500.“On campus there were no ‘colored’ or ‘white’ signs on the drinking fountains or bathroom doors,” General Cooper wrote in a reminiscence published in Notre Dame magazine in 2014. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Katie Britt proposes federal database to collect data on pregnant people

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      Katie Britt, the Republican US senator from Alabama best known for delivering a widely ridiculed State of the Union speech in March, marked the run-up to Mother’s Day on Sunday by introducing a bill to create a federal database to collect data on pregnant people.The More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (Moms) act proposes to establish an online government database called “pregnancy.gov” listing resources related to pregnancy, including information about adoption agencies and pregnancy care providers, except for those that provide abortion-related services.The bill specifically forbids any entity that “performs, induces, refers for, or counsels in favor of abortions” from being listed in the database, which would in effect eliminate swaths of OB-GYN services and sexual health clinics across the country.The website would direct users to enter their personal data and contact information, which government officials may then “use to conduct outreach via phone or email” for additional resources.Britt introduced the legislation on Thursday alongside two co-sponsors: fellow Republican senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota.In a statement, Britt said the bill was proof that “you can absolutely be pro-life, pro-woman, and pro-family at the same time”, adding that the legislation “advances a comprehensive culture of life” for mothers and children to “live their American Dreams”.Critics have noted that the database of “pregnancy support centers” would provide misleading information in an effort to dissuade women from seeking abortions. Axios noted that the bill would also provide grants to anti-abortion non-profit organizations.The state of Alabama, which Britt represents, already has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. After the US supreme court eliminated federal abortion rights by overturning Roe v Wade in 2022, the state banned abortion except in cases where there is a serious health risk to the mother.Britt’s party is in the minority in the US Senate and has only a slim majority in the House. Her bill would need to be approved in both chambers and then be signed by Democratic president Joe Biden to become law, giving her proposal virtually no chance of making meaningful progress in the legislative process as-is.The speech Britt gave to rebut Biden’s State of the Union was panned by both parties after she invoked a story about child rape that she implied had resulted from the president’s handling of immigration at the US’s southern border. The abuse actually occurred years earlier in Mexico while a Republican was president, George W Bush.Britt’s delivery – which oscillated between smiling and sounding as if she were on the verge of tears – was also a target of ridicule, though she defended her performance. More

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      Alabama chooses candidates for new Black congressional district

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      Shomari Figures, an attorney and Obama White House executive from a politically-prominent civil rights family, has won the Democratic nomination to run in Alabama’s redrawn second congressional district Tuesday night, defeating state representative Anthony Daniels.The runoff election has been closely watched because of its implications for control of Congress in November, and for the effect of supreme court orders requiring southern states to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act and eliminate racial gerrymandering.Republicans currently control Congress by a margin of 218 to 213, with four vacancies. A win by Figures in November represents one seat flipping control from Republicans to Democrats.Alabama legislators resisted complying with the order of the US supreme court last year, requiring the state’s congressional map to add an additional district that would be politically competitive for a Black candidate. The courts eventually appointed a special master to oversee redrawing district lines, creating a new second district in southern Alabama, stretching through the “Black Belt” of counties with large African American populations.Just under half of the residents are Black. The Cook Political Report rates Alabama’s second congressional district as “leans Democratic” with a +4 Democratic partisan advantage, which Republicans believe may still provide an opportunity to hold the seat.Tuesday night, Republicans chose Caroleene Dobson, a real estate attorney and political newcomer, to face Figures in November. Dobson, a Harvard graduate and Federalist Society member, ran as a more conservative candidate than her runoff opponent, former State Senator Dick Brewbaker, who served a Montgomery-area district for 10 years.The Republican runoff candidates had contributed about a million dollars to their campaigns by March election filing deadlines, a sign of how hard fought the contest will be in November.The campaigns of Figures, 38, and Daniels, 41, differed less by ideology than biography. Daniels is the youngest Black man to lead Democrats in the Alabama house of representatives. He grew up in a small Black Belt town south of Montgomery, but represents Huntsville, Alabama, a prospering north Alabama city from which he has built a statewide power base.Daniels developed a reputation as a political dealmaker while serving in the legislature, navigating a political environment that is hostile to Democrats to get legislation passed that eliminated state income taxes on overtime pay. But Daniels could not overcome Figures’ financial advantages in a runoff.Figures is the kind of Alabama political royalty whose engagement five years ago was announced in the New York Times. Figures’ father, Alabama state Senator Michael Figures was a crusading attorney who famously bankrupted the Alabama Ku Klux Klan in the ’80s. His mother, state Senator Vivian Davis Figures, won the seat held by her husband after his death in 1996 and has held it since.Figures resigned his job as the deputy chief of staff and counselor to Merrick Garland, the attorney general, to compete in the crowded March primary. His longstanding connections to national politics helped him draw nearly $2m in outside spending from groups like Protect Progress, a Washington-based political action committee. More

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      Alabama Runoff Elections Set Field in Newly Competitive House District

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      Shomari Figures, a Democrat who worked in the Justice Department, will face Caroleene Dobson, a lawyer and Republican political newcomer, this November for the seat in Alabama’s Second Congressional District, according to The Associated Press.The two candidates won primary runoff elections on Tuesday in the district, which was redrawn after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the state had illegally diluted the power of Black voters.Now that the district has more Black voters, who historically have largely supported Democrats, political analysts see the race for it as one of the most competitive in the South. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report ranks it as a likely Democratic seat. (The district’s current representative, Barry Moore, is expected to remain in Congress after winning the Republican primary in the neighboring First Congressional District.)The Second District now stretches across the state, encompassing much of Mobile; Montgomery, the Alabama capital; and several counties in the Black Belt, where rich soil once fueled plantations worked by enslaved people.In the Republican primary, Ms. Dobson faced Dick Brewbaker, a former state senator. Mr. Brewbaker repeatedly pointed to his experience in the State Legislature, while Ms. Dobson argued that it was time for a newer political voice in Washington.In the Democratic runoff, Mr. Figures’s opponent was State Representative Anthony Daniels, the House Democratic leader.Mr. Figures’s family has a long political legacy in Alabama: He is the son of Michael Figures and Vivian Davis Figures, who have both served in the State Senate, with Ms. Davis Figures winning her husband’s seat after his death in 1996. Shomari Figures moved back to Alabama after working in the Justice Department and the Obama administration.Mr. Daniels does not live in the district — a point of contention in the race, though residency is not a requirement — but grew up there. He argued that his leadership position in the State House had shown that he could deliver for Alabama residents.The November elections could result in Alabama sending two Black representatives to Washington for the first time in its history if Mr. Figures were to win and if Representative Terri Sewell, the Democrat in the Sixth Congressional District, wins re-election, as analysts widely expect. More