ORLANDO, Fla. – The City of Orlando unveiled a tribute Thursday dedicated to the first interracial little league baseball game in the south.
The Barrier Breakers Monument is at Lake Lorna Doone Park and honors the August 1955 game, which was played in the same location.
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The game brought together the Orlando Kiwanis and Pensacola Jaycees. The two teams are represented in statues of two 12-year-old boys standing next to each other.
Some players who took part in the game were in attendance for Thursday’s ceremony.
The monument was paid in part by the Edward E Haddock Jr. Family Foundation and is the final work of artist George Nock, who died in November 2020.
Nock also broke barriers as a member of the first historically Black college football team to win an integrated bowl game. The game was the Tangerine Bowl and was also held in Orlando in 1966.