BALTIMORE _ When Orioles outfielder Cedric Mullins was in elementary school, he came home to ask his parents a question: Why had another boy at recess told him to go back to the cotton fields?
Fellow Georgia native and Orioles outfielder Dwight Smith Jr. grew up in an area where Confederate flags were prevalent. Once, he says, he was walking through his neighborhood when he saw a noose hanging from a tree.
After Jackie Robinson's historic _ and painful _ integration of Major League Baseball in 1947, the league and its players have rarely spoken openly about race and equality, according to at least one expert. Yet, the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police and the resulting national reckoning on race reverberated across professional sports _ and continues to reverberate within the Orioles.
Mullins, Smith and some of their teammates comprise a contingent of Orioles supporting the Black Lives Matter movement through the Major League Baseball Players Association's Players Alliance, a group of more than 100 Black current and former MLB players. On Sunday, the team will wear patches commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues as part of a league-wide day of recognition that, locally, will also highlight Black and minority-run baseball from around the Baltimore area.
"Growing up and seeing the things I've seen and things I've dealt with personally in the past, I kind of just held my tongue, just kind of ignored it and just keep going on about my business," Smith said. "It was the right time for me to speak up and talk about these issues that we've been having in this country for so long. There's no other way to really put it."
Said Mullins: "It's something that I've always wanted to speak on, but it can be a tough subject matter, and it does make people uncomfortable. But that's how we grow as people, and even as baseball players: We go through things that make us uncomfortable."
It was September 2017 when then-Orioles center fielder Adam Jones spoke to the media at Boston's Fenway Park about demonstrations such as NFL star Colin Kaepernick's protest of police brutality during the national anthem. That wouldn't happen in baseball, he said _ "a white man's sport."
But nearly three years later, on this season's opening day and in that same ballpark, the Orioles players and coaches wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts during warmups, knelt in a moment of reflection and stood with arms locked as a show of unity during the national anthem.
The team talked about racial equality and social justice the entire week leading up to the season's first pitch, according to Smith and manager Brandon Hyde.
"I'm supporting our players and their rights to individually express themselves in a peaceful way," Hyde said at the time. "That's the culture we're trying to build here, and that has happened the last few months. It's been unbelievable."
For Mullins and Smith, the on-field demonstration was a lifetime in the making.
"It was a very proud moment," Mullins said.
