How Softball Destroyed Hate in One NJ Town

Woman being recognized for her contribution to the civil rights movement through some good old-fashioned softball

Everywhere Margaret Hicks Morris looked in life, she was surrounded by love. But in segregated North Carolina in the 1920s, Margaret saw hate after her family beat up a white salesman who groped and slapped her mother.

"The Ku Klux Klan members were standing over us and I just about had my first heart attack," she said.  "It was the scariest thing any child would want to see.”

Her father, mother, six sisters and two brothers vanished over the next two years. It was only when a young Margaret arrived at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia that the mystery was solved.

“There was papa, mama, Retha, Odelle, Buddy…all of them,” she said.

And in an instant, the family whisked her away to a home in Beverly, N.J. -- where she saw her first real baseball diamond. A field that was much nicer than the family's makeshift one in North Carolina.

“The outhouse was first base, the chicken coop was second base, the pigpen was third base,” Margaret said laughing as she described the baseball field she left behind.

Using that new field as a start, she and her sisters founded the unstoppable softball team – The Beverly Amazons. A team that would start to undo the discrimination she met on the first day of school.

“I was just a little girl and they pushed me out and said this is for white girls. And I sat in the fetal position, crying,” she said.

But from the other side of the tracks, wealthy white families started coming to the Amazon's field. The team beat every challenger on the field -- even men disguised as women.

“We would fall, we would slide, we would crawl -- so the other team was not gonna get any runs, if possible,” she said.

Margaret marched with Dr. King, became a licensed minister and lived to see the nation’s first black president.

"I prayed for his safety. I was worried about that," she said.  "But I'm proud that I had a little part in that.”

Two months shy of her 90th birthday, Margaret is content to enjoy her family and her mention in history books.

But it’s what Margaret and her team did in Beverly that tops them all.

"We brought the whole town together as one," she said.  Instead of that dividing line.”

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