The Rev. Reneé Kesler on importance of Black history at Covenant Health Park
The Rev. Reneé Kesler speaks about the late Bob Booker and the importance of Black history at Covenant Health Park, Tuesday, April 8, 2025.
For Covenant Health Park to truly be a place where all types of people can come together, a bold and deliberate partnership had to happen between stadium developers and local Black leaders to consider the history – much of it painful – of how the plot of land became available to build on.
The Knoxville neighborhood once known as The Bottom was a microcosm of post-Emancipation life in East Tennessee, where the low-lying land near First Creek supported a close-knit community of formerly enslaved people and immigrants who took pride in the city’s Black baseball team, the Knoxville Giants.
The boundary-breaking club will be honored by the Knoxville Smokies on Aug. 8, as players with the Double-A Chicago Cubs affiliate will wear the Negro League team’s jerseys for Knoxville Giants Night.
While the new promotion is a celebration of Black Knoxville trailblazers, it’s also a moment to reflect on how urban removal policies between 1959 and 1974 forced Black families from their businesses, churches and homes to make room for projects such as the Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum.
Covenant Health Park might be different in that it’s outdoors, but putting people in seats is still the name of the game. The build-it-and-they-will-come mentality seems to be working, as more people are coming to games compared to the team’s time in Kodak.
But now that it’s built, does everyone feel welcome?
The Rev. Reneé Kesler, president of Beck Cultural Exchange Center, partnered with Smokies owner Randy Boyd and the development team on the front end to ensure all people felt some ownership of the publicly-owned park.
Those efforts sparked the collection of statues installed outside the stadium to honor Black Knoxvillians and the legacy of Black baseball in the city. While some stadiums around the country might have a single statue highlighting a team’s Negro League past, Covenant Health Park has seven. The “centerpiece of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum” in Kansas City, Missouri, for comparison, has just three more, according to its website.
The Knoxville statues, commissioned by Beck, honor players from the original 1920 Giants team. Each figure was carefully chosen and represents a unique aspect of the team and its history.
There’s a statue of Forrest “One-Wing” Maddox, which was particularly important to Kesler in the way it spotlights the abilities of an amputee to persevere and pursue athletics. Another statue honors team manager and former Green School Principal William M. Brooks, whose bronze figure symbolically faces the school now named Green Magnet Academy.
“(Green School) was a light on the hill for those of us who were down in the valley,” said former Beck President Dewey Roberts II, whose father was also a former principal at Green School.
These statues are not the final word on The Bottom’s history but, rather, an entry point. They are meant to be a conversation starter – a visual hook that inspires curiosity. The goal is to develop a walking museum that tells the full story of the community around the ballpark.
“Reverend Kesler has put everything, all her heart and energy into making sure that the stadium appreciates the Black athletes that we had here,” Roberts told Knox News.
Her work continues, as Beck is creating a system of QR codes that would be placed at the base of each statue. When scanned, the codes would direct people to Beck’s online archives to learn more.
The archives are exhaustive and include black-and-white baseball photographs taken by Margaret Carson, a high school student in 1920, that became reference points for creating the statues. Carson went on to become the first historian at Beck, which now includes 50,000 artifacts.
“Most of these baseball players also had to work,” Kesler said. “So, it wasn’t just that you were playing baseball, but you were playing under the fact that you were still working here. You were still part of this community. You were still part of this segregated society.”
The people of The Bottom had to create their own spaces and their own heroes, and Giants players became local legends. An inaugural member of the Negro Southern League, the Giants were a symbol of excellence and defiance in a segregated world that denied players access to white leagues and major stadiums.
The Giants, while beloved at home, faced the realities of segregation head-on.
While they Giants played on local diamonds, like at Leslie Street Park, Knoxville did not have a stadium large enough to accommodate a Black team and their crowds for bigger games. The Giants were forced to move to places like Nashville and Alabama to play in these situations, a regular reminder of the inequalities they faced.
By the time Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, Giants players had spent more than two decades forging their own path in Knoxville. The MLB in 2024 saw the highest diversity among all major sports league, according to Forbes, yet African Americans’ involvement in the sport was at historic lows.
The partnership between Beck and Boyd has Covenant Health Park digging into a fuller history of the roles African Americans played in shaping Knoxville history − in baseball and beyond. It’s not only statues that honor notable Black Knoxvillians at the stadium, but the residential buildings overlooking the ballpark are named after acclaimed Black modernist painter Beauford Delaney and William Francis Yardley, a civil rights advocate believed to be the first African American to bring a case to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
“This park is about resilience,” Kesler said in April as the statues were unveiled. “It’s about people who would not give up.”
Knox News reporter Gabriel Jackson covers the Knoxville Smokies and One Knox SC. Email: gabriel.jackson@knoxnews.com.
