NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – An untold baseball story will be told during the International Black Film Festival in Nashville on Oct. 5.
“My mother gave me a scrapbook after he [her father] passed and said, ‘Do something with this scrapbook,’ and I said, ‘Well, what do I do?’” Harriet Kimbro-Hamilton said.
Kimbro-Hamilton ended up taking that scrapbook and writing a book: Daddy’s Scrapbook: A Daughter’s Perspective.
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The book details the life of her dad, Henry Kimbro, who played baseball in the Negro League for the Nashville Elite-Giants in the 1930s.
“From there, the second book came from the idea that I spoke about my father in the first one,” Kimbro-Hamilton explained. “The second one is about the other negro leaguers, and I found there were about 20 of them that lived here in Nashville and called Nashville their home.”
Through writing both books, she acquired tons of pictures and videos.
“I came to realize no one will see this footage if I don’t do something about that, so that’s how the documentary came to be about,” she said.
The documentary is called “A Tour of One City: The History of the Negro Leagues in Nashville and Beyond.”
“I wanted their voices to be heard, not just mine, and they are no longer with us,” Kimbro-Hamilton said. “One of them is here, including my father.”
Kimbro-Hamilton said she realized a lot of people did not know this ever existed in Nashville.
“I wanted to just focus on them,” she said. “These were regular men that raised families. After baseball, they all had jobs here in Nashville, and probably no one knew that they were great baseball players, and that kind of shaped that.”
The Nashville Sounds hosted a screening of a segment of the documentary during a game in 2024.
“Dr. Kimbro-Hamilton’s documentary on Negro League Baseball is not only a compelling piece of storytelling but an essential contribution to the broader understanding of history, race, and sports in Nashville and beyond,” noted Doug Scopel, vice-president of operations for the Sounds Baseball organization.
Now the documentary, which recently took home the top prize for documentaries in Marina Del Rey, will be screened on October 5 at the Scarritt Bennett Center at 2 p.m.
“When people see the film, I hope they take away respect for the players who endured terrible situations and just for the love of the game, just as talented as major league baseball, take away pride in the history that was Nashville’s Negro League as a place in history,” Kimbro-Hamilton said.
To buy tickets to the screening, visit here.
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