Negro League's heroes finally get their tombstones

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Negro League's heroes finally get their tombstones

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43815227/ns/nightly_news/



William "Big Bill" Gatewood

TOPEKA, Kan. — Amid headstones of chiseled and polished granite at a Topeka, Kansas, cemetery lies a new tombstone. With a baseball and the figure of a baseball catcher etched in stone, it is dedicated to “Topeka’s ‘Super Substitute’” — Carroll Ray Mothell, better known “Dink.”

He died on April 24, 1980; but his grave just got a tombstone on June 20, 2011.

Before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, African American baseball players were segregated from white players and played in the Negro Leagues.

After their baseball careers ended, many of the Negro League’s greatest players went on to work menial jobs and were buried in unmarked graves.