Jim Crow in Savannah's Parks in the 20th Century presented by Jeffrey M. Ofgang: Grayson Stadium

In 1926, Savannah opened an athletic stadium in Daffin Park called Municipal Stadium. Both were run by the Park and Tree Commission, and, like the park, the stadium was segregated. After a hurricane destroyed the wooden grandstands in 1940, the stadium was rebuilt in 1941 and renamed Grayson Stadium. When Savannah's minor league baseball teams played at the stadium starting in 1936, Black spectators were seated separately. At Grayson, they were relegated to the "colored section" in left field, as shown in the blueprints. All the players on the field were white.

Jackie Robinson, who would break Major League Baseball's color line in 1947, was scheduled to play at Grayson Stadium the year before in a spring exhibition game for the Brooklyn Dodgers' minor-league team, the Montreal Royals, against the Savannah Indians. The city of Savannah barred Robinson from playing, so the Royals refused to play. The first integrated minor-league game at Grayson Stadium was played in 1953.

Most direct-action racial protests in Savannah in the 1960s were aimed at downtown lunch counters and department stores. However, in 1962, Black leaders, including the Savannah NAACP president, W.W. Law, called for a boycott of Savannah White Sox games until the city integrated the grandstands at Grayson Stadium. A poster announcing the protest stated, "The colored rest room is a common unsanitary outhouse."

Black fans stayed away, and average attendance for White Sox games, already low, fell to 850. The team owner demanded that the U.S. Post Office fire Law from his job as a letter carrier. The White Sox moved the last eight games of their season to Lynchburg, Virginia.

The grandstands in Lynchburg were integrated, but Black leaders there also threatened a boycott because Black and white players could not stay in the same hotel. The boycott failed, and the White Sox relocated permanently. In 1964, the Lynchburg White Sox won their league championship while Grayson Stadium lay empty. Minor League baseball returned in 1968 with the Savannah Senators. As a result of the Civil Rights Act four years earlier, the grandstands at Grayson Stadium were integrated.

Grover "Deacon" Jones and Don Buford, future Major Leaguers, were the only Black players for the 1962 Savannah White Sox. Jones says the owner decided to move the franchise only after Jones's wife Virginia and Buford's wife Alicia refused one day to sit anymore in the segregated bleachers under the hot sun. Instead, they moved to the covered grandstand behind home plate, in the section reserved for the white players’ wives. According to Virginia Jones, the White Sox general manager pleaded with the women to move, saying their presence among white spectators endangered the team’s advertising contracts. Virginia Jones recalled telling the general manager, Tom Fleming, "I'm sorry, Tom. We're not going to leave. You do what you have to do." Virginia Jones sat again behind home plate the next day. A few days later, as Deacon Jones recalled in an interview with the Lynchburg News & Advance, the general manager called the players together and announced, "Gentlemen, we've decided to move the whole franchise."