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Seventy years after baseball legend Don Baylor was barred from playing ball in Austin’s former Westenfield Park, his family celebrated a marker renaming it after him.
City officials and Baylor relatives came together on Feb. 28 to unveil a new marker commemorating Don Baylor Neighborhood Park. Mayor Kirk Watson and City Council members Marc Duchen and Natasha Harper-Madison spoke at the event, attended by Don Baylor’s widow, son, cousin, niece, and granddaughter.
Baylor’s family took the renaming plan to District 10 Council Member Duchen last year soon after he took office.
“They had done a tremendous amount of homework thinking about how to best honor him,” Duchen told Austin Free Press. “It was time to honor somebody else in the space, somebody that was more relevant to the community, that has a specific story to tell about access to the park.”
Image credit: Ellington Tough
The Austin City Council was telling a very different story in the 1920s, when it adopted an urban plan that designated a six-square-mile section of East Austin as the “Negro District.” The city reinforced that segregation policy by withholding basic services from Black residents who remained in freedmen communities west of East Avenue, now Interstate 35. The plan displaced most African Americans in West Austin neighborhoods, but some — including residents of Clarksville — chose to stay. Those who remained often lived for decades without paved roads, indoor plumbing, or other essential city services.
“Clarksville had been established since 1871, so it was pretty large,” Don Baylor Jr., the baseball star’s son, told Austin Free Press. “There were a lot of pooled resources, but people also grew their own food, raised their own chickens.”
Blacks remained in Clarksville for another 100 years. But in another twist of fate were displaced from their homeland by economic pressures of redevelopment, rising taxes and home values, and spiking rents.
Don Baylor was born in that working-class community in 1949. It’s where he learned to play baseball on dirt roads that the city refused to pave under its then-racist policies. Like Clarksville, Baylor learned to be self-sufficient.
“When I was growing up, my dad would always mention Westenfield,” Don Baylor Jr. said. “To him, the symbol of Jim Crow in Austin was that park. Here he is, this athletic young kid, and he can’t even go across the railroad track (to play ball) because that was West Austin.”
In a community that relied largely upon itself, the local school topped out at fourth grade. Baylor had to finish his elementary education at East Austin’s segregated Blackshear Elementary School.
“When he was in fifth grade and sixth grade, he had to take the bus across town and back,” Baylor Jr. said. “This was a city bus, not any kind of school bus.”
Image credit: Becky Baylor
Baylor began seventh grade in 1961, the year that O. Henry Middle School integrated. He was among the first three Black students to attend it. Later enrolling at Stephen F. Austin High School, he was the first African-American to participate in athletics there. He declined Darrell Royal’s invitation to become the University of Texas’ first Black football player, opting to play baseball instead. He was attending Blinn Junior College in Brenham, when the Baltimore Orioles drafted him in 1967.
Image credit: Society for American Baseball Research.
With the California Angels in 1979, the American League honored him as its Most Valuable Player. He became the first player to appear in three consecutive world series with three different teams when Baylor and the Minnesota Twins won the 1987 world championship. Baylor later managed the Colorado Rockies and Chicago Cubs and was named the 1995 Manager of the Year. He was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame, the Los Angeles Angels Hall of Fame, and the International League Hall of Fame.
Baylor founded a California golf tournament and the 65 Roses Golf Tournament, helping to raise millions of dollars for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Despite his storied career, Baylor’s Austin connection was not well known. “Even our baseball fans didn’t know that he was from here,” Baylor Jr. said. “I was like, ‘We have to figure out how to change that.’”
He and his stepmother, Becky Baylor, approached Duchen’s office with their renaming proposition in January 2025. Last May, Duchen pitched the resolution to the Austin City Council, which hit that ball out of Westenfield Park – into the Don Baylor Neighborhood Park.
Image credit: Texas State Cemetery
The Feb. 28 renaming celebration was followed by a reception at Clarksville’s historic Sweet Home Missionary Baptist Church, where Baylor had been a deacon and lifelong member.
“This dream has come true,” Becky Baylor said in her speech. “Don and I traveled many roads and many miles together, but today, his life has truly come full circle.”
After his 2017 death, Baylor was interred in the Texas State Cemetery, which is in East Austin.
Ellington Tough is a junior at Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), where he serves as the news editor for the LASA Liberator. He is professionally certified in Adobe production and has won multiple awards for his work.
