Covenant Health Park will be packed tonight, Aug. 8, for a game that honors the Knoxville Giants and the Negro Leagues when America’s pastime was still segregated.

The Knoxville Giants were a founding member of the Negro Southern League and its first champions. On Friday evening, the current Knoxville Smokies will wear Giants replica jerseys that pay homage to the city’s baseball history.

The game doubles as the Beck Cultural Exchange Center’s annual Eighth of August Jubilee, and the pre-game VIP event sold out, along with a separate allotment of game-only tickets.

Any tickets left, and there aren’t many, can be bought HERE on the Smokies website or secondary markets.

Gates open at 5:30 p.m. with juke joint band and line dance performances on the concourse at 5:30 and 5:50 p.m. by the Grooving & Moving Line and Eureka’s Sole Smooth line dancers. Rev. Reneé Kesler, president of Beck Cultural Exchange Center, and DJ Sterl the Pearl will make welcome remarks and recognitions at 6 p.m.

A dance team performance by Austin-East High School will take place at 6:25 p.m. with an African Drummers Performance at 6:35 p.m.by Obayana Ajanaku and Co. The ceremonial first pitches will be held at 6:45 p.m., featuring Ned Arter.

The Eighth of August Jubilee holds significance in the history of emancipation and freedom in Tennessee because August 8, 1863, was when Tennessee Military Governor Andrew Johnson freed enslaved people. Arter, the great-great grandson of the enslaved Samuel Johnson, received the Heritage Award at Beck Center’s first Eighth of August Jubilee in 2015.

Johnson, his sister Dolly, and her three children, Liz, Florence and William, were among the emancipated in 1863. William would later take a trip to Washington, D.C., where he met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave him a silver-tipped cane with both their names inscribed. Arter inherited the cane.

Kesler and the Beck Center partnered with Boyd Sports when the stadium project was planned to honor the history of the Knoxville Giants. Statues are located at the first and third base gates of multiple Giants players, along with Payne Avenue Little League players during segregation in the 1950s. The team played at the now-gone Payne Avenue Recreation Center and the still-standing Cal Johnson Recreation Center just off Summit Hill Drive directly behind the stadium.

Information about each statue is available HERE.

The national anthem will be performed at 6:55 p.m. by the Knoxville College Jubilee Singers. First pitch is set for 7 p.m.

The Smokies’ opponent will be the Biloxi Shuckers who will play as the Biloxi Dodgers of the Gulf Coast Negro League. Segregation is a brutal stain on baseball and U.S. history.

Friday’s game is both a celebration of the Eighth of August and a reminder to never forget.

Maria M. Cornelius, a senior writer/editor at MoxCar Marketing + Communications since 2013, started her journalism career at the Knoxville News Sentinel and began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press and a 10th anniversary edition will be released in 2026.