Brushing Back Jim Crow

While Jackie Robinson is justly famous for breaking the color line in major-league baseball in 1947, other young African American players, among them Hank Aaron, continued to struggle for acceptance on southern farm teams well into the 1960s. As Bruce Adelson writes, their presence in the South Atlantic, Carolina, and other minor leagues represented not only a quest for individual athletic achievement: simply by hitting, fielding, and signing autographs alongside their white teammates, African American ballplayers helped to end segregation in the Jim Crow South. In writing this book, Adelson interviewed dozens of athletes, managers, and sportswriters who witnessed this important but largely unrecognized front in the ongoing civil rights movement. Slowly, through the vehicle of baseball, these African Americans shattered Jim Crow restrictions and met the backlash against Brown v. Board of Education while simultaneously challenging long-held perceptions of racial inadequacy by performing on the field. Brushing Back Jim Crow weaves their firsthand accounts into a narrative that spans the long season of racism it the United States, gripping fans of history and baseball as surely as a pennant - or a home run - race.