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Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South
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. When nineteen-year-old Percy Miller took the field for the Danville (Virginia) Leafs in 1951, his presence on the roster was not the result of altruism: the team's white owners saw attendance flagging and recognized the need for more African-American fans. Two years later, Hank Aaron and his two black teammates for the Milwaukee Braves' Jacksonville (Florida) farm team were regularly greeted by racial invective, even bottles and stones, on the road. And Ed Charles endured nine years of discrimination in the southern minor leagues before breaking into the majors and finally winning the World Series with the Mets in 1969.
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 in the United States, gripping fans of history and baseball as surely as a pennant or a home run--race.
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. When nineteen-year-old Percy Miller took the field for the Danville (Virginia) Leafs in 1951, his presence on the roster was not the result of altruism: the team's white owners saw attendance flagging and recognized the need for more African-American fans. Two years later, Hank Aaron and his two black teammates for the Milwaukee Braves' Jacksonville (Florida) farm team were regularly greeted by racial invective, even bottles and stones, on the road. And Ed Charles endured nine years of discrimination in the southern minor leagues before breaking into the majors and finally winning the World Series with the Mets in 1969.
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 in the United States, gripping fans of history and baseball as surely as a pennant or a home run--race.
275 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 25, 2011
Excellent book about the integration of minor league baseball in the South. Adelson details the difficulty Afro-American players faced in becoming pioneers outside the ML spotlight. Segregation in the minors continued in some leagues past 1960 and the suthor does a good job describing the efforts of owners to keep the status quo.
August 17, 2018
Jackie Robinson's heroic turn as the first African American major league baseball player receives lots of attention--and for good reason, as this brings out. But few think about all the other players who helped integrate professional baseball, and here I don't mean major league ball. Adelson, in this book, turns his attention to the minor leagues, particularly those in the South, which lagged behind the majors and which featured many of the same struggles that were endured by men like Robinson.
The book begins with an anecdote about a young man whose intention was to continue on to college but who was drafted by a baseball team. He didn't really want to play, but his dad urged him to, because that had been the father's dream. For most African Americans, until the 1950s, playing baseball professionally was just that--a dream--unless of course one played for the Negro Leagues. This was an opportunity, the dad brought out, to do something great for a people. The son chose baseball. The anecdote, as written, held for me an emotional wallop.
Alas, in one of the major issues for this book, the anecdote is repeated in the very next chapter, word for word (though in slightly greater detail insofar as it is enlongated at its start and end). Other anecdotes and quotes are repeated elsewhere in the book. And there is no index, so tracking down a minor character's identity is difficult; described first in some early chapter, the character is not reintroduced in a late chapter where he shows up again, and so one is left with a gnawing wish to remember who this guy is or was.
But the tales themselves are incredibly interesting. Adelson spends time in different leagues during the course of the 1950s, covering events year by year, and connecting them to large events in the civil rights movement. Often, rather than writing about the events, he lets quotes from newspapers or from interviews with baseball stars stand in for narrative, giving one a sense of the times.
In brief, some of the rather amazing things that happened included the following: A given minor league team might integrate by adding one or two black players. That team then reaped the benefits of larger attendance from black patrons, at a time when attendance numbers were otherwise sagging. But other teams in a league often disagreed with such actions, and so various things might happen to stop the integration from fully occurring. State and local governments might ban interracial game and sporting events, or the league leadership itself might step in to enforce segregation. As a result, black players from another team had to be left behind or the team might have to forfeit (ironically to the team that refused to play because of the inclusion of a black player). Just as segregated buses were boycotted in some cities during the civil rights movement, so too African Americans often ended up boycotting games by those teams that refused to integrate, which increased the attendance problem and the declining revenue. In some cases, leagues or teams ended up going out of business because of their stubborness. Some northern teams simply stopped coming South to play sports (most notably, in college football, but also exhibition baseball games with major league teams).
But even if a black player was allowed to take the field, there were other issues. There wasn't just the name calling, which often spurred such athletes on. There was the fact that seating was often segregated so that African Americans were relegated to lousy outfield seats and often not enough--this last factor sometimes led to expanded black and eventually integrated seating. There was the fact that black players might take the field with their white counterparts, but after the game, they'd have to go stay at someone's house. They couldn't go to the hotel with the team, couldn't eat at the same restaurants as the team, couldn't essentially do anything with the team itself out in public. It was a lonely and tough life, a mirror of what Robinson endured but sometimes in spades insofar as this was the South, where jim crow reigned.
I never thought much, when I was younger, about what some players had endured just a decade or so before my birth, men like Billy Williams or Hank Aaron, who played minor league ball in the South and who were old and about-to-retire stars or new coaches when I was a kid. I thought of them as great ballplayers, but their early careers were in fact civil rights-type actions, given the prejudice they had to endure. As Adelson shows, baseball was in some ways the first line of integration. As segregation fell here, it would fall elsewhere in entertainment, at schools, and in public transportation.
The book begins with an anecdote about a young man whose intention was to continue on to college but who was drafted by a baseball team. He didn't really want to play, but his dad urged him to, because that had been the father's dream. For most African Americans, until the 1950s, playing baseball professionally was just that--a dream--unless of course one played for the Negro Leagues. This was an opportunity, the dad brought out, to do something great for a people. The son chose baseball. The anecdote, as written, held for me an emotional wallop.
Alas, in one of the major issues for this book, the anecdote is repeated in the very next chapter, word for word (though in slightly greater detail insofar as it is enlongated at its start and end). Other anecdotes and quotes are repeated elsewhere in the book. And there is no index, so tracking down a minor character's identity is difficult; described first in some early chapter, the character is not reintroduced in a late chapter where he shows up again, and so one is left with a gnawing wish to remember who this guy is or was.
But the tales themselves are incredibly interesting. Adelson spends time in different leagues during the course of the 1950s, covering events year by year, and connecting them to large events in the civil rights movement. Often, rather than writing about the events, he lets quotes from newspapers or from interviews with baseball stars stand in for narrative, giving one a sense of the times.
In brief, some of the rather amazing things that happened included the following: A given minor league team might integrate by adding one or two black players. That team then reaped the benefits of larger attendance from black patrons, at a time when attendance numbers were otherwise sagging. But other teams in a league often disagreed with such actions, and so various things might happen to stop the integration from fully occurring. State and local governments might ban interracial game and sporting events, or the league leadership itself might step in to enforce segregation. As a result, black players from another team had to be left behind or the team might have to forfeit (ironically to the team that refused to play because of the inclusion of a black player). Just as segregated buses were boycotted in some cities during the civil rights movement, so too African Americans often ended up boycotting games by those teams that refused to integrate, which increased the attendance problem and the declining revenue. In some cases, leagues or teams ended up going out of business because of their stubborness. Some northern teams simply stopped coming South to play sports (most notably, in college football, but also exhibition baseball games with major league teams).
But even if a black player was allowed to take the field, there were other issues. There wasn't just the name calling, which often spurred such athletes on. There was the fact that seating was often segregated so that African Americans were relegated to lousy outfield seats and often not enough--this last factor sometimes led to expanded black and eventually integrated seating. There was the fact that black players might take the field with their white counterparts, but after the game, they'd have to go stay at someone's house. They couldn't go to the hotel with the team, couldn't eat at the same restaurants as the team, couldn't essentially do anything with the team itself out in public. It was a lonely and tough life, a mirror of what Robinson endured but sometimes in spades insofar as this was the South, where jim crow reigned.
I never thought much, when I was younger, about what some players had endured just a decade or so before my birth, men like Billy Williams or Hank Aaron, who played minor league ball in the South and who were old and about-to-retire stars or new coaches when I was a kid. I thought of them as great ballplayers, but their early careers were in fact civil rights-type actions, given the prejudice they had to endure. As Adelson shows, baseball was in some ways the first line of integration. As segregation fell here, it would fall elsewhere in entertainment, at schools, and in public transportation.
July 4, 2022
Like almost everyone, I thought the story of baseball integration culminated with Jackie Robinson in 1947. I should have realized that this was 7 years before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 and 16 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1963. Although there were no major league baseball teams in the south, there were many teams in the minor leagues, which fed players to the Majors and which excluded Blacks. Adelson documents the harsh realities of Black players assigned to southern minor league teams in the Jim Crow south through extended comments from players and snippets of newspaper articles, often from the Black press. There is extensive documentation of the attendance figures of these southern leagues and teams, showing how inclusion of one or two Black players brought enough Black fans to the parks to save the franchises. Most disturbing were the laws passed in the 1950's in Georgia, Louisiana, and Birmingham, Alabama, forbidding Blacks and whites to participate in any sport together. The book is an eye-opener.
August 26, 2022
An excellent read on the integration of minor league baseball in the south. For those who linger for the good old days when things were simpler? This is a reminder of some things not to be forgotten.
Again a good book about baseball and a sober reminder of racism in America during the fifties and sixties.
Again a good book about baseball and a sober reminder of racism in America during the fifties and sixties.
December 24, 2010
A good book for those interested in either baseball or the civil rights movement. It reminds us that barriers were broken down one person, one city, one day at a time. This book includes a lot of newspaper quotes and player interviews.
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