Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro
Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball
Research
Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the
story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and
triumphs precede Robinson's momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues
(1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African
American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are
lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and
poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of
Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines
wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome
Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir
Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others.
Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a
propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual
frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits
and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is
necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated
baseball in particular and African American cultural history more
generally.