Cracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas

The best-known story of integration in baseball is Jackie Robinson, who broke the major league color line in 1947 after coming up through the minor leagues the previous year. His story, however, differs from those of the many players who integrated the game in the Jim Crow South at all professional levels. Chris Holaday offers readers the first book-length history of baseball's integration in the Carolinas, showing its slow and unsteady progress, narrating the experience of players in a range of distinct communities, detailing the influence of baseball executives at the local and major league levels, and revealing that the changing structure of the professional baseball system allowed the major leagues to control integration at the state level. Holaday illuminates many smaller stories along the way, including desegregation in Little League and American Legion baseball, the first Black players to play in the tiny foothills town of Granite Falls, North Carolina, and the pipeline of Afro-Cuban players from Havana to the Carolina leagues. By showing how race and the national pastime intersected at the local level, Holaday offers readers new context to understand the long struggle of equality in the game.

About the Author :
Chris Holaday is a writer, college teacher, and historian in Durham, North Carolina.

Review :
"A rich portrait of integration as a difficult, gradual process that often took a real toll on those tasked with leading the way. . . . Cracks in the Outfield Wall is a well-written, well-researched intervention into well-trodden territory."--Journal of Southern History "Holaday's book does a masterful job of showing how America's game, whether grassroots or professional play, was defined by and often adhered to the racial hierarchy of US society. . . . What makes Cracks in the Outfield so compelling is that Holaday gives nuance to civil rights history through regional play as well as challenges the framework of a traditional historical monograph. . . . [A] critical regional roadmap for how to study and understand racial integration and the civil rights struggle more broadly."--Journal of Sport History "[Holaday's] primary focus . . . is the myriad '50s and '60s Carolina [minor league players] and their teams, both of which folded often and occasionally reappeared years later, and how, why, and when they accepted Black players, both American and Latino. It is a large, complex task that Holaday executes with grace and clarity."--North Carolina Historical Review "Holaday executes [this book] with grace and clarity, employing primary sources--contemporary newspaper accounts, numerous interviews conducted with players and team officials, autobiographies of players who went on to become MLB stars--to substantiate and expand his own research."--North Carolina Historical Review