Voices from Great Black Baseball Leagues

Before Jackie Robinson crossed major league baseball's color line, there existed a parallel world of "blackball" with its own pantheon of superstars: Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Smokey Joe Williams, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and many others. Hundreds of elite athletes played in the Negro Leagues from 1887 through the early 1950s, and this remarkable oral history offers an inside look at some of their lives. Seventeen players and a team owner reminisce about this often-overlooked side of American baseball, recapturing the era with a vividness that no journalist could rival.

Dover (2010) unabridged republication of the edition published by Da Capo Press, New York, 1992.