A baby is born

BC’s book on baseball hitting bookstores

I promise this is my last bit of shameless promotion for a long, long time, but I have to trumpet the release this week of my book, When to Stop the Cheering: The black press, the black community and the integration of professional baseball. (I know, a long title.) It’s from Routledge, a division of Taylor & Francis, and it straddles the fence between scholarly and general interest reading.

The book grew out of my dissertation at UNC, a project that was guided and informed by so many wonderful people, chief among them the late, very great Margaret Blanchard. My happiness in seeing this project through to completion is tempered by her absence. (She passed away in September 2004). Her fingerprints are all over the book, which seeks to include in the narrative of baseball’s integration the black sportswriters who labored so hard and for so long to take Negro leaguers to the promised land of the big leagues.

Oprah hasn’t called yet, so I don’t know how well the book will sell, but I know I gave it everything I had and that it indeed breaks new ground in primary source research on the sport and on the black press. It’s convenient that the release comes on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s big breakthrough in Brooklyn. Let’s play ball!