Description
Book SynopsisThe civil rightsera story of young boys whose dreams of playing in the Little League World Series were dashed, not by a loss to a more formidable team, but because of the color of their skin.
Trade Review"Lamb's engaging and thought-provoking book provides readers with a unique story about integration, segregation, and America's pastime and cannot be recommended highly enough."—Chad S. Wise,
NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture"
Stolen Dreams works as a history told at the intersection of sports, civil rights, and southern memory, reminding readers of how often those fields are closely woven together."—Robert Greene II,
Journal of Southern History"Lamb includes grand context of what was happening in South Carolina, the South and American courts during the tumultuous early 1950s. That makes
Stolen Dreams . . . a slick double-play: academically worthy of any Palmetto State history syllabus and perfect for a baseball fan's 2022 season reading list."—Gene Sapakoff,
Post and Courier“[
Stolen Dreams] meticulously documents an important moment, and team, that few people will know but should. It’s about the collision of racism and baseball, years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and shows just how far Blacks had left to go to be accepted in America’s pastime. Lamb writes this story with affection, grace, and skill.”—Mike Freeman, editor of race and inequality at
USA Today“Chris Lamb takes a forgotten baseball tournament and a forgotten moment in the civil rights struggle and spins them into an unforgettable story, proving, as Martin Luther King Jr. might have said, that the long arc of a batted ball bends toward justice. With impressive research and sharp insight, Lamb illustrates once again the important role baseball plays in understanding and shaping American culture.”—Jonathan Eig, best-selling author of
Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season“Sports is a brilliant and bracing window for understanding Jim Crow segregation in the South. With this book, Chris Lamb uncovers a narrative in this history that few readers will know: a history of racism, injustice, baseball, and the kids crushed by the hatreds of adults. I can’t recommend this book enough. It speaks to the past brilliantly, but it also speaks to our troubled present. A necessary and important read.”—Dave Zirin, author of
The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World“Lamb has presented Little League Baseball as a microcosm of Jim Crowism with so many history lessons of shame, sadness, and racial injustices propagated by the white majority. Lamb fires cannon shots with explosive narratives about Octavius Catto, Judge J. Waties Waring, Isaac Woodard, Robert Morrison, Robert Small, Frazier B. Baker, and others. This narrative is one of the most comprehensive examinations of the Lost Cause obsession for control in America.”—Larry Lester, Negro League Baseball historian and author
“Chris Lamb’s thorough and eloquent account embodies the best tradition of civil rights scholarship, exposing America’s long history of racism, particularly in Charleston, a city built literally on the backs of enslaved people. Redemptive at its core,
Stolen Dreams reminds us of all of the importance of telling the stories of African Americans that have so often been erased, forgotten, or neglected.”—Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina poet laureate, 2003–20
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
1. “The Team Nobody Would Play”
2. America’s Original Sin
3. The Charleston Baseball Riot
4. The Lost Cause
5. The Accommodationist
6. The Blinding of Isaac Woodard
7. “It’s Time for South Carolina to Rejoin the Union”
8. The Story of Little League Baseball
9. The YMCA
10. Even the Ocean Was Segregated
11. Brown v. Board of Education
12. “A Dastardly Act”
13. A Long Time Coming
14. The Trip to Williamsport
15. “Let Them Play!”
16. Emmett Till
17. “Paper Curtain”
18. The Civil Rights Movement in Charleston
19. Gus Holt’s Crusade
20. Return to Williamsport
21. No City Owes Its Success More to the Whipping of Slaves
22. The “Emanuel Nine”
23. John Rivers’s Dream
Notes
Bibliography
Index
